I. Examples of Sonic Citizenship
1.1. The Nation: Community Singing as Sonic Citizenship
During the pandemic we experienced or heard news reports of how citizens came together through singing and sound making to help each other get through the crisis. People cheered for healthcare workers as they walked to and from work, banged pots and pans together at set intervals to express their appreciation for the healthcare system, and sang together from balconies to break the forced isolation. In Denmark, the most common tendency was local citizens organizing sing-alongs from balconies and backyards. This was soon picked up at the national level as the Danish Broadcasting Corporation launched the communal sing-along broadcast Fælles – hver for sig [Together – while apart] with the desire to bring Danes together in pandemic times through, as the title of the program says, “All the songs we know and love” (Nielsen 2021).
In “Sonic citizenship: Rights and rites of belonging in Ireland” (2018), the Irish researcher of music and migration Helen Phelan examines community singing in an asylum-seeking community in Ireland in the early years of the new millennium. Phelan concludes that in addition to providing a distraction from isolating and monotonous living conditions, community singing would also establish a “sung belonging,” a sense of belonging during a precarious situation in which people lack formal citizenship. She therefore argues for “the role of ritual singing as a form of ‘sonic’ citizenship or sung belonging” as a “‘rites-based’ rather than a ‘rights-based’ space of belonging” (Phelan 2018: 248 and 256). Being together in a state of sensory awareness, whether in the form of religious rituals or community singing, reminds us experientially that we are not alone. By offering a form, content, and bodily expression through gesture and sound (sonority), the group song creates a phenomenological experience of an unfolded and practiced (performed) belonging (Phelan 2018: 258).
In a continuation of Phelan’s analysis: the multiplicity of collective singing initiatives that we saw during the pandemic could be regarded as such a practiced and performed ritual of belonging, where the singing established a rites-based space of belonging. Here, participatory sonic practices, through sung belonging, established and expressed community and solidarity between citizens of a local community or a nation.
Returning, however, to the Danish context during the pandemic, the picture is not clear-cut. At first glance, the sing-along broadcasts seem to have been a positive experience for many people, perhaps especially for families who saw it as an opportunity to sing together. However, because the constructed community was expressed as a television program, the national community was mediated and disconnected: there was no shared rhythm and no synchronization of the voices sounding out from private living rooms and, thus, no one was really listened to, and no one was really heard. Sociologist Benedict Anderson proposes that the nation is an imagined political community because we do not know the other community members but presume a relationality to them. Regardless of any inequalities, most often we conceive the nation as a “deep, horizontal comradeship” (Andersen 2006: 5-7): language, imagery, singing, as well as everyday social practices, play pivotal roles in establishing this imagined community, as elucidated by Michael Billig's notion of “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995). This notion refers to the often-unnoticed ways in which the sense of the established nation state is reproduced over and over, for instance when we sing the national anthem at a football match. As the Danish ethnographer Tine Damholt concludes in her analysis of the use of communal singing in citizenship ceremonies: "Citizenship is not just something that flows through the person passively and inclusively. It is also something you do” (Damholt 2008: 56-65). Fælles – hver for sig was not overtly nationalistic. It did, however, aim to instigate this banal, everyday nationalism to reinforce the sense of a national “we” – a deep, horizontal comradeship which in this context exclusively encompassed Danes who love and know the same songs. The TV-show had in that sense an instrumental goal: to bring the Danes together through specific Danish songs.
During the time that the broadcast was airing, there was a tense relationship between the state and certain groups of citizens who protested against the imposed COVID-19 restrictions, because they felt these restrictions curtailed citizens' sense of freedom. This tension sharply contrasted with the unified national “we” implied in the sing along programs. The Danish composer Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard addressed this dissonance in his artwork Sing Along! (you’re either with us or against us) (2020), where he underscored the potential exclusionary nature of community singing and their implied homogeneous communities by vacuum-packing the popular national songbook Højskolesangbogen typically used in communal singing. In a description of the work, Løkkegaard highlights that, for some, the broadcasts created "a saturated community bubble," while others perceived them as "a claustrophobic vacuum" (see website description).
In this example there are two dimensions of sonic citizenship in play. The first pertains to the social, horizontal aspect such as the sense of belonging or the sense of exclusion; the other pertains to the formal, juridical ties with the nation-state wherein one holds formal citizenship, entailing certain rights (e.g. freedom of speech) but also formal and informal restrictions, duties, and laws. These two dimensions are often intertwined, as illustrated in the example of community singing on screen. This example could be seen as an innocent attempt to comfort the viewers by establishing a mediated horizontal space of belonging. Concomitantly, it could be regarded as an attempt to manage or govern the public, as an enhanced sense of belonging would make the public more compliant to the restrictions imposed by the government.
A historic example of the intertwinement of the two dimensions of sonic citizenship can be found in the American historian Helen Rosenfeld’s analysis of post-revolutionary France and the challenges following the newly achieved freedom of speech. Speakers in parliament and other democratic forums would drown each other out with noise, thus prohibiting democratic participation. Freedom of speech was thus accompanied by a new problem: the right to be heard (Rosenfeld 2011). As indicated in the introduction, the Danish term medborgerskab places a stronger emphasis on the social, horizontal dimension, akin to what is referred to in English as civicness, because it encompasses both the horizontal, social relations with others and the vertical aspect of power, including rights (e.g., freedom of speech) and limitations. Since sonic citizenship encompasses both the horizontal, social sense of belonging or exclusion as well as the vertical question of power, including both protection and rights but also restrictions, sonic citizenship necessarily implies a field of conflict or dissensus. However, by focusing on these elements of conflict, and accepting them, we might also be able to find ways for individuals to accept or to address these conflicts in a constructive way.