ABSTRACT
Having listened to what Rodney Ogawa had to say about racialized changes in his listening tastes over time, I turn to my own home and my own family. My Music (Crafts, Cavicchi, Keil, et al. 1993) is one of my favorite books about music because it teaches us to listen to what people say about their pleasures and epiphanies when listening to music. I regard listening as a kind of making: I want to call into question the most basic assumptions around music production. This book is subtitled Asian Americans Making Music for that reason. Our vocabulary for talking about the participation of ordinary people in music is paltry. Ordinary people “consume” music, or dance to it, or take lessons for a few years, or sing in the church choir, or listen to the radio, or buy CDs. Ordinary people are understood to “listen” to music, yet I believe that the act of listening is at once richer and more complex than we have yet theorized. Crafts, Cavicchi, Keil, et al. offer abundant evidence of this; Christopher Small (1998), R. Murray Schafer (1994), and Jacques Attali (1985) have perhaps come
the closest to theorizing listening as central to the place of music in culture. I constantly ask my students to talk and write about what they listen to and why, and this exercise is always full of discoveries as well as disappointments, because ordinary people aren’t taught to value their own opinions about music or to express them in particularly searching ways. Asian Americans tend to devalue their own musical experiences twice over (at least) because they’re both ordinary people (those of us who aren’t YoYo Ma, anyway) as well as a group of Americans who are rarely encouraged to pursue “the arts.”
