Graduate Research Colloquia: Dr Jacob Kingsbury Downs (University of Oxford)

Image

Abstract

Beyoncé's RENAISSANCE (2022) is an album overflowing with musico-affective collisions and fluidities. As her listeners, we career through sonic worlds influenced by Black (and) queer musical histories, encountering the ebullient, inexorable urgency of the dancefloor at every turn. In this talk, I combine a musicological interest in the composition of Beyoncé's sonic aesthetic with philosophical exploration of the album's foregrounding of affective articulation. I focus in detail on junctures between tracks and sections, examining the influence of early disco practices on moments of 'seamless mixing', beat-matching, and tempo-mapping, as well as considering how the narrative logics of such moments imbricate with the themes of the record. In this way, I critically investigate how RENAISSANCE's aesthetic and structural gestures echo the sonic and affective flows and overflows of Beyoncé's (self-professed) musical ancestries. I do so partly by adopting Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta's (2023) notion of liquidarity as a descriptor of the 'fluid togetherness' of the dancefloor, asking how-and why-we might hear dance music's embodied socialities in the album's form, as well as why we might critique its aesthetic intentions.

Biography

Dr Jacob Kingsbury Downs is Departmental Lecturer in Music at the University of Oxford, where he also serves as Chair of Faculty in the Faculty of Music and Organising Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. In 2024, he was named as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. His research links contemporary music, sound studies, continental philosophy, music technology, and empirical approaches to the study of music consumption and creation. He is currently PI on the John Fell Fund project 'Regarding the Noise of Others: Social Phenomenologies of "Loudcasting" on Public Transport' and Co-I on the UKRI project 'Influencing Environmental Values through Music'. His first monograph, Headphone Listening: Space, Embodiment, Materiality, will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2025/2026.