About

Michael Gallope is a Professor and the Department Chair in the Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on music and sound, continental philosophy and critical theory, visual culture, the Black/African diaspora, and theories of modernism. As department chair, he contributes to the academic leadership and development of the department, engaging with interdisciplinary approaches to cultural and literary studies.

Research topics

• Art
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Political economy
• Law
• Gender studies
• Anthropology
• Epistemology
• Visual arts

Selected publications

• John Cage:

  2025-05-06

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• The Politics of <i>Alien Listening</i>

  boundary 2 · 2024-11-01

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  Abstract Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding's book Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth (2021) offers a deep philosophical discussion of NASA's Golden Record that had been attached to the side of its 1977 Voyager probe. The Golden Record was an album of sounds from around the world that was sent in the hope that an alien listener might be able to hear examples of music and language from planet Earth. Chua and Rehding's book uses NASA's Golden Record as a portal through which to imagine a new philosophy of music and listening based in vibration, inconsistency, generosity toward the unknown, and unconditional inclusion. This review analyzes the philosophical content of their book and poses questions about the underlying epistemological and political complexity of their ethical injunction.

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• <i>Experimenting the Human: Art, Music, and the Contemporary Posthuman</i>. By Douglas Barrett

  Music and Letters · 2024-11-06

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• The Musician as Philosopher

  2023-07-10 · 3 citations

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• Philosophy: The Rise of Materiality

  2023-01-01

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  A commonplace narrative of musical aesthetics c. 1800 might run as follows: Enlightenment philosophies of music were based in mimesis, notably the imitation of emotions; in the nineteenth century, music was marked by a Romantic resurgence of interest in the absolute or ineffable (Chua 1999; Hoeckner

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• Five Variations on Music’s Ineffability

  Musicology Now · 2023-09-08

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• Black Art As Unmappable Dissent

  Cultural Critique · 2021-01-01

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  Black Art As Unmappable Dissent Michael Gallope (bio) BLACK AND BLUR BY fred moten Duke University Press, 2017 Have we sensed the significance of the black avant-garde? Have we grasped its fracturing and multiplicative powers, its dissenting sublimity, and its peculiar ability to recast traditional conceptions of the aesthetic? And have we understood this in the context of a history of aesthetics that has continued to venerate the powers of the white subject over the resistant fugitivity of the alienated object? Fred Moten's essay collection Black and Blur invites sustained mediation on these questions. It contains a wide range of Moten's prose writings since 2003, from journal articles and catalog essays to liner notes and experimental prose. The essays cover a range of media; many focus on music and visual art, but there are also discussions of literature, poetry, and criticism. The collection was the first installment in Moten's trilogy, consent not to be a single being, which stretches to two further volumes: Stolen Life (2018) and The Universal Machine (2018). Moten's essays stage a rebellion against the perennial consent granted to the a priori whiteness of Euro-Western modernism; in the process, he incarnates a black praxis of utopian dissent. Black music, black sound, and the black voice—and the reorientation of listening he enjoins—are recurring focuses. When I read Moten, it feels as though I am being asked to think with a living philosopher. This seems like glowing scholarly praise, but that is not my primary aim in saying this; I mean it as an earnest claim about genre. Why write a traditional review when one can hear—in prose—a breathing, syncopating, and meditative philosopher who is [End Page 193] asking to be heard? With this in mind, my aims here are primarily exegetical. I will try to show how I read Moten and why I have found his work inspiring for the past seventeen years, since I came across his first book, In the Break (2003). In my own writings, I have quoted Moten, appealed to his sensibility, asked him to speak, but often with only minimal context or explanation. So I want to take this opportunity to build upon the thinking I hear (and have heard) in Moten's writings. I know I am running the risk of running afoul of Moten's method by watering down the poetic negativity of his writing. His essays invite slow work, and important slow work. Without wanting to forestall the often formidable challenges his meditations pose, I will here try to press ahead and offer an account of recurring themes and questions in his writing, thus showing readers the kinds of things I have come to hear. Central to Moten's work is a vision of the historicity of black aesthetics. He emphasizes the roots of black aesthetics in the history of enslaved Afro-descendants (both in the United States and in the Caribbean) who were expropriated, dehumanized, and silenced in order to provide the material basis for modern capitalism and democracy. Moten's writings take as an axiom that the dissenting power of black art is linked to the economy of trans-Atlantic violence and racial subjugation, both historical and ongoing. His approach challenges any ready-to-hand aesthetics regarding the powers of the enlightened, white, Euro-Western subject—with all of its assumptions of agency, autonomy, sovereignty, and privileged capacities for dissent. For Moten, normative conceptions of artistic style, of modernism, of various avant-garde protests and refusals, remain dependent upon a racist marginalizing and silencing of black sociality and black aesthetics. This is a leitmotif of Moten's materialism; the historicity of modernist forms is conditioned by the racial subjugation inherent to the historicity of capitalism. This materialism is also central to Moten's reading of Frederick Douglass's Autobiography of a Slave (1845) featured in the introduction to his first book, In the Break. Moten follows the work of the critic Saidiya Hartman and positions Douglass's description of his Aunt Hester's beating as a brutal spectacle—what Moten describes as a "primal scene"—that is endlessly restaged and reheard throughout the history of the black avant...

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• Deep Refrains : Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable

  2021 · 74 citations

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  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  • Art
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• Society

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-15 · 1 citations

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  Abstract Since the emergence of European aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, music’s relationship to society has only occasionally been a privileged topic of philosophical discussion. This chapter surveys and compares the work of five key figures in Western philosophy who thought carefully about the relationship between music and society: Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Du Bois, and Adorno. Guiding the discussion are two key motifs: imitation, in which music is taken to manifestly resemble various elements or processes in society; and codes, where, at a deeper and more latent level, music is taken to reflect or reveal some kind of obscure social meaning. In the final section, the chapter submits both categories to critique, contending that, while these philosophers’ writings remain highly instructive points of departure, they are of limited use in accounting for the many complex linkages between music and society within the globalized movements of twentieth-century popular music.

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• Review of Jean-Luc Nancy. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2020-03-15 · 3 citations

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  After years and years of debate, has music studies come to a consensus on how to relate culturalist and historicist claims about music to formal claims? Or are most analytical approaches still to external to musical experience? In Charlotte Mandell’s splendid translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s brief but passionate À l’écoute, the French philosopher gives us a glimpse of a completely different philosophy of music. Uninterested in wresting out the dialectic between immaterial structure and the materiality of a self-evident cultural practice, Nancy’s notion of music in Listening (as Mandell has translated in À l’écoute) respects no proper distinction between subject (listeners, participants, composers, musicians, or otherwise) and object (say, a thing or phenomenon of organized sound). Nancy prefers to think of music as the becoming-sound of sense; this means his book is not so much a “philosophy of music” in the regular sense of the phrase as it is a philosophy of listening.

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Frequent coauthors

• James Currie

  1 shared

• Judy Lochhead

  1 shared

• Steven Rings

  1 shared

• Sherry Lee

  Thomas Jefferson University Hospital

  1 shared

• Beth M. Snyder

  University of North Texas

  1 shared

• James Hepokoski

  1 shared

• Michael J. Puri

  1 shared

• Elaine Kelly

  1 shared

Labs

• Michael Gallope LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Liberal Arts

  University of Chicago

  2013

• B.A., Philosophy

  University of Chicago

Awards & honors

• Faculty Residential Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Un…
• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend,…
• Sabbatical Supplement, College of Liberal Arts, University o…
• Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 2004 - 2005
• Harper-Schmidt Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Art…