For our final meeting of the year, the SSWG is pleased to welcome back Ashon Crawley (ISM Fellow and assistant professor of religious studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia) to present a paper titled “‘Take It…’: Geosonic Possibility and the Hammond Organ Sound.”
The meeting will be on Tuesday, April 30 from 5–7pm, in room 208 of the Whitney Humanities Center. Note that there are no pre-circulated readings for this meeting—please join us for food, drink, and conversation!
Here’s a brief description of the talk from Crawley:
“In this talk, I attempt to develop an idea of geosonics as an enactment of otherwise possibility. Focusing on the phrase “take it to church” as a cue for musicians and congregants in the Black church tradition to change the register of the sound from major to minor scaling – incorporating flatted fifths, arpeggios, diminished and augmented chords with voices and on the Hammond organ, along with the increases in fervor and of intensity of the flesh praising – I speculatively produce other modes to “take it” to mean a mode of carrying, cultivating, conducting mysticism, a Black mysticism, of and in the flesh. Sounded out in practices of Blackislam and Blackpentecostalism, the talk occasions the interrelation of sacred practices and traditions as geospatial and sonic, produced by dislocations and dispossessions.”
Note that, while there are no specific readings for this meeting, you may want to check out Crawley’s book, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, and specifically the coda, available here, which deals with the Hammond organ.
