Professor David Clarke (Music, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
Plurality, Inclusivity, Difference: Challenges for the Future University
Informing my proposal is T.W. Adorno's imagining of peace among human beings in his essay Subject and Object': 'Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other.
In contrast to the corporatist cliches of current university mission
statements, this suggests a more worthy vision for the future
university, which it might pursue through theoretical reflection and
intervention, and the practical cultivation of curricula that not only
reflect distinctness, or cultural difference, but foster participatory
engagement with it. But how can we negotiate between a plurality of
cultural and epistemic positions without lapsing into an
everything-is-relative mentality that characterises some brands of
postmodernism and liberalism?
My proposal is to help advance this inquiry by bringing to CRASSH
perspectives on cultural pluralism acquired through my own
critical-theoretical researches and practices as a musicologist and
musician, and by creating further chapters (metaphorically and
literally) through dialogue with scholars in my own and other fields.
To date my explorations have included not only speculative research but
also curricular developments, the one informing the other. My article
‘Elvis and Darmstadt’ represents my most sustained attempt
to theorise cultural pluralism, with particular reference to the
high-art v. popular music divide in 20th-century music production,
consumption and historiography. In it I weigh liberal pluralism against
theories of radical democracy by Zizek, Mouffe and Laclau. Elsewhere,
in my essay Eminem: Difficult Dialogics, I consider how rebarbative
forms of hip-hop severely problematise weak-relativist celebrations of
cultural plurality, and paradoxically force ethics into the frame. And
in my article on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction I examine what is
simultaneously enjoyable and disturbing in media representations of
world music that make light of cultural and historical difference.
These inquires have arisen from, and feed back into, the pluralist
musical culture of my own department at Newcastle University, which has
grown further under our CETL (Centre for Excellence in Teaching and
Learning) for Music and Inclusivity, of which I am Director. The (mixed) lessons learned from the CETL are
a further contribution I hope to bring to CRASSH.
Among my research questions (also part of a projected book, Music after Postmodernism) are:
• What can music, as a social practice, contribute to interdisciplinary
debates on plurality and inclusivity, identity and difference?
• How might ethnomusicology and practical engagement with world musics help develop models of ‘distinctness without domination’?
• How, from this, can we build an ethics for relating to the culturally other?
• What insights might be gained from the philosophies and consciousnesses (howsoever defined) underpinning other musics?
Included in my approaches will be an inquiry into my own experience of
learning Indian music and of implanting it into the curriculum – see
http://www.cetl4musicne.ac.uk/projects6.html. The former represents a
paradigmatic case of participant-observation which I want to evaluate
against the wider canvas of anthropology, postcolonialism and
multiculturalism. The latter raises many fascinating questions, such as
why the biggest takers for learning a non-western classical practice
have been students of western popular music.
