
A Companion
for Liberatory
Practice

When I was a child, my mom used to take me to the library every week. The librarians — Miss Carolyn, Miss Phyllis — were some-where between high priestess and impossibly cool older sister to me. I read across the shelves of the children’s library from left to right, sometimes venturing up into the adult section to look at glossy art and nature books. These books were my companions, constant and warm and full of stories that made me feel like my inner stream of questions and feelings had homes outside of myself, currents of unfamiliar voices who shared the same qualities of pull that I felt inside myself.
What I hope to offer here is a sense of companionship for fellow artists, thinkers, dreamers, and movers wishing to engage thoughtfully and lovingly in this difficult, beautiful world.

A Companion for Liberatory Practice





Audio on


[3]The term exposition is used by the Society for Artistic research, editors of The Journal of Artistic Research, as an alternative for the more traditional scholarly framework of an article. See The Journal of Artistic Research, https://jar-online.net/en/journal-artistic-research (accessed May 10, 2024).
[7] See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, Aunt Lute Books, 1987),
María Lugones, "Purity, Impurity, and Separation," in Signs (Winter 1994), 458-479,
bell hooks Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994),
Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité/ In Praise of Creoleness, trans. M.B. Taleb-Khyar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
Claire Chase, “Tyshawn Sorey by Claire Chase - BOMB Magazine,” Bomb Magazine, September 17, 2019, accessed December 22, 2021, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/tyshawn-sorey/.
For an early interview about Matana Roberts's (they/them) cross-categorical practices, see "Matana Roberts by Christopher Stackhouse," Bomb Magazine, accessed May 10, 2024,
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2015/03/18/matana-roberts/.
Jonathan Leal, Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
My name is Michi, and this is my dissertation.
I'm an in-between person, racially and disciplinarily. This document centers that in-betweenness, and asks with bell hooks what can be accomplished when the margins between dominant spaces are centered. [1]
What I share here can be read as a type of musicology, or as a form of creative research, or simply as a story. It follows my musical and scholarly practices over the course of the past seven years, during which I've been a PhD student in Musicology at Stanford University. Building on the work of women-of-color feminists, queer theorists, and decolonial scholar-practitioners, [2] I create a series of imaginary doors that open onto liberatory practice rooms: conceptual and artistic spaces that facilitate ways of engaging collectively with ecological and social complexity.
This is a performance, by which I mean an exposition [3] of my moving self in a particular context. The context happens to be a musicology degree, and the friction between my impulses to speak in nonverbal forms and the expectations I’ve encountered are part of what I want to share and to understand in this performance. Just as central as the frictions are the spaces of connection and resonance that I’ve found, the incredible generosity and insightfulness of my colleagues and my mentors, who have put up with me kicking and screaming for years and patiently listened and engaged and waited for me to find the trust they had long ago laid out for me.
What I’m doing is not new, but what I’ve learned most crucially from musicology is that the context is part of the doing. (Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu rhyme here, in line with the similarities that ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl pointed out in 2003 between the "New Musicology" of the 1980s and what he calls the "'old' ethnomusicology." [4]) What I mean is that Dahlhaus's words cannot fully realize their intention without Sylvia Wynter, without Judith Becker, without Matana Roberts, without any of the people whose insights shape and clarify both his context and the context of the world in which he is read. I take as a given that music is a fundamentally social and relational experience. [5] Because of this, much of this dissertation veers outside the boundaries of what might traditionally be called musical analysis or musicology. This broad and interdisciplinary work has been essential to my personal evolution as a musician, and the entanglement draws me deeper into musical practice. [6]
I hope to say with my actions that disciplinary boundaries are porous, and that when we admit space for what doesn’t fit in our expectations we all become richer. Guided by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, Patricia Hill Collins, Jennifer Nash, bell hooks, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Tyshawn Sorey, Matana Roberts, Jonathan Leal, and so many others, [7] I want to ask how the transgression of borders can strengthen the cores of established disciplines, against the colonial myth of territoriality.
The field of Historical Musicology has the power and mainstream cultural reach that comes with a historical origin in European musical culture. It remains relevant because within its tools are the capacity for critique and reflection that have led to the crucial disentangling of the field from what it studies to how it studies. In other words, practitioners of musicology no longer study only the history and context of Western Art Music, but rather the historical and contextual study of music anywhere, using tools that were initially honed through studying European classical music. [8] Similarly, the field of ethnomusicology has moved far from its roots in the study of non-Western and non-classical musics, while maintaining an expansive core of methodologies for participatory and embodied research that were honed in the context of studying musics outside the cultural frameworks of European Art Music. [9]
(It might be useful to note that, at the moment, the music department at Stanford doesn’t have a traditional graduate music theory program distinct from the computer-based music theory at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), which has become a home-away-from-home for me during my time at Stanford thanks to the generous and brilliant people there. Within the context of historical musicology, I’ve frequently found myself bringing in my trusty pack of colored pencils to exercise the juicy analytical techniques that I learned from mentors like theorist-pianist Daphne Leong and musicologist Klára Móricz.)
With my dissertation, I dwell in the overlapping spaces between dominant musical disciplines, and ask what’s possible when the engrained hierarchies between critical and creative modalities, and their historical roots in European colonial constructions of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, are foregrounded as a part of the landscape in which musical artists and scholars work. [10]
Power can be used like any tool, and I want to suggest that there is space in disciplines like musicology for people to use power in the service of collective liberation from the traditions and assumptions that limit who participates in mainstream conversations.
I offer this with deep humility, knowing that as someone who draws formative influences from musical performance, visual art, musicology, ethnomusicology, composition, Black and women-of-color feminisms, queer theory, ecofeminism, critical theory, practice-based research, and performance studies, to name a few, I have barely begun to scratch the surface of what has been done in any single field. If my dissertation is a performance, it’s a performance of learning in process, in motion. I want to share not only the ideas I’ve understood but the ways in which I’ve come to them, because what I’m learning is so far from complete. It’s a snapshot, and I hope you’ll follow citations outward from this snapshot and into the work of the people who have led me to this place [11]. And I hope that in all the places that I’ve missed or misinterpreted someone’s life or work, my mistakes will read as humble and genuine openings to say and do more.
. . .
[2] Acknowledging the giants on whose shoulders I stand is the work of this dissertation and a project worth lifetimes; as a starting point I recommend the anthology All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave, ed. Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N.Y. : Feminist Press, 1982),
and
Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
[1] bell hooks, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness," Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36 (1989), 15-23.
For an expansion and complication of the idea of in-betweenness, see Fred Moten, "Not In Between," in Black and Blur: Consent Not to Be a Single Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) 1-27.
[4] Bruno Nettl, "Ethno among the Ologies," in Nettl's Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 102-103.
See Carl Dahlhaus, Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Köln: Musikverlag Gerig, 1977)
and
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice , trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
And re: the "New Musicology" movement referenced by Nettl, see, e.g., Susan McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt886.
Tom, getting to work with and learn from you, to be led by your insightful questions, and to share with you my doubts and excitements (and to connect in moments of delight about Cage and unruly bow arms) has been such a gift for me. Your brilliance, humility, and generosity inspire me to become more thoughtful and caring and inquisitive in all of my practices. Thank you for your gentle questioning around the places where I was afraid to look. You've helped me to relearn to love parts of myself that I'd diminished and to reconnect with the wonder that brought me to where I am. Thank you.


for Thomas Grey

[8] See, for example, Gary Tomlinson, Music and Historical Critique: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
[10] Sylvia Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality
of Being/Power/Truth/
Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument," in The New Centennial Review 3, 3 (Fall 2003), 257-337.
[11a] Have I mentioned Lila Abu-Lughod?! Her model of "ethnographies of the particular," against the hierarchical assumptions that she writes are inevitably carried within notions of "cultures," motivates my emphases on the complex of "discourse and practice" (147), relationality (148), and care for the details that work with and against cultural grains (150). See "Writing Against Culture," in Recapturing Anthropology (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), 138-162.
[9] See, for example, Nettl 2010,
Anna Schultz, "Still an Ethnomusicologist, For Now," The Journal of Musicology 37, 1, (2020), 39–50,
Travis A. Jackson, "Rearticulating Ethnomusicology: Privilege, Ambivalence, and Twelve Years in SEM," Ethnomusicology 50, 2, (Spring/Summer, 2006), 280-286,
and
J. Lawrence Witzleben,
"Whose Ethnomusicology? Western Ethnomusicology and the Study of Asian Music,"
Ethnomusicology 41, 2, (Spring -Summer, 1997), 220-242.
[11b] Shawn Wilson's
Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008) is a core inspiration as I think about the relationship that my work takes with the communities in which I participate.
And I adore Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's essay "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You," in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
[14] Ali Smith has a beautiful novel called Companion Piece in which she refracts the word into many shapes-- the attentive presence of a dog, a paired wrought iron key and lock, the book itself, a meditation on loneliness in the COVID-19 pandemic, connective tissue between historic and present-day injustices. (London: Vintage, 2024)
The phrase "liberatory practice" draws from the intersecting movements for Black and Women's liberation [12], which began in the work of abolitionists working against the institution of chattel slavery and continues today in the intertwined movements for abolition of the prison-industrial complex, for freedom from military occupation, and for collective liberation from the countless subtle and extreme ways in which the intertwined impacts of capitalist, heterosexist, racist, ableist, and patriarchal power structures impact the ways in which we learn, interact, live, and die. [13]
The mixture of artistic and scholarly methodologies in this document draws on the vast and longstanding bodies of work of theorist-artist-activists whose work extends under and around and between academic spaces, as well as on the rich bodies of work within artistic and practice-based research disciplines.
I dedicate my work in particular to the artistic thinkers and activists whom I have learned from outside traditional academic spaces, including Matana Roberts, Meredith Monk, Mazz Swift, DJ Lynnée Denise, Pamela Z, Helga Davis, Li(sa E.) Harris, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Annea Lockwood, and Miya Masaoka, and to the hope that this work can help open up generous institutional spaces for work that challenges colonial assumptions about the hierarchical divisions of mind and body.
This is a companion, in the sense that a book or a song can be a companion. [14] Companionship has a specific inflection, warm or at least benign. [15] I use the word here to suggest that the warmth of companionship is a generative part of solidarity and camaraderie, and of the work of liberatory practice.
The flowers that surround these words are an offering of gratitude to some of the people whose life and works form the backbone of these movements. Many of these people and sources support my work in indirect ways, or in ways that go beyond the information-gathering bounds of a single citation. For these people, in addition to including a note in the margin, I've gathered together particular works that inspire me in a central garden, inspired in part by Sara Ahmed's "Recommended Reading List" in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. I share this in the final Seeds section as a resource for continuing to move beyond the spaces in this document.
[12] I found Angela Davis's Freedom is a Constant Struggle to be extremely helpful for orienting among these rich and overlapping movements.
I use the word "liberatory" in homage to and solidarity with Black feminists like Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Esperanza Spalding, Helga Davis, and Brontë Velez, and to the women of the Combahee River Collective who articulated in their statement the ways in which the liberation of any being is fundamentally intertwined with the liberation of all beings, and that attention to the insights and experiences of Black women is an opening into what Patricia Hill Collins describes alongside Italian feminists as "transversal politics" that build solidarity across groups.
See:
Combahee River Collective, "A Black feminist statement," in All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave, ed. Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N.Y. : Feminist Press, 1982), 41-47,
Patricia Hill Collins, "The tie that binds: race, gender and US violence," in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21, 5 (1998), 917-938, DOI: 10.1080/014198798329720
and more in Seeds.
[15] The Collins Dictionary traces its roots from the Latin com+ panis: a companion is one who breaks bread with you, who shares a meal with you. Whereas "comrade" comes from the word camera, room, traditionally meaning one who shares the same barracks, and speaks to a shared purpose, companion is maybe less lofty in its aims: a meal together along the way, another body to share an experience with. (Collins Dictionary, s.v. "companion," accessed May 10, 2024, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/companion )


What I offer here is a personal story, with the hope that this can ultimately point outward rather than inward. This is a practice known as reflexivity, which ethnomusicologist and artist Tomie Hahn describes as "turning back on oneself, a process of self-reference, and/or group self-reference, self-knowledge of self-knowledge." [16] She describes how reflexivity, among other things, challenges assumptions that a single dominant perspective can stand in for the multiplicity of intertwined experiences that make up our world, and how feminist ethnographers brought reflexivity into the mainstream as an alternative to these dominant paradigms [17]. "Anyone receiving their ethnographic training-wheels post-1975 falls into a reflexivity camp, a 1980s reflexivity-glam trend," she writes. "We learned that including ourselves was all right, but we were also cautioned that reflexivity creates potential obstacles such as self-absorption, presumptuous navel gazing, loss of clarity between self and other, and the politics of "going native." So, she asks, "with all its hazards, how can we proceed reflexively?" [18]
The answer that I strive toward has to do with an intersection of care, love, humility, and curiosity, in which I am led by the support and example of my advisors and dissertation readers Jarosław Kapuściński, Thomas Grey, Denise Gill, and Claire Chase, as well as by the generosity of the people I am fortunate to call my friends. In particular, I want to honor and thank AnnaMaria Ignarro, Ambika Kamath, Susana Canales Barrón, Ling Ling Huang, Michele Cheng, Barbara Nerness, Julie Zhu, Julie Herndon, Marie Finch, Simona Fitcal, Doga Cavdir, Starlin Lemons, Liangyeh Tai, Egemen Kesikli, Iddo Aharony, Jonathan Leal, Hassan Estakhrian, Rebecca Moses, Jillian Costello, Tyler Denton, Tim Spinelli, Charlie Costello, Alejandra Calvo, Laura Steenberge, Danny Clay, Gabriel Ellis, Elea Proctor, Rose Lachman, and Phil Taylor for being the unwritten earth supporting everything I've done these past seven years. The fact that stars in the universe collided in such a way that I've gotten to share life with you blows my mind every single day. When I was visiting with AnnaMaria a couple years ago, and in connection with our long and heart-opening letter-writing practices, she gave to me a book on memoirs by Beth Kephart called Strike the Empty: Notes for Readers, Writers, and Teachers of Memoir [19], flagged with the passages that had stirred her. Here's one, marked with pink highlighter: "True memoir is a writer acknowledging that he or she is not the only one in the room" [20]. I hope that my writing makes the room of this dissertation as inviting and supportive for you, whoever and wherever you are, as my friends have made the spaces that we share outside it.
Denise, your care and generosity changed what I imagined research could be and do. I'm grateful for the ways that you've seen and listened to me, and for the opportunity to witness your creativity, scholarship, leadership, vulnerability, love, grief, and joy. Your support and encouragement, the ideas and ways of being that I've learned from you, and the ways you've pushed me to embrace and inhabit my fullest self, have brought me into a deeper relationship with myself and with my surroundings. Thank you.


for Denise Gill
[16] Tomie Hahn, "Emerging Voices: Encounters with Reflexivity," Atlantis 30, 2 (2006), 89,
https://journals.msvu.ca/index.php/atlantis/article/view/782
[18] Hahn 2006, 91.
I'm also grateful to Denise Gill for introducing me to Ruth Behar's The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks your Heart, which models the bravery and beauty possible in reflexive writing. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
[19] Beth Kephart, Strike the Empty: Notes for Readers, Writers, and teachers of Memoir (Juncture Writing Workshops, 2019)

Michiko Theurer
[13] It's important also to say that the movements for Black and Women's liberation are fundamentally linked with other anti-colonial struggles; for example, the Aboriginal activists' groups in Queensland in the 1970s, cited by Lilla Watson, a Gangalu activist involved in this movement, created the often-quoted slogan:
"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
Lilla Watson, Keynote Address, A Contribution to Change: Cooperation out of Conflict Conference: Celebrating Difference, Embracing Equality, Hobart, Australia (September 21-24, 2004) accessed June 1, 2024 at https://uniting.church/lilla-watson-let-us-work-together/
[17] Hahn 2006, 90.
[20] Kephart 2019, 98.
[5] See Judith Becker's extension of Bourdieu's concept of habitus as "Habitus of Listening," in ‘Deep’ Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 69-86.
Re: the use of "Deep Listening" as it predates Becker's chapter, see Pauline Oliveros, "Deep Listening: Bridge to Collaboration," keynote address, ArtSci98: Seeding Collaboration (Cooper Union, New York City, April 4-5 1998), in Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992-2009 (Deep Listening Publications, 2010), 26-31.
See also Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw, eds., What Is Social Aesthetics? (Duke University Press, 2017).
[6] The program Ensemble Evolution at Banff (Summer 2019), which was co-directed by Claire Chase and Steven Schick and included a mind-boggling group of faculty and participants including Matana Roberts, Tyshawn Sorey, Mazz Swift, Miya Masaoka, Rania El Mugammar, Nicole Cherry, George Lewis, Niloufar Shiri, Layale Chaker, Joy Guidry, IONE, and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, was a formative experience for me, and guided the shape of my subsequent work in and outside of Stanford.
Invitation
I invite you to breathe with me, wherever you are reading this: sitting, standing, crouched, stretched out.
These sounds are an offering for the people who live in the silences of the world that I participate in.
They are an offering to friends and collaborators whose work is not included in my dissertation:
because I didn't have the funding to support an equitable collaboration with you;
because when I did find funding my affiliation with Stanford called up institutional traumas and power imbalances that I was unable to offset;
because you didn’t have a home or a space to work in;
because sharing our work felt like a violation of the intimacy that allowed it to take shape.
These sounds are an offering for the present-day Muwekma Ohlone people, on whose traditional land Braun Music Building and Stanford University were built, and whose lineages draw from many different tribes indigenous to the present-day Bay Area, represented by the
Armija / Thompson,
the Santos-Pinos / Juarez / Colos / Armija,
the Guzman / Nonessa,
and the Marine-Guzman-Peralta, Marine-Alvarez / Galvan, Marine-Sanchez, Marine-Munoz, Munoz-Guzman, Marine-Arellano, and Marine-Elston / Thompson / Ruano
descended families.
They’re for the people of the Tuscarora Nation, who are still (as of January 2024) fighting for state recognition in North Carolina, and the Pamlico Nation, who were devastated by European disease and warfare, and whose ancestral homelands are occupied by the house that I grew up in (and that I lived in during the COVID-19 pandemic) in a suburb in Eastern North Carolina.
And they’re for the Black, Chinese American, Chicana/e/o, Latina/e/o, and all the other people whose lives, in their full rich miracle of human awareness, curiosity, brilliance, and love, have been spent in slavery, forced labor, and poverty building railroads, cleaning classrooms and bathrooms and hallways, and otherwise creating and upholding the wealth without which Stanford would never exist.
I ask you, my advisors and my readers, for accountability in witnessing this commitment: that this dissertation may be an act of solidarity with Black and Indigenous people, with people of the global majority, with queer people, with gender-marginalized people, with disabled people, with people who are unhoused, with anyone who has been excluded from the institutions and experiences that have brought me where I am. I ask for your help, that I may always become more and more aware of the internalized habits that are getting in the way of my valuation of love and solidarity; that I may approach this commitment with humility and curiosity and love. I ask that you witness with me the ways in which what I share came from experiences of pain that I know only as a blank, smooth stone deep inside my body, inherited from ancestors who both participated in and were hurt by the intertwined structures of colonialism and capitalism and racism.
Grief overflows its containers.
One side plus one side equals more than one whole.
In this contradictory space, I stand in solidarity with those least empowered, and continue to breathe with the unhealed wounds driving the violence of those in power.
This dissertation is an opening and a gathering. This dissertation is a protest grounded in love. It’s an expression of gratitude for and solidarity with everyone whose voices have been excluded from the institutions that shaped me, and who despite being physically absent from my program at Stanford became my guides to love and joy and movement when I was disabled by chronic migraines and depression during my years in the program. May this institution and the world in which it stands become a garden of flowers for future generations inheriting your legacies.