The Musician as Philosopher

Reviews / Votes

"Michael Gallope's The Musician As Philosopher is an inspired and dilative look at the maelstrom of creative work in music and sound emanating from thinkers and doers living and working in mid-twentieth century New York City. . . . Pivoting fluidly between sound and media analyses, aesthetics, political economy, musicology, and critical perspectives on praxis, reception, and consumption, Gallope presents new frameworks for understanding some of the thinking and feeling behind the recorded works now canonized as exemplars of a gritty and resourceful vernacular avant-garde. . . .Understanding these musicians as philosophers, Gallope offers readers a deep history of sounds, styles, and ideas that ushered in music's future." -- Kwami T. Coleman, New York University ""In his first book Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy and the Ineffable (2017), musician and academic Michael Gallope explored the ways in which music inspired modern European philosophers. With The Musician as Philosopher, he turns to the philosophical thinking of musicians themselves, with a focus on the 'strange, intense, disorienting' musical irruptions of New York's postwar avant-grade. It's refreshing to see [Ornette] Coleman's philosophy taken seriously and Gallope pays equal respect to Alice Coltrane's engagement with Eastern philosophy. The Coltrane chapter is perhaps the richest in the book, bringing her musical and spiritual practices together... While tracing the commonalities between these artists, Gallope recognizes the complex dynamics of class, race, gender and sexuality... He describes his approach as an immanent critique and it would be fascinating to read his take on the vernacular avant-gardes of disc, hip-hop and no wave, all vital sites of hyperfracture and alchemy." * Stewart Smith, The Wire * "The Musician as Philosopher counts to my mind as the highest achievement to date of Michael Gallope's already storied career. In work ranging from history to high theory and taking in everything from philosophy to recording technologies and extended techniques to a large array of documentary archives, The Musician as Philosopher gives us a nuanced dive into an American avant-garde previously unimagined, and emerges with a persuasive thesis: that a diverse strain of experimental American musicians of the 1950s-1970s were resistant vernacular philosophers. Wildly divergent in their positions, mainstream to minoritized, and making use of different affordances, they nevertheless shared a driving ambition to push the boundaries of conventional musicking in ways diversely aligned with utopianism, mysticism, and Black traditions, and with common inclinations toward valuing process over product, exploring non-Westernisms, and experimenting variously with esotericism, ecstasy, deskilling, "oblique metaphysics," irony, hallucination, self-shedding, nihilisms, and other kinds of what Gallope calls "alchemies." Here at last is a book that shows brilliantly how to write history and philosophy at the same time."
-- Martha Feldman, University of Chicago " . . . . anyone seriously interested in
the artists concerned will find much to get
their teeth into here." * Shindig! Magazine * "Michael Gallope's The Musician as Philosopher is a fascinating book since it is one of the few to center musician's theorizing (Brent Hayes Edwards' Epistrophies, and Daphne Brooks' Liner Notes for the Revolution, are two other important contributions). There is of course a rich history of the role of musician's thinking for academic scholarship, both in the humanities and the sciences, but the musicians themselves and their voices have not received much attention as themselves being creators of critical theoretical texts (both in terms of actually written language and music, amongst other forms of disseminating ideas). I am excited by the prospect of thinking about how the inclusion of artists and specifically musicians' ways of theorizing within the space of so-called knowledge production may shift how we understand the role of not only scholarship, pedagogy, and knowledge, but also artists, and especially musicians and music making, within our society." -- Jessie Cox, Harvard University " . . . one great strength of The Musician as Philosopher is Gallope's nuanced exploration of the intertwined professional and ideological forces that influenced the experimental directions of these very different artists . . . . Gallope is particularly adept at picking apart the webs of appropriation and societal prejudice that informed many of the musicians' perspectives, with or without their conscious knowledge. One leaves these character studies with a rich appreciation for the melange of trends and forces, both historical and contemporary, that helped shape the perspective of each artist." * Notes *