Music and Subversion

This project explores how habits and patterns of listening are subverted by musical experiences. In Book IV of the Republic, and through his mouthpiece, Socrates, Plato speaks to music's capacity to influence, invade and otherwise disrupt thought - seeing a great need for it to be regulated (apparently a Dorian mode for war and a Phrygian mode for peace - with everything else at risk of corrupting the youth). Subversion is the inverse operation to mechanisms of containment and regulation (things that we might be inclined to posit as a site 'proper' to music). But this regulation also allows us to listen (hear things as musical), understand, grapple and play music. Subversion, then, poses something of a philosophical question about the transformation of musical understanding (at the very least the habits of our listening) with some metaphysical ramifications - that music exceeds our faculties of understanding. In looking at the ways in which music is subversive, this project details the relationship between music and the horizon of the new, its relationship to resistance, radicalism and political activism.