The politics of listening in intercultural artistic practice

This article offers an analysis of the function of listening in the musical practice of the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones, based on video documentation recorded between 2006 and 2011. A discussion of the function of openness, drawing on Gadamer, and the distinction between ‘musical’ and ‘musicianly’ listening suggested by Pierre Schaeffer provides the ground for an understanding of mutual learning in cross-cultural artistic practice. Östersjö and Nguyễn identify the same principles in the making of two music theatre works, Idioms (2010–11) and Arrival Cities: Hanoi (2014–15) together with the Swedish playwright and director Jörgen Dahlqvist. The authors, who are both performers in the group, argue that true listening must build on trust that also allows the participating artists to accept the opacity of the other. The ethics implied by the notion of the ‘right to opacity’ also become the ground for a discussion of a politics of listening. Here, the authors claim, following Attali, that the political dimensions of intercultural musical practice can be traced in the hybridity that characterizes the artistic output.