William Cheng

Music education today requires an approach rooted in care and kindness that coexists alongside the dismantling of systems that fail to serve our communities in higher education. But, as the essayists in Sound Pedagogy show, the structural aspects of music study in higher education present obstacles to caring and kindness like the entrenched master-student model, a neoliberal individualist and competitive mindset, and classical music’s white patriarchal roots. The editors of this volume curate essays that use a broad definition of care pedagogy, one informed by interdisciplinary scholarship and aimed at providing practical strategies for bringing transformative learning and engaged pedagogies to music classrooms. The contributors draw from personal experience to address issues including radical kindness through universal design; listening to non-human musicality; public musicology as a forum for social justice discourse; and radical approaches to teaching about race through music. Contributors: Molly M. Breckling, William A. Everett, Kate Galloway, Sara Haefeli, Eric Hung, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Mark Katz, Nathan A. Langfitt, Matteo Magarotto, Mary Natvig, Frederick A. Peterbark, Laura Moore Pruett, Colleen Renihan, Amanda Christina Soto, John Spilker, Reba A. Wissner, and Trudi Wright

Music education today requires an approach rooted in care and kindness that coexists alongside the dismantling of systems that fail to serve our communities in higher education. But, as the essayists in Sound Pedagogy show, the structural aspects of music study in higher education present obstacles to caring and kindness like the entrenched master-student model, a neoliberal individualist and competitive mindset, and classical music’s white patriarchal roots. The editors of this volume curate essays that use a broad definition of care pedagogy, one informed by interdisciplinary scholarship and aimed at providing practical strategies for bringing transformative learning and engaged pedagogies to music classrooms. The contributors draw from personal experience to address issues including radical kindness through universal design; listening to non-human musicality; public musicology as a forum for social justice discourse; and radical approaches to teaching about race through music. Contributors: Molly M. Breckling, William A. Everett, Kate Galloway, Sara Haefeli, Eric Hung, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Mark Katz, Nathan A. Langfitt, Matteo Magarotto, Mary Natvig, Frederick A. Peterbark, Laura Moore Pruett, Colleen Renihan, Amanda Christina Soto, John Spilker, Reba A. Wissner, and Trudi Wright

Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility.Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects, William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientations toward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think about the perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses may ultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin—or, if we choose, repair. With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion, and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparative attitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of better worlds.

Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility.Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects, William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientations toward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think about the perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses may ultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin—or, if we choose, repair. With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion, and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparative attitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of better worlds.