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Previous Events at the Center (Archive)

Female Voices in the Public Sphere -- Amanda Weidman

February 25, 2010 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 5:30pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall
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 »

Seventh Annual Columbia Music Scholarship Conference

February 25, 2010 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Saturday, March 6, 2010 - 10:00am - 6:00pm
Location: 
301 Philosophy Hall
   
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 »

The Presence of Divinity in Tibetan Buddhist Ritual -- Martin Mills

January 19, 2010 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Monday, March 1, 2010 - 5:00pm
Location: 
EALAC Lounge Room (403 Kent Hall)

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 -- Gerald Seligman

February 18, 2010 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 - 5:30pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall
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 -- Marcelo Campos Hazan

January 28, 2010 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Thursday, February 11, 2010 - 4:30pm
Location: 
Center for Ethnomusicology, 701C Dodge Hall

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.

 read more »

Music as Law: “The Lion King,” Intellectual Property and South African Cultural Heritage -- Veit Erlmann

October 19, 2009 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - 5:30pm
Location: 
The Center for Ethnomusicology, 701C Dodge Hall

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.  read more »

The Pareto Software: A Journey through the Music of the Bedzan Pygmies -- Fabien Levy

October 19, 2009 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 - 4:00pm
Location: 
The Center for Ethnomusicology, 701C Dodge Hall

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 »

Metaphoricity, Iconicity and Mimesis: Towards a Musical Semantics of Social Identity in Turkish Roman Music -- Sonia Seeman

October 19, 2009 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - 4:00pm
Location: 
The Center for Ethnomusicology, 701C Dodge Hall


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 -- Colloquium with Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco

January 24, 2009 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Tuesday, May 5, 2009 - 4:00am
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall

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.  read more »

Singing the Present through the Past: "Kharbusha" at a Wedding Celebration in Morocco -- Alessandra Ciucci

April 23, 2009 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Friday, April 24, 2009 - 4:00am
Location: 
622 Dodge Hall
The Spring 2009 Colloquium Series of the
Department of Music, Columbia University
is pleased to present

Singing the Present through the Past:
"Kharbusha" at a Wedding Celebration in Morocco
Alessandra Ciucci, Columbia University

Respondent: Farzaneh Hemmasi

Friday, April 24
4PM, 622 Dodge Hall

The colloquium is free and open to the public.
Light refreshments will be served after the talk.

‘Cuba Rebelión: Underground Music in Havana’ -- Dr. Geoff Baker

January 24, 2009 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Sunday, April 19, 2009 - 10:08am - 11:08am
Location: 
301 Philosophy Hall--test

Colloquium

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 24, 4 pm

Dr. Geoff Baker, Royal Holloway, University of London

‘Cuba Rebelión: Underground Music in Havana’

Sounds of Death, Images of Bio(In)Security --Colloquium with Dr. Charles Briggs

January 24, 2009 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 4:00am
Colloquium

Tuesday, April 7, 4 pm

Charles Briggs
Department of Anthropology, Berkeley

Abstract:
This paper returns, perhaps nostalgically, to a dialogue between scholars of music, language, aesthetics, and performance that emerged in the 1970s, flourished ephemerally in the 1980s, and withered as the new millennium approached. These reflections were sparked after I was recruited as the ethnographer and photographer for an extraordinary collaboration between indigenous activists, healers, and biomedical professionals seeking to diagnose and document an epidemic of a 100% fatal unknown disease in a Venezuelan rainforest. It traces the production and literally global circulation of sounds—the wailing and narratives of parents—and visual images, reflecting on how alternative sites of knowledge-making and mediatization were transformed into a criminal threat to state (bio)security.

I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in Anthropology in 1981. My research and teaching center on the development of critical perspectives that cross borders - national, disciplinary, epistemological, and the academic/activist divide. I have worked in the United States and Latin America, and I combine linguistic and medical anthropology with social/cultural anthropology and folkloristics. I have explored many topics, but I have focused on using a variety of critical approaches in exploring how precarious poetics and social constructions of language, communication, and media structure and are structured by everyday life in zones of racialization, power, danger, and often death.
 read more »

Digital Economies and the Politics of Circulation

December 11, 2008 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Friday, April 3, 2009 - 1:00pm - Saturday, April 4, 2009 - 1:59pm
Location: 
Philosophy Hall
Click here for full size poster!Digital Economies and the Politics of Circulation
Dates: April 3 and 4, 2009
Location: Philosophy Hall, Columbia University

A conference co-organized by
Ana María Ochoa
The Center for Ethnomusicology, The Music Department, Columbia University

Claudio Lomnitz
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University

For the detailed program please click here.

This is an interdisciplinary and transnational conference that seeks to explore the interrelationship between the changing status of textualities, the rise of informal economies and the global politics of circulation.  By changing textualities we mean the transformation in modes of support and circulation of artistic artifacts and legal documents (from different types of musics, to cinema as well as documents that make up the legal archive). The point of departure for the conference is the realization that there is a gap between practices of archiving, production and circulation of different forms of textualities and their juridical status. The association between property, technology, art forms and governmentality is being challenged from a broad spectrum of creative practices, but this is not just a problem about intellectual property. The migration of the discussion in the globalization of the arts to a legal terrain brings to the foreground the increasing incommensurability between the local, national and global politics of diversity, and governmentality. Thus practices of exchange of digital texts become a radical site for the audiovisualization of the global crisis of the political entailed by this incommensurability.  read more »

Conference Announcement: Listening In, Feeding Back

January 24, 2009 by EthnoAdmin

Event Start: 
Friday, February 13, 2009 - 12:00pm - Saturday, February 14, 2009 - 8:00pm
Location: 
301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University; Concert location - Miller Theater, 2960 Broadway (at 116th Street)


Listening In, Feeding Back





Organizers:



David Novak, Columbia University, Society of Fellows in the Humanities
den12@columbia.edu
Ana Maria Ochoa, Columbia University, Department of Music
ao2110@columbia.edu

Conference and concert are free and open to the public. No registration or tickets necessary. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.

Description:
In recent years, several North American academic disciplines, including history, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and media studies, have devoted significant attention towards practices of listening. The act of listening is undoubtedly an underexplored dimension of modern sensory experience -- and of modernity itself, which is too often characterized by an overdetermined regime of visuality. What can listening offer to emerging interdisciplinary work on perception, performance, aesthetics, social life, and the circulation of sound media? Listening is more than a given function of musical interpretation, which might attend to sound only in its deliberately aesthetic or openly communicative forms. Rather, it is a culturally-situated practice that shapes the particular spatial and material conditions of our perception. Listening influences the social distinctions of daily life, and is inextricably bound to aesthetic and bodily experiences with music and noise. And increasingly, characterizations of listening recognize its diverse practices as productive transcultural relationships, which in themselves constitute the globalization of media. Our experiences with sound are key to broad projects of self-making that rewrite logics of authorship and cultural origin through circulation and new modes of appropriation.  read more »

"Lists of words, inventories and enchanting rites in Brazilian popular song" -- Dr. Elizabeth Travassos

January 24, 2009 by jmukai

Event Start: 
Monday, February 9, 2009 - 12:00pm
Colloquium and Lunch Discussion

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9 (lunch seminar), 12 pm

Dr. Elizabeth Travassos

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

"Lists of words, inventories and enchanting rites in Brazilian popular song"
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