Research

ABSTRACT

This PhD explores how white affectivity impacts the creative practices of brown composers. The project consists of a portfolio of compositions, five narrative portraits of brown composers, and a written dissertation. The project is firstly concerned with documenting how the compositional process may be forcing us to (dis)identify—a term used by Jose Esteban Muñoz to describe how a minority subject navigates majoritarian space. I use these affective mechanisms as locating-devices to examine western European classical music (WECM) composition’s desire for whiteness, noting how WECM carefully manages the conditions of minoritarianism as a constitutive norm.

This research uses an emerging sociogenic methodology I have developed that combines analytical knowledge (theory), practice (music composition), experiential knowledge (auto-ethnography and biography), and communal knowledge (interviews). Sociogeny focuses the research on the moment a minoritarian subject recognizes how the white, colonial, hegemony pressures them to see themselves through its dominant lens—i.e. double-consciousness. The narrative portraits help to contextualize and decenter my own experiences as a lead participant-researcher. Through autoethnography and biographical accounts, I connect our experiences to broader political and social concerns connected to our identifications in composition. These personal accounts are mediated through theories from political Latin identity, disability as method, Black feminist thought, and queer performativity and phenomenology, enhancing the subtleties in our understanding of diaspora, double-consciousness, and white affectivity in composition. 

Disability as method is further explored both in the compositional process and in the writing. The reader should be aware that I embraced my Autistic and ADHD flow-state—letting my neurodivergence define the quality of the writing and presentation of the scores. This means that my writing and scores are a direct reflection of the assimilative artifacts of British and American grammar rather than evidence of a struggle for perfection.

Many of the chapters in this PhD are for BIPOC readers only. Rather than relying on the good-faith of the reader, I have chosen a more direct method of access, one based on interdependence, to fully ensure the safety of the participants and me. For me to believe in the good-faith approach, equity would need to exist rather than the white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. To combat the imbalance in power inherent in our society, I propose readers contact me at my email (diazsounds@gmail.com) to have a conversation and for us to build community. There are two versions of the PhD: a BIPOC-only version and a non-BIPOC version. Readers may need to read one before the other and we may need to have several discussions before access is granted. Nonetheless, I encourage all readers who are respectfully interested in the work to reach out to me.

I argue that brown composers, within the current Western, white, hegemony, may experience a type of epistemic self-harm causing a forced distancing between our Selves and our identifications through assimilation logics via white affective mechanisms. Nevertheless, when a composer employs a creative practice guided by liberatory logics, one may avoid epistemic self-harm that is sometimes caused by composition—or at least gain the agency and awareness of the self-harm and its effects, giving the composer a choice to engage and implement self-care strategies.