Teaching Music & Difference: Thick Listening — musicologynow.ams-net.org

At first, I simply lectured about music, explaining the relationship of anthropology to ethnomusicology, discussing the ethnomusicological shift from studying music in culture to music as culture, reviewing classes of instruments, and talking about what kinds of things the study of music can show us (relationships to nature, gender relations, etc.).  I also discussed dance, focusing on how bodily motion and the use of space engaged local cosmologies.  After a few semesters, however, that lecture morphed into a combination of in-class exercise and mini-lecture that I called “Thick Listening,” after Geertz’s (1973) discussion of the importance of “thick description” in ethnographic interpretation.  While Damon Krukowski uses “thick listening” in his 2017 Paris Review article to refer to the process of listening to noise in analog music, I have been using the term since at least 2014 in the ways described above.  In any case, our respective meanings are not unrelated, since Krukowski describes the process of listening through surface noise back to the original conditions of the recording—that is, to original cultural production—in ways that make ethnographic sense.

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