Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good

If it were not bad enough to find out that the Australian government has over recent years been redistributing Australian Research Council funds away from the humanities (and in particular the creative arts and writing) by a factor of almost two-thirds towards areas it described as being of ‘immediate and critical importance’, we now know that at least two music research projects that were approved in the 2019 grant round were subsequently denied support at the whim of former Federal education minister Simon Birmingham. I doubt many of us were surprised, however. The annual chore of grant writing has felt for some time now to be a Sisyphean one, more a ritual of disciplinary self-abasement rather than self-affirmation given the already dismally low chances of success. Nevertheless there now seems to be clear grounds for Australian Vice-Chancellors and learned academies to protest vigorously about such open prejudice against our discipline. Musicologists should protest too, of course, but perhaps we could also consider how we might better present the case for public support. To that end, the appearance of a book like William Cheng’s Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good seems both timely and welcome, for in it Cheng sets himself the task of examining how musicology might ‘renegotiate the means and purposes of careful labor, intellectual inquiry, and living soundly’ (p. 5). Cheng’s endeavour parallels recent work done by a consortium of conservatoire heads (of which I was one) who explored how tertiary music education could be more explicitly understood in terms of its benefits to wider society. Just Vibrations stands out, however, for focusing specifically on musicology and has quickly generated a good deal of online