Tuesday April 20th, 5:30 pm in 701C Dodge Hall Amanda Minks Postcolonial Play: Socializing Race and Language on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua
This talk examines the endurance of colonial legacies of race and language in the socializing activities of Miskitu children on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Along with institutional contexts, informal play and performance are key sites for socializing racialized concepts of persons and languages. The resilience of race as a prominent feature of cultural hierarchies raises questions about celebratory discourses (both popular and academic) of cultural interaction and hybridity, alternately viewed as creolization, transculturation or interculturalism. read more »
Writing Musical Lives John Szwed The Center for Ethnomusicology, 701C Dodge Hall, April 13, 5:30 pm
This talk will focus on some of the virtues and problems of writing about the lives of musicians. It will include a quick survey of the types and uses of life narratives by ethnomusicologists, folklorists, social scientists, and popular writers, with a short discussion of some recent innovative biographical works. Examples will be drawn from a variety of biographies, including my books on Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Jelly Roll Morton, and Alan Lomax read more »
ProfessorJorge Cañizares-Esguerra Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History Department of History, University of Texas.
Respondent: Susan Boynton The Music Department, Columbia University.
April 9, Dodge Hall 622, 4 pm
Between the Heart of Christ and the Heart of Mary: The Global Jesuit Mission in Quito ca. 1750.
The paper offers a typological reading of a 17th-18th century Jesuit church in Quito (Ecuador). It demonstrates that the façade, chapels, altars, and images in the temple were originally organized around a typological reading of the Apostles Peter and Paul as prefigurations, on the one hand, of the Petrine, institutional, masculine, Christological, Roman side of the order and, on the other, of the Pauline, global, feminine, Marian, missionary dimension. Typology readings of the Old and New Testament (prefiguration- fulfillment) helped organize the layout of cities, temples, and colonial institutions throughout the Monarquía de España. In short, typology as a reading technique and as a historiographical sensibility was central to the global expansion of early modern Catholicism.
Tuesday, March 30 5:30pm in 701C, Center for Ethnomusicology Kiri Miller "How Musical is Guitar Hero?" Abstract: How are games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band shaping players' concepts of musicality, creativity, and embodied performance? This talk explores new forms of musicking at the intersection of the "virtual” and the “real,” showing how these games might illuminate the changing nature of amateur musicianship in a technologically mediated world. read more »
Female Voices in the Public Sphere: Playback Singing as Cultural Phenomenon in South India. A talk by Amanda Weidman Location: The Center for Ethnomusicology, 701C Dodge Hall Tuesday, March 9, 5.30 pm
Playback singing, a process in which the voices of professional singers are first recorded in the studio, and then “played back” on the set to be lip synched by actors, is foundational to Indian popular cinema. More than simply a technological process, it is a cultural phenomenon enabled by technological capacities that allow voices to be recorded, manipulated, amplified, circulated, and matched with various images. Playback singers are celebrities in their own right, and playback singing is a realm of vocality intricately encoded with meaning, as voices are explicitly and powerfully linked to class, caste, community, and regional identity through film song sequences. read more »
The seventh annual Columbia Music Scholarship Conference will take place on Saturday, March 6 in 301 Philosophy Hall at Columbia University from 10 AM to 6 PM.
Nine graduate students and young scholars will present original
research exploring various facets of the conference theme "Music and
Money: Examining Value in Music." Ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) will deliver the keynote
address "Following the Musical Money Across the Social Web." CMSC would
like to thank the Graduate Student Advisory Council, Columbia
University Department of Music, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and
Race, and the Institute of Latin American Studies for co-sponsorship of
this year's conference. read more »
Monday March 1st, 5 pm in EALAC Lounge Room (403 Kent Hall) Martin Mills The Presence of Divinity in Tibetan Buddhist Ritual
An examination of the performance of ritual amongst Tibetan Buddhist communities in the Western Himalaya. The lecture will look at certain principal ritual actions - such as the recitation of scripture and mantras - in the performance of exorcistic and healing rites, and examine the manner in which these ritual actions are linked by their participants to the question of divine presence, whether in the form of classical tantric evocations of divine power, or in the form of more localised possession events. read more »
Who Will Pay the Piper: The Threat to Diversity in the Face of 'Free' Downloads A talk by Gerald Seligman 701C Dodge Hall February 23, 5:30 pm
As music distribution moved online and technologies allowed the free exchange of music -- whether the artists themselves agreed or not -- the bottom fell out of a funding structure that had kept the music industry alive. That industry is not just the major corporations with dubious reputations but also any artist or honest investor in music who has funded a career -- his/her own or another's. There is no such thing a free download. Supporting music costs money, and the remarkable strides we have all seen in recent years in introducing more artists from more cultures than every before in history cannot be sustained without the possibility of a return on sales, without funding. This lecture and discussion will present a growing consensus on where the industry is, what it thinks it must do and the many obstacles in achieving the goal or reconnecting artists (and investors) with income for recorded music. read more »
Race, Nation, and José Maurício Nunes Garcia by Marcelo Campos Hazan
Respondent: Kristy Riggs
The compelling life story of José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830), the mulatto son of freed slaves who rose to become chapelmaster of the Rio de Janeiro cathedral, has engaged Brazilian popular and scholarly imagination for many generations. This paper examines the interrelated discourses of race and nation as they articulated with posthumous representations of Garcia and his music in specific political contexts. The aim is to illuminate the shifting ways in which race and more specifically miscegenation was interpreted in Brazil and how these changing interpretations intersected with nationalist ideologies of cosmopolitan conformity and national singularity signified by Garcia’s music.At the dawn of the Republic (1889), a historical image of Garcia as “the Brazilian Mozart” was already widespread, one that crucially influenced and reflected the consolidation of the German canon in Brazil. The elite’s reliance on cosmopolitan cultural models, which established both difference within and sameness across national boundaries, was accompanied by a profound concern with the country’s racial configuration. In accord with evolutionist and determinist thought, many believed that Brazil’s backwardness vis-à-vis civilized (and civilizing) Europe sprang from the miscegenation of its population. How the intellectual elites reconciled the Germanic excellence of Garcia’s art with the African inferiority of his mixed blood is addressed in the first part of this paper. As Brazil entered the twentieth century, miscegenation, previously blamed for the country’s supposed stunted development, began to be significantly reappraised. The populist Vargas regime (1930-1945) promoted mestiçagem as a source of national pride, a strategy that successfully neutralized dissent while creating a generalized sense of belonging. The second part of this work examines the shift from exclusive to inclusive nationalism, and how Garcia’s music came to be racially reinterpreted as genuinely Brazilian, rather than essentially German.
Tuesday, February 2 in 701C, Center for Ethnomusicology Veit Erlmann Music as Law: “The Lion King,” Intellectual Property and South African Cultural Heritage Abstract:
In March 2006 a landmark settlement was reached between Walt Disney Inc. and the estate of Solomon Linda, the South African composer of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a song used (without approval from Linda’s estate) in the Disney movie and Broadway production “The Lion King.” Although it was widely hailed as a breakthrough in protecting authors’ rights in the developing world, the settlement raises numerous questions about the role intellectual property (IP) law is increasingly playing in global social, economic and political affairs. In my talk I will make two interrelated arguments. First, I propose that musical practice shares with the law a fundamental concern with normativity. The way musicians, audiences and the music industry interact often seems more rule-like and self-referential than the model of law underpinning legal scholarship, having a profound impact on – and in a way even creating - many of law’s taken-for-granted concepts of authorship, originality, and appropriation. Consequently, such practices do not so much stand outside the law, as in the majority of studies on music and IP which frame the relationship between the music industry and the law as that of two distinct realms - as music and the law – than they are to be seen as law.
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Tuesday, December 1 at 4pm in 701C, Center for Ethnomusicology Fabien Levy The Pareto Software: A Journey through the Music of the Bedzan Pygmies... and through the World of Ethnomusicology Abstract: Pareto ["Patchs d'Analyse et de Resynthèse des Echelles dans les musiques de Tradition Orale" / patches of pitch-scale analysis and re-synthesis in the music of oral tradition] is a set of patches made for the software Open Music by IRCAM which offers three functions:
1) To transcribe an acoustic signal into musical information
2) To propose various statistical tools to help to determine the musical scale read more »
Tuesday, November 10 at 4pm in 701C, Center for Ethnomusicology
Sonia Seeman Metaphoricity, Iconicity and Mimesis: Towards a Musical
Semantics of Social Identity in Turkish Roman (“Gypsy”) Music read more »
The Politics of Music Categorization in Portugal: Discourses, Performance and Research May 5, 4 pm at the Center for Ethnomusicology 701C Dodge Hall Colloquium with Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco Instituto de Etnomusicologia Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal)
This colloquium addresses the discursive formulation of music categories in Portugal within the framework of nation building from the end of the 19th century up to the present. It analyzes the conceptual framework that underlies music behavior and practice, the meanings assigned to the main concepts differentiating music genres and styles, the ways these concepts are resignified by different actors in distinct periods. It deals with how music categorization affects music discourse, discourse about music, and its reception. It also examines the ways difference and power are recognized and exercised through music categorization.
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