UCLA

“Shouting the People: The Aesthetics of Live-Soul Performance” considers the relationship between mid-twentieth century Black life, discursive practice, and music-making. Critiqued and examined heterogeneously, “Shouting the People” examines live-soul performance and the distinct conditions that enabled its collaborative production. This process, broadly conceived, underscores the expressive and critical practices that underly the making of meaning around a given performance. Within “Shouting the People’s” three case studies, expressivity within music making is theorized as the evidence of a particular composition’s revision via an alchemy between a distinct setting, musical production, spectatorship, discursivity, and aesthetic practice; otherwise identified as live(ness). Each chapter describes distinct modes of live(ness) during soul performance. These sonorous episodes are critiqued through empirical analysis intertwined with praxis-informed methods cultivated within musicology and Black Study. “Shouting the People” demonstrates that music-making within the Black vernacular tradition is an antiphonal, and thus, ongoing project; antiphonal due to Black music’s capacity to invoke the tropes of other sonic events; ongoing due to Black music’s capacity to instantiate additional tropes will be inevitably invoked.