“What I want,” writes Kevin Quashie in Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, “is the freeness of a black world where blackness can be of being, where there is no argument to be made, where there is no speaking to or against an audience because we are all the audience there is. . . . ”1 In Who Hears Here?, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., invites us into a world where Black music is “of being,” devoid of defenses, justifications, or validations for its existence. Black creativity and intellectuality simply are, and Ramsey historicizes, theorizes, and “storifies” their various manifestations majestically.
Who Hears Here? is a collection of Black world-making essays that read as a road map for a musicological life lived beyond the strictures of the discipline. Each essay reveals the cartography of a career that continues to traverse the oft-siloed fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music...
