“Strange Fruit”: Music between Violence and Death

Abstract

Common wisdom holds that there is no music where there is silence or noise. The insight seems simple enough. Where there is silence, there can be no music to interrupt it. Where there is noise, it interrupts the music we are trying to hear. Perhaps we can make the same common point more precisely by saying that there is no music where there is only silence or only noise. Noise, by itself, uninterrupted, is sheer violence; it has the power to kill at extreme volumes and frequencies. Silence, by itself, equals death, the only state uninterrupted by noise. Music, ranging from Cage's 4′33″ to Wagner's Ring, is born of a contract between the violence of noise and the silence of death. It is the product, we might say, of a violence done to the violence that, arguably, spared humans from death and allowed them to become civilized. We appeal to that argument, first proposed by Jacques Attali, in Section I.1 We consider whether music, on this view, is no more than a continuing violence marshaled against what was supposed to pose a violent threat to human civilization. Can there be so much violence at the root of what we now recognize as civilized human being? And must music be a part, even an essential part, of that violence? Why and how, finally, has that violence and that music been turned especially against the bodies (and souls) of black folk and women?

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