Listening Back: Music, Cultural Heritage and Law

Abstract

As a performative activity, music has the potential to help explain the interpretive and rhetorical work of lawyering. As an aesthetic creation that reflects and shapes individual identities and social bonds, music is a cultural force that may contest or enhance political and legal power. The papers in this special issue contribute to the expanding field that pairs law and music by examining how music has affected legal practices and legal thinking in particular historical and cultural instances. Keywords Music Á Aesthetics Á Culture Á Identity The voices of law and music scholarship are growing louder. This increase in volume comes after a broad neglect of sound by the legal academy. Kieran Dolin notes the ''institutional hostility'' music has faced [3: 30], and James Parker comments that, despite the auditory pervading life and law, ''As a community of jurists, we have become deaf to law and to the problem of the acoustic.'' [10: 962]. These assertions can be understood in relation to the numerous explanations of legality stressing the visual experience and the authority of the image. This emphasis on the ocular resolves into a vision of society as ''…an exponentially expanding videosphere, a Planet Hollywood, a YouTube universe, a gamer zone of augmented life…'' [5: 2]. Traditionally, music had been greatly influential on our social structures and cultural identities. As pointed out by Bernhard Grossfeld and Jack Hiller: ''History tells us that music has been seen as a means of social organization to increase and to harmonize physical and spiritual forces.'' [6: 1150]. This comment accounts for music's past importance. Does music continue to exert