In the summer of 2017, an opinion piece in The Guardian by the writer and theatre-maker Stella Duffy attracted an unusual degree of interest among British musicians and musicologists.Footnote ¹ Duffy's piece was prompted by the publication of a new report, ‘Towards Cultural Democracy’, the outcome of a research project at King's College London.Footnote ² Noting the report's starting point in ‘the deep and widespread political division expressed through the 2016 EU referendum campaign and vote’, Duffy enthusiastically endorsed its recommendations for a root-and-branch reform to UK cultural policy, aimed at redirecting arts funding towards the facilitation of ‘everyday creativity’ – the diverse cultural and creative activities pursued by ordinary people which exist separately from, and are usually ignored by, both the art-world and commerce. Not the least reason to embrace such reform, Duffy contended, was its being a means of overcoming ‘the divisions we are now experiencing’. Criteria of ‘excellence and quality’ in the arts had for too long reflected ‘mainstream, metropolitan-based thinking’, producing ‘exclusivity and a stratified culture’ of which we are now ‘living the violent results’. The solution, Duffy argued, was to support work ‘allowing everyone to join in, not simply as audiences and consumers, but as active participants’; in this shift, ‘elitism must make way for creativity and community-led culture’.

Duffy's choice of words here carried unmistakable resonances of the polemics at the time of the EU referendum, which highlighted the perceived political and cultural dominance of self-serving metropolitan ‘experts’ and elites. Unsurprisingly, her article hit a nerve. A flurry of social-media responses from professional musicians and academics was subsequently coordinated by the pianist and musicologist Ian Pace, who compiled them on his personal blog and invited open dialogue.Footnote ³ Interestingly, many of Duffy's critics took issue with her precisely on the grounds chosen by the King's College report: that of democracy. For Björn Heile and Michael Morris, the approach being advocated by Duffy was not democratic but populist – sinisterly so.Footnote ⁴ Heile likened the ‘idea that everybody is equally artistic and that even training is suspect’ to Mao's Cultural Revolution: ‘What it is decidedly not’, he concluded, ‘is democratic.’ ‘It is quite unclear’, wrote Morris in similar vein, ‘that the proposals of this movement involve anything which would ordinarily be called a democratic process.’ Pace focused on the problematic history of generic appeals to ‘community’ and the blanket rejection of experts, noting how such talk was meat and drink to twentieth- (and twenty-first-)century dictators and demagogues on the left and right. He drew attention, too, to the negative consequences for democracy of removing state support for art forms that aimed at social critique rather than ‘narrow communitarian ends’. Art, he proposed, ‘is not just a means for producing social harmony’.

A way of understanding what was going on in this argument is suggested by Anthony Gardner in his stimulating book Politically Unbecoming.Footnote ⁵ He opens with an account of an angry dispute that took place between two competing camps – one Russian, one non-Russian – in the avant-garde art-world of the 1990s, each of which claimed adherence to what Gardner terms the ‘mythic signifier’ of democracy. In the statements of both camps, Gardner argues, democracy functioned as an ‘apparently universal arbiter […] one thought capable of prevailing automatically over the arguments of others, as though somehow immune from challenge’.Footnote ⁶ Gardner sees this episode as reflecting the way in which, after 1989, democracy had ‘become hegemonic to the point of being mistakenly mythologized as postideological […] with radically opposed agendas finding their rationalization in the same cooptable signifier’. In the case of the debate around the ‘Towards Cultural Democracy’ report, there were at least two different understandings of democracy in play. Duffy's emphasis upon community reflected an idea of democracy revolving around inclusive participation, with culture viewed as a means to heal the social rifts starkly exposed by the EU referendum. For Pace and many of his colleagues, the more important democratic value was contestation, the facilitation of different, often minoritarian, visions and values as part of the public sphere. The dichotomy is not so far from the dispute chronicled by Gardner, whose opposed camps defined democracy in terms of (on the one hand) ‘enriching and convivial compromise’ and the disavowal of disagreement and (on the other) dissent and antagonism.

The issues laid open by this debate serve as a useful frame for approaching the three books under consideration in this review. Only one – Nancy Love's Trendy Fascism – explicitly refers to democracy in its (sub)title, but a triangulation can be completed by connecting through to the ‘freedom’ of David Toop's subtitle and the ‘citizenship’ (or ‘social responsibility’) foregrounded in the title of Oxford University Press's imposing edited volume. Articulations of belonging and boundaries are important subtexts to all three books, which traverse both the socially unifying imperative championed by Duffy and the case of marginal musics that contest a perceived mainstream. Each volume invites us to rethink the relationship between democracy and community. Which kinds of community may be considered democratic, and which not? What places do cohesion and contestation inhabit within democracy? What kinds of difference can democracy, and a democratic community, encompass? How is music best channelled to serve the cause of democracy?

The edited volume Artistic Citizenship primarily sets out its stall on what we might term the ‘obligations’ wing of the democratic triangle, its titular focus on responsibility and ethics declaring an emphasis on the duties of citizenship that are conventionally thought to be the essential counterbalance to democracy's freedoms and rights. Citizenship has been the subject of considerable attention within recent musicology. In 2017, Martin Stokes chose ‘The Musical Citizen’ as the theme for his Institute of Musical Research Distinguished Lectures; these considered the implications for music of a rich array of recent citizenship theories relating to the nation state, urban geography and crowd theory.Footnote ⁷ A 2014 Royal Musical Association/British Forum for Ethnomusicology Study Day at the University of Manchester entitled ‘Music, Circulation and the Public Sphere’ explored the place of music within the everyday domains of debate and exchange that are regarded as the exemplary arenas of the citizen. Recent books have looked at music's capacity to delineate overlapping conceptions of the citizen and at its mobilization in the service of state conceptions of citizenshipFootnote ⁸ – what Stokes terms ‘citizenship as hailed’ as opposed to ‘citizenship as experienced’. The present volume is both narrower and broader in content. It focuses upon artwork consciously designed by its practitioners to serve a civic purpose, rather than the more unconscious manifestations of citizenship latent in patterns of production and consumption. This is investigated across 27 chapters spanning multiple art forms (dance, poetry, theatre, the visual arts and digital media, as well as music), the authors comprising a mixture of scholars and artists, with a view to documenting current practice as well as offering theoretical and evaluative perspectives.Footnote ⁹

Community and community-building loom large in the definition of ‘artistic citizenship’ offered by the volume's editors: ‘Artistic citizens are committed to engaging in artistic actions in ways that can bring people together, enhance communal well-being, and contribute substantially to human thriving’ (Elliott, Silverman and Bowman, ‘Artistic Citizenship: Introduction, Aims, and Overview’, 3–21 (p. 7)). The volume documents an impressive array of participatory and interactive projects that aim to put such citizenship into action, often led by professional practitioners or arts organizations wishing to make a positive intervention in people's lives, sometimes by targeting specific social issues or injustices. This is hardly a novel field of artistic endeavour, and one wonders if it requires the missionary tone that surfaces in the editors’ introduction from time to time. Their account of artistic citizenship is drawn in opposition to those artists who ‘disavow practical, civic, or political purposes [… who] are inner-directed free spirits whose vision and work must not be contaminated by considerations “extrinsic” to the formal or expressive qualities deemed resident in the artwork itself’ (p. 8) – a category that today one would imagine is vanishingly small.

More commanding of attention is the food for thought offered by the volume on the difficult questions that inevitably crowd in once goals such as community-building, well-being, ‘human thriving’ and social justice are placed centre stage. The editors highlight this challenge when they bluntly state their interest in ‘how responsible artistic practice can actually make the world a better place’ (p. 11). They leave little room for doubt over what they would regard as ‘making the world a better place’. It would be an effort waged on the terrain of ‘violence, religious and ideological conflicts, poverty, starvation, disease, environmental disasters, and gender and racial discrimination’ (p. 11), and in more specific terms would entail advances such as ‘making the world more equitable’ (p. 12) and ‘the mitigation of racism, sexism, ageism, classism, and ethnocentrism’ (Silverman and Elliott, ‘Arts Education as/for Artistic Citizenship’, 81–103 (p. 89)). One imagines that most of the volume's readers will heartily concur that these are worthy goals. But how far beyond this demographic can it be assumed that such values unconditionally hold sway? In the aftermath of Brexit and Trump, it is surely a good deal harder to share the editors’ confidence that what would make the world a better place is easy to define in advance, on behalf of the entirety of any ‘community’ towards which a socially conscious artist may feel some responsibility.

Fortunately, the volume as a whole presents a healthy dissensus on key questions such as these, meaning that the occasionally incautious proselytizing of the editors’ opening chapter is only intermittently indulged by other contributors, and is sometimes contradicted outright. Indeed, there are indications of productive points of disagreement between the editors themselves. In their later chapter ‘Arts Education as/for Artistic Citizenship’, Silverman and Elliott explore the idea of ‘living a good life’ as embodied in the Aristotelian concept eudaimonia; and Bowman touches on the same term in his own chapter ‘Artistry, Ethics, and Citizenship’ (pp. 59–80). Their elaborations are interestingly different, however. Silverman and Elliott interpret eudaimonia as meaning for today's artists what they call ‘right action’, which takes the form of ‘a productive, meaningful, ethical, and community-oriented way of life that benefits themselves and others’ (p. 88). Bowman, on the other hand, posits a sharper distinction between ‘what it is right to do’ and ‘what it is good to be’ (p. 69). The latter is determined by character alone; within this view, what counts as ‘good’ is necessarily an open question; the artist citizen ‘pursues courses of action not because they are “correct” or required but because they are congruent with who they aspire to be and because they hold promise for lives lived well’ (p. 75). Within this view, no assumptions are made about ‘self-evident’ agendas for artist citizens, nor about the necessary congruence of their courses of action with the felt needs of a larger community.

Indeed, the teachings of the Greeks, which loom large in this first part of the volume, remind us that the urge to use the arts to strengthen the bonds of a community was once openly understood as an essentially authoritarian one. David Wiles, in his chapter ‘Art and Citizenship: The History of a Divorce’ (pp. 22–40), quotes from Polybius's description of the various legal obligations upon the citizens of Arcadia to engage in national songs and dances in order to ‘soften and break up [their] stubborn and unbending natures’ (p. 25). A present-day version of this kind of rigid disciplining into the established values of a community appears to be the Venezuelan ‘system’ of children's orchestras, which Geoffrey Baker, in a chapter that offers a useful summary of his groundbreaking 2014 book on El Sistema, characterizes as aiming at the formation of obedient ‘subjects’ rather than free-thinking ‘citizens’ (‘Citizens or Subjects? El Sistema in Critical Perspective’, 313–38).Footnote ¹⁰ Wiles contrasts this community-orientated conception of citizenship with a later, Aristotelian one that, as in Bowman's interpretation of eudaimonia, places the emphasis upon ‘choices made by individuals’. These ‘two fundamentally opposed traditions of citizenship’ find new life, Wiles proposes, in Brecht's theatre, where the participatory impulse for ‘surrendering ego for the sake of the collective’, which Wiles notes sits comfortably with Nazi ideology, exists in tension with ‘the morally autonomous individual tasked with making responsible choices’, a conception that in Brecht finds expression through the device of the Verfremdungseffekt (p. 36).

Many of the contributors to this book, however, do not perceive such a close relationship between the forging of communal bonds and authoritarianism. The challenge they face, in advocating for the arts’ potential to contribute to social cohesion, is how to recognize that, as Iris Marion Young observed over 30 years ago, community ‘is an understandable dream […] but politically problematic […] because those motivated by it will tend to suppress differences’.Footnote ¹¹ An interesting case here is Thomas Turino's ‘Music, Social Change, and Alternative Forms of Citizenship’ (pp. 297–312), which develops the author's well-known work on ‘participatory’ performance cultures through an examination of the North American contra dance scene, in which Turino has been an active participant for over 30 years.Footnote ¹² He highlights the various ways in which these dance events ‘engender a kind of egalitarian consensus building’ that he regards as reflecting ‘values and practices diametrically opposed to a capitalist ethos’ (p. 298). The dances are open to anyone, and permit inclusion of people with a wide range of abilities within the same performance; importantly, as with other kinds of participatory performance, they are ‘not for listening apart from the doing’ (p. 303). Turino probes the potential of this kind of cultural involvement to effect ‘habit change’ that shifts participants’ wider cultural values and promotes egalitarian community values in other domains of daily life. At the same time, while highlighting the openness of the movement to new members, Turino accepts that there is a ‘chicken and egg’ aspect to the relationship of participants and social values. It emerges that the contra dance's vaunted ‘consensus building’ can rely upon a fair degree of already-established consensus from the outset: attendees ‘tend to be politically liberal’; they favour ‘healthy’, outdoor lifestyles; they share ‘a desire to belong to a likeminded community that provides a comfortable alternative to contemporary American life’ (p. 307). This is not to detract from the value of the egalitarianism within the meetings themselves, with their emphasis upon open membership, the active participation of all and their relatively flat organizational structure. But it is important to keep this ‘democratic’, inclusive structure distinct from the suggestion that such art practices function to unite a wider social body or to make a more dramatic intervention upon social divisions. If anything, the contra dance, in embodying values of a relatively liberal, well-educated and ecologically inclined group, highlights a key social division in modern America, rather than overcoming it.

As such, the kind of community work done by the contra dance scene is to bolster a particular position in a wider democratic spectrum. In so doing, it contributes valuably to the vigour of democratic life. But it does not in itself heal the divisions of that wider democratic life, and it might just make them more marked, as is rather suggested by Turino's proposal that the contra dance scene represents values and practices ‘diametrically opposed’ to capitalism. A couple of the volume's other contributors more directly pick up on Wiles's theme that citizenship may take the form of a ‘radical dissenting voice that subverts an unthinking status quo’ (p. 32) – and in so doing, they recognize ways in which the values of democracy can be better served by articulating social difference rather than community cohesion. Ana Vujanović, for instance, in her chapter ‘Art as a Bad Public Good’ (pp. 104–22), warns of the capacity of ‘socially useful art’ to serve the broader civic agendas of a neoliberal state, and ultimately to function ‘as an ideological buttress for the private – that is, for corporate globalizing capital’ (p. 108).Footnote ¹³ Her argument stresses the fundamentally partisan status of every cultural activity, some of which serve hegemony (thus comprising a ‘good’ public good), others offering opposition (hence a ‘bad’ public good). She gives particular attention to the potential of artistic autonomy to constitute a bad public good, arguing – contrary to the traditional leftist objections to autonomous art as elitist and indifferent – that the idea of art's self-governance comprises a valuable ‘structural incompatibility’ with the neoliberal state's progressive capitalization of human activity (pp. 116 –18). Tyson Lewis's crisply lucid chapter ‘Image as Ignorant Schoolmaster: A Lesson in Democratic Equality’ (pp. 549–62) proposes a similar ‘disarticulation of virtues and aims’, deploying Jacques Rancière's elaboration of the different ‘regimes’ of art, and the notion of ignorance as a profoundly democratic virtue, to critique situations where ‘art is instrumentalized as a kind of equipment for promoting the artist's values, beliefs and ideologies’ (p. 552). For Lewis, democratic cultural practice means abandoning any agenda determined in advance in favour of an attitude of curiosity towards that which is excluded from any supposed consensus; artistic citizenship thus takes the form of a ‘disruption of the given’ (p. 561). In ways such as these, the volume Artistic Citizenship finds some space for the view that, in the words of Anthony Gardner, ‘democracy [is] not a politics of harmony, but a politics of conflict’.Footnote ¹⁴

Disruption of the given is, unsurprisingly, a recurrent motif of David Toop's Into the Maelstrom, the first instalment of a promised two-volume survey of the history of free improvisation (traced here up to 1970). It finds expression, first of all, in his conviction that free improvisation is a ‘fundamentally cooperative music’ in which everyone involved takes part on equal terms:

A group such as AMM is consequently lauded for having ‘no leaders, no soloists, no manifested hierarchy’ (p. 216). But improvisation's freedom is also figured by Toop as a tendency towards dissensus. Thus the work of a group like the Spontaneous Music Ensemble comprised a ‘collective, dialogical practice that embraced rather than suppressed dissent, idiosyncrasy and independence’ (p. 263). In his own practice as an improviser, Toop experiences this dissensus in terms of coercion as well as liberation:

There is no danger, in Toop's account of improvisation's collectivities, of disagreement and difference being neglected.

In spite of the attention thus given to both equality and the expression of difference, democracy is a term that features very little in Toop's discussion – indeed, he finds that the social component of improvisation contrasts favourably ‘with current ideas of democracy in which participation is promised yet hollow’ (p. 3). This absence is in part a reflection of Toop's general reluctance to resort to freighted characterization, totalizing conclusions or grand syntheses regarding improvisation's social relations; Derek Bailey's dictum that ‘only an academic would have the temerity to mount a theory of improvisation’ is quoted with approval (p. 29).Footnote ¹⁵ On the contrary, Toop is preoccupied – in a not undemocratic manner, one might add – with the challenge inherent in representing an essentially collective experience from a single standpoint (pp. 12, 27, 70). This concern, and Toop's standing as a participant in the field, motivates an unconventional approach in which the voices of others are prominently represented (including examples from correspondence and interview materials going back many decades), and the discussion itself takes on an improvisatory quality, with free association of ideas taking precedence over cumulative argument. This may frustrate the reader looking for a powerful new theory or conceptualization of this still neglected field. On the plus side, the discussion is rich with anecdotal detail about individual performers, performances and recordings, and for those with established interest in the subject there is much to savour in terms of details about the early years of the seminal practitioners of the 1960s.

Instead of a straightforward chronological history up to 1970, Toop weaves together commentary upon improvisation old and new, using very recent practice to reflect back on historical precursors, as well as vice versa. Each of his 12 chapters is loosely organized around a particular concern or set of concerns, including voice and mouth, solo improvisers, electronics, the relationship with jazz, and so on. Toop's dredging of music history for early examples of free improvisation throws up some fascinating examples. He notes the coincidence of clusters of early experiments in 1944 and 1960 with, respectively, the imminent end of the Second World War and independence from colonial rule, although he stops short of arguing for a straightforward causal relation (pp. 98, 153). His consideration of the relationship between improvisation and 1960s rock culture (pp. 205–6) provides an interesting point of connection with Benjamin Piekut's work on the ‘mixed avant-garde’ of the 1960s, suggesting a more intimate connection than Piekut is inclined to entertain.Footnote ¹⁶ I was struck also by the significance attributed by Toop to the pointless disciplines of post-war national service in shaping the creative personae of key figures of the 1960s British improvisation scene (pp. 254, 264).

Freedoms may be central to Toop's account, but as he himself notes at the end of the book, ‘many freedoms swirled within the dream of freedom’ (p. 291). Toop's narrative tends to emphasize ‘freedom from’ rather than ‘freedom to’, and this criterion is sometimes deployed to adjudicate whether a musical practice counts as free improvisation ‘proper’ or even deserves mention at all. The ‘utopian’ freedom from established conventions, he suggests, distinguishes free improvisation from ‘more or less codified, often very ancient styles of idiomatic improvisation’, such as those found in jazz, various world traditions and other music ‘not wholly tied to the strict instructions of a composer’ (p. 15).Footnote ¹⁷ No wonder then that, from this perspective, a particularly elevated status is assigned to the work of AMM, which offered a ‘confrontation with the orthodoxies of music […] a music seemingly based on renunciation’ (pp. 209–10). And while free improvisation is extolled by Toop as a place which permits dissent and ‘allows me the range of my character’, there are indications in his text that this ‘freedom to’ pursue personal preference is trumped by the imperative of ‘freedom from’ tradition. Not all freedoms are permitted within the boundaries of the genre, at least as they are sketched by Toop. The ‘personable, witty and accessible’ tone of Errol Garner's 1944 apartment sessions, for instance, makes them problematic as ‘a historic marker in the evolution of free improvisation’ (p. 93). An attachment to the device of theme and variation is similarly regarded as marking much American work of the 1960s as ‘free jazz’, rather than free improvisation (p. 233). A discussion of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians prompts a swipe at ‘the orthodoxies of free jazz’; fortunately, here Toop's dialogical approach also leaves room for Roscoe Mitchell's reservations about the author's assignment of the group to the category of ‘free improvisation’ (p. 240). Toop notes in passing a different kind of exclusion, in the form of the almost complete absence of women from improvisation scenes before 1970; one wonders, though, whether a pioneering figure like Irène Schweizer, active already in the late 1960s, could not have received more individual attention in this volume – or was her early style too indebted to the ‘common practice’ of jazz (pp. 164, 198)?Footnote ¹⁸ Toop is more generous towards the eclectic tendencies of Ennio Morricone and the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, arguing that their ‘capacity to move fluidly between extremes challenges a stereotypical image of free improvisation as a refuge for zealots and fundamentalists with no connection to other musics’ (p. 188) – although in view of the position staked out elsewhere, this reads rather like a ‘challenge’ issued by Toop to himself.

Especially striking, however, in view of the emphasis given to departing from convention, is the boundary that persisted – and Toop seems to think rightly so – between performers and audience. For Toop, speaking (one imagines) first and foremost as an improvising performer, the listener to improvisation should certainly be considered an active participant. ‘The practice of listening’, Toop avers, ‘is an improvisation’ (p. 16), and it follows from this stance that active listening is tantamount to ‘joining in without adding noise’ (p. 134). It is, moreover, a skilled practice, ‘demanding an extra level of effort from its listeners, to follow its form as it emerges, to hear detailed interplay as the musicians hear it’ (ibid.). But although the rhetorical emphasis here lies on participation, readers will be struck by the proximity of this concept of the ‘attentive, fluent and educated’ listener to that typically imagined by composers for the concert hall since (at least) the mid-nineteenth century – a model of listening that might be seen as, in some sense, ‘active’, but which has also been characterized as fundamentally obedient and even subservient.Footnote ¹⁹ Here, then, an element of music's established ‘hierarchies of labour, rules and protocols’ remains stubbornly present, an impression confirmed not least by Toop's characterization of various historically attested interventions by audience members in terms of ‘sabotage’, ‘invasion’ and (best of all) ‘anarcho-hippie-libertarianism’ (pp. 132–3).Footnote ²⁰ Toop approvingly recalls the disdain shown by AMM members when a member of the audience produced an instrument and tried to join in.

At one level Toop's touchiness here (undoubtedly shared by many of the musicians he is writing about) may be ascribed to the still-contested status of improvisation as a legitimate art form, involving high levels of skill, virtuosity and experience.Footnote ²¹ Yet the question persists: if the ‘contestation of musical norms’ is so central to free improvisation, why the sensitivity over the unplanned involvement of ‘instant experts’ (p. 135)? The answer, presumably, is to do with the continuing importance within improvisation's dissensual collectivity of certain shared core values. The collective renunciation of rules and protocols is paradoxically felt to require a continued policing in order to maintain its singularity as an outsider art – ‘as anomaly, as conscience, as critique and as refuge’, as Toop expresses it (p. 3). Often enough, the improvisers that interest Toop could in any case count on a good proportion of their generally rather select audiences being fellow practitioners, meaning that the enduring protocols for audience behaviour were respected and well understood. Reflecting upon AMM performances of the early 1970s, Toop recalls that ‘audiences were small enough to make these occasions feel like the gathering of an estranged family, rather uncomfortable yet deeply affecting’ (p. 213). As this metaphor suggests, improvisation's disruption of the given by no means implies the wholesale abandonment of common interests, protective boundaries and limits to freedom.

Toop's account of free improvisation serves as a reminder of an obvious point: disagreement often coexists with commonality. The freedom to express differences by no means implies the absence of larger markers of unity. In this connection, the dichotomy that emerged from discussion of Duffy's article – democracy as inclusion versus democracy as contestation – is of course readily bridged if it is accepted, first, that debate is democratic when it involves the voices of everyone (a point neglected by some of Duffy's critics) and, second, that inclusive participation is democratic when it is seen as a route to the fullest expression of difference, not simply a utopian (or authoritarian) overcoming of rifts (a point that Duffy's article underplayed). Democracy has typically been understood by its theorists as contending a social unity and social difference at one and the same time. Under this conception, staking a position apart from others does not imply complete separation.

This is not, however, to dissolve away all the difficulties of convening a democratic community. For the challenge facing many putatively democratic societies today is that the bases for democracy's underlying unity – the grounds for democracy's mediation of difference, determining such questions as who is entitled to participate, on what terms and with regard to which matters – are themselves increasingly the subject of strident disagreement. Who decides such grounds? Who is excluded, marginalized or disadvantaged by them? What constraints exist on the kinds of democratic difference that can be expressed or even felt? Such conflicts inevitably sharpen in situations where democratic participation is less voluntaristic than is the case in small-scale music-making, and thus can count on less like-mindedness from the outset. Within larger and more disparate population groups, extreme articulations of dissent are liable to be understood not in terms of democratic difference, but as challenges to democracy itself.

This is the vexed territory into which Nancy Love ventures in her book Trendy Fascism, whose publication coincides with widely expressed concern that what citizens of democratic nation states have in common is increasingly difficult to discern. World events have unhappily lent her subject a degree of topicality exceeding her own gloomy predictions: I found myself reading the book in the summer of 2017, as the protests and murderous violence around the ‘Unite the Right’ rally unfolded in Charlottesville, and as concern about race relations in Donald Trump's America reached new heights. Love explains that the focus of her earlier, pioneering book Musical Democracy upon ‘progressive social movements’, especially the feminist and civil rights movements,Footnote ²² left her feeling the need ‘better to understand the role music plays in politics across the political spectrum, including the radical right’ (Trendy Fascism, p. ix).Footnote ²³ Trendy Fascism joins other recent titles to study the place of music in white-supremacist and radical nationalist culture, including Kirsten Dyck's Reichsrock (2016), which gives attention to the transnational aspects of today's white-power music industry, and Benjamin Teitelbaum's Lions of the North (2017), an ethnographic study of the Scandinavian scene.Footnote ²⁴ Love's focus is predominantly upon American (and to a lesser extent British) musicians and communities, and she pays particular attention to the implications of her findings for democracy, as befits her scholarly background in political science. In three case-study chapters she explores different musical genres invested in white-supremacist politics – ‘skinhead’ rock, folk pop and heavy metal – which draw out different aspects of white supremacism itself: respectively, its decentred organizational structure; its sexual politics and family values; and its deployment of religious tropes. She provides compelling evidence for the role of music in recruiting new followers to white-supremacist organizations; for the newcomer, her account of the proliferation of white-power music and the networks that support it will be eye-opening. A strength of her study is the delicate negotiation she undertakes with an ideology that most of her readers will find abhorrent, culminating in an argument (in the final chapter) that the values of democracy are best served not by disdaining the supporters of white supremacism, but by addressing the root causes for their identification, among which economic precarity looms especially large.

This plea for a measure of empathy does not mean that Love regards the expression of white-supremacist views as a legitimate position within democratic debate. Here there is none of the ‘moral equivalency’ implied in Trump's remarks following the death of a Charlottesville protestor. For Love, white supremacism is an ‘undemocratic cultural project’, and white supremacists ‘would subvert the very possibility of global democracy’ (pp. 15, 21). In other words, Love, like most theorists of democracy through history, perceives limits on democracy's capacity to accommodate different points of view. In the case of white supremacism, the centrality of what Love (following others) terms ‘hate speech’, with its denial of minority rights and its well-documented association with acts of violence (an association that registers strongly, as she notes, in the words and visceral sonic impact of some white-power music), positions it as fundamentally undemocratic. An effect of laying out this position so starkly is that the ways in which some white supremacists nonetheless claim the values of democracy for themselves end up being side-lined – and thus so does an important strand within contemporary democratic politics. Love notes in passing the support lent by the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany to the release of an album by American white-nationalist teen duo Prussian Blue (p. 71);Footnote ²⁵ and she writes interestingly on the decentred ‘swarm’ formation of racist skinhead groups, drawing on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to theorize their independence of ‘the centralized leadership and hierarchical authority of classical totalitarianism’ (pp. 56–7). The latter characterization rather complicates the designation of such groups as ‘fascist’, in so far as fascism was classically seen as organized around a Führenprinzip and thus intrinsically anti-democratic. But the broader appropriation of the value of democracy by the far right – for instance, through defending the expression of extreme views in the name of freedom of speech; or making a populist claim to represent the real views of ordinary people, which have been suppressed by a self-interested liberal elite – is an area left unexplored.Footnote ²⁶

This does not mean, however, that Love entertains an unwarrantedly simplistic or utopian view of democracy. On the contrary: she identifies elements of continuity between the world-view of white supremacists and what she terms ‘hegemonic liberal democracy’, a perception that aligns her with those theorists who have stressed the existence of ‘some operation of exclusion, some founding violence’ behind any putatively universal democratic arrangement.Footnote ²⁷ She asks her readers ‘to consider how the white power music scene discussed here, at least in some respects, reveals the internal cultural-political demons of western liberal democracies’ (p. 27). Here she is interested especially in the blindness of Western liberal democrats to the situated cultural politics that lay at the basis of the formation of modern democracies, with their particular construction of autonomous individuality or ‘self-sameness’, and the implied othering of those who did not (and do not) conform to it. Love draws attention to ‘the historical origins of Western liberal democracies in white racial hegemony’ and proposes:

For Love, this insight necessitates not the abandonment of liberal democracy, but a quest for how the exclusions that beset its foundation might be overcome, or at least diminished, in the present day. Pursuing an argument first advanced in Musical Democracy, she contends that the grounds for democratic discourse – and for changing minds – will not be found purely in the communicative rationality advanced by deliberative democrats such as Jürgen Habermas, whose bias in favour of certain kinds of democratic subject has been the object of much criticism. Instead, she is interested in how the arts and popular culture can cultivate human solidarity, working on the presumption (as she has written elsewhere) ‘that a whole person engages with the world affectively as well as rationally’.Footnote ²⁸ This demands attention to what she terms ‘aesthetic reason’, by which she means embodied experiences that reveal the ‘inadequacies of linguistic representation’ and that ‘unsettle identities in a way that may offer alternative nonviolent responses to conflict and difference’ (pp. 139–40, citing Lesley J. Pruitt). She attributes to music, in particular, the potential to circumvent conventional practices of representation and to ‘invoke affective, corporeal aspects of communication [that] open up the vulnerable spaces between self and other where our shared humanity resounds’ (p. 150).

As she is well aware, the challenge with this proposal is that art's – and especially music's – extralinguistic capacity to express human solidarity is as susceptible to be channelled into sect mentalities as it is into some kind of panhuman identification; her earlier discussion of white-power music's corporeal effects, its ‘power to catch the souls of thousands, and turn them into racial nationalists’, clearly demonstrates this danger (pp. 6, 55–6). Love's argument is partly that democrats must recognize the importance of the aesthetic sphere in shaping democracy, if its power is not to be monopolized by those dedicated to hate and violence. Nonetheless, her account remains hazy when it comes to the mechanism for ensuring that the sense of solidarity arising from embodied musical experience is of the kind that reaches beyond existing identities and attachments, rather than blindly reinforcing them. In her discussion of hip-hop, for instance, it appears that the genre's potential for ‘building coalitions between Black and white youth’ ends up being conditional upon the Habermasian rationality she earlier critiqued – a rationality required to recognize the genre's ‘origins in Black culture’, to reject ‘racial (and other) stereotypes’ and to ‘confront whites’ fascination with Black deviance’ (pp. 141–2). Love states that her purpose ‘is to supplement the role of [verbal] reason in the public sphere, not to displace it’ (p. 297); but this does not entirely efface the impression that the book's later stages succumb to a romantic metaphysics whose role in forming the mythos of white supremacism Love has very persuasively analysed in earlier chapters.

These problems aside, Love's account offers an instructive reminder that, for many theorists, democracy is not simply an arena for the defence of competing interests, but is also a space for reconsidering and modifying established positions. Love takes as inspiration the example of former white supremacists who have renounced their racist attachments, and argues that in exchange it is important to challenge liberal, middle-class Americans’ denigration of ‘white trash’ – the working-class whites who often form the grass-roots support for white-supremacist movements. In Love's view, such denigration scapegoats those who enjoy fewer privileges, and lets off the hook ‘a capitalist system that measures human worth by levels of economic success’ (p. 130). As ‘recovering skinhead’ Frank Meeink has remarked: ‘White supremacists aren't the only people who throw around stereotypes about people they don't know.’Footnote ²⁹

In such processes of realignment, Love paints a picture not of wholesale surrender of previous commitments, but of an interplay of both assertion and self-questioning, in which changed perceptions come about through more thorough acquaintance with the values and life contexts of others. Such a process has been modestly evident in the UK since the 2016 EU referendum, as remainers’ shock at the outcome gave way to new levels of recognition of the reasons for leavers’ vote. If we are to explore the potential of art – and music specifically – to contribute to such narrowing of differences, without resorting to Love's claim for the mysterious bonds forged by art's embodied practices, we could do worse than return to the King's College report on cultural democracy. Some of the criticism of Duffy's advocacy of ‘culture by and for all’ seems to have been motivated by an anxiety that it would signal nothing other than a state-funded orgy of ‘the known’ at the expense of the proffering of critical alternatives. What contribution to democracy would such a policy make if it merely reproduced ‘the existing world’ – ‘what has been’ rather than ‘what might be’? But in fact, the ‘Towards Cultural Democracy’ report advances a more nuanced set of proposals than Duffy's short article could fully convey. At its heart is the proposal that the creation of culture should be considered one of the ‘core human capabilities’ that Martha Nussbaum has argued democratic governments have a duty to support as part of their commitment to ensuring quality of life and social justice.Footnote ³⁰ The report's authors borrow Nussbaum's key question: ‘What is each person able to do and to be?’ Their contention is that the ‘creative potential of human beings’ is not adequately supported by current cultural policy, producing a ‘democratic deficit’ in which ‘the freedom to co-create versions of culture’ is withheld from most people.Footnote ³¹

Importantly, the report's argument for a funding strategy orientated towards ‘everyday creativity’ holds space open for the personal and social change which Love sees as intrinsic to democracy. In the first place, emphasis is laid upon the scope for facilitating cultural involvements that otherwise would not have happened because of lack of supportive conditions; in this sense, ‘self-actualization’ is as much to do with transformation as with reproduction, and ‘cultural democracy’ is figured as an overcoming of marginalization.Footnote ³² In the second place, we may follow Love in regarding the assertion and self-questioning of established positions not as antithetical tendencies within the democratic process, but as co-implicated. The only way in which we might come nearer to each other, Love implies, is to know each other better, and that requires everyone being granted a platform. In other words, the move towards ‘what might be’, democratically speaking, hangs upon real acquaintance with ‘what is’ – at least if it is to amount to more than a one-sided directive from a self-appointed caste of visionaries. This may well be a discomfiting experience, and in extreme cases tests the limits of a given understanding of democratic exchange. But even in cases such as these, it is by hearing our differences in greater fidelity that new grounds for negotiation emerge over what it is that we might, and might not, come to share.