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Center for Ethnomusicology Report, Fall 2008

CENTER FOR ETHNOMUSICOLOGY REPORT, FALL 2008

Prepared by : Ana María Ochoa

I. Fall 2008

1. Events

During the past semester the Center for Ethnomusicology organized a series of events, some in association with other Centers or Associations in the university. These included:

  • Chris Waterman, Dean , School of the Arts, UCLA (Center for Ethnomusicology Colloquium).
  • Denilson Lopes, Communication Studies, UFRJ, Brasil (Center for Ethnomusicology and CSER)
  • The New Evidence 1400-1800 Series and the Center for Ethnomusicology Colloquium co-organized talks by Jaime Lara (Chair of the program of Religion and the Arts at Yale Divinity Schoool) and José Pardo Tomás (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain). Special thanks to Giuseppe Gerbino and Susan Boynton for the co-organiztion of these talks.
  • Samuel Araujo, Vincenzo Cambria, Sinesio Jeferson Andrade Silva (Laboratorio de Etnomusicologia,UFRJ) presented at our new lunch-dialogues series.
  • A Master Class with Charles Marshall, Satsuma Biwa Performer, in association with the institute for Medieval Japanese Studies.
  • We also co-sponsored the Fifth Annual Guria Benefit which is hosted annually by Dimensions, the Barnard South Asian Students Association.

The following ensembles were active during the semester in conjunction with the MPP Program:

The Gagaku Ensemble, in association with the Japanese Program.
The Bluegrass Ensemble, Lion in the Grass.
The Brazilian Music Ensemble.

Special thanks to David Novak, Miho Walsh, Louise and Noriyuko Sasaki, Toby King, Adriano Santos and Ole Mathisen for all the work in the ensembles.

Besides this the Center for Ethnomusicology organized a video editing workshop and a grant writing workshop, both taught by Anna Stirr. Other workshops will continue in the Spring.

2. Congratulations, celebrations

Congratulations to Professor Chris Washburne for the publication of his book, Sounding Salsa with Temple University Press.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Keenan and Maurea Landies who received their Ph Ds this Fall.

Congratulations to Matt Sakakeeny who won the Charles Seeger Prize for the most distinguished student paper presented at SEM and Elizabeth Keenan for winning the Wong Tolbert Award for best student paper on the topic of women.

Congratulations to Ryan Skinner for publishing his first his first children's book: Sidikiba's Kora Lesson.

A warm welcome to Julian Albert Luker, son of Morgan Luker and Ruth Wikler-Luker who was born on December 3 at 1.13 am at Meriter hospital in  Madison, Wisconsin.

SPRING 2009

We look forward to a very busy and exciting Spring semester. We will have two guests in our colloquium series:

Geoff Baker (date to be defined).

Charles Briggs, March 26

Besides this, we have two conferences in the Spring. These are:

1. LISTENING IN, FEEDING BACK

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

Ana Maria Ochoa, Columbia University, Department of Music

Description: In recent years, several 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 everyday 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, then, are key to broad projects of self-making that rewrite logics of authorship and cultural origin through circulation and new modes of appropriation.

Adding the metaphor of feedback to contemporary inquires into listening encourages us to reconsider the creative social relations that develop within the distinct spaces and circulations of sound media. Feedback touches on the cyclical nature of people’s experiences with recordings, the recurrent relationships between different sites of listenership, the connections between production and consumption, and the many circuits of authenticity and transformation through which sound travels. Re-situating feedback from cybernetics and network theory into mediated social practices of listening helps to reveal logics of interconnection, emplacement, attention and subjectivity that have become crucial to cultural politics. Feedback loops challenge linear histories of music; the isolation of hearing as a sense (and of listening publics from each other); and the maintenance of boundaries between genres and categories of musical style and experience. Feedback instead offers links, circulations, and connections: not as closed tautological arguments, but cross-wired circuitries that recognize constant change, and also stress their own coincidental and unpredictable infrastructure.

Themes to be addressed may include:
1. The role of listening and feedback in the experience of media circulation
2. Listening as a conscious re-orientation of ongoing productions of knowledge (both in everyday social practice and in terms of received disciplinary problems)
3. Listening in the context of electronic media and technology, and the changing environments of musical production and reproduction
4. Feedback and listening as creative practices in popular music genres
5. Feedback as a revision of linear narratives of historical invention in terms of coincidence and simultaneity
6. Feedback in the transactions of new media networks, which challenge existing terms of communication, democratic exchange, and political control of sound
7. Listening in alternative modernities: aesthetics conceived through relationships of transcultural difference, colonialities, and histories of mimesis, imitation and influence

List of Presenters:
Karin Bijsterveld (Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University)
Steven Connor (Modern Literature and Theory, Birkbeck College)
James Fei (Music/Intermedia Arts, Mills College)
Steven Feld (Anthropology/Music, University of New Mexico)
Charles Hirschkind (Anthropology, UC Berkeley)
Brian Kane (Music Theory, Yale University)
Louise Meintjes (Music/Anthropology/Ethnomusicology, Duke University)
David Novak (Society of Fellows, Columbia University)
Yoshihide Otomo (Independent Composer/Performer)
Mark Smith (History, University of South Carolina)
Jonathan Sterne (Communication Studies, McGill University)
Elizabeth Travassos (Folklore/Ethnomusicology, University of Rio de Janeiro)
Amanda Weidman (Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College)

Concert:
There will be a concert performance on Friday, Feb. 13 at 8 PM at the Miller Theatre at Columbia University featuring Alvin Lucier, Yoshihide Otomo, and the trio of James Fei, Hideki Kato, and Toshimaru Nakamura.

2. 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

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. The panels in which these different topics would be discussed are:

A. Heritage, intellectual property and the digital archive
B. Digital technologies, the arts and informal economies: case studies
C. Memory, justice and the digital archive
D. Circulation of textualities and legality: opportunities and closures

List of Presenters:

Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation Belgium/Thailand)
Carolina Botero (Organización Karisma, Colombia)
Kim Christen (Department of Comparative and Ethnic Studies, Washington State University).
Alex Dent (Anthropology and International Affairs, George Washington University)
Arilson Favareto (Centro de Engenharia, Modelagem e Ciências Sociais Aplicadas
Universidade Federal da Região do ABC - UFABC, Sao Paulo)
Aaron Fox (Music, Columbia University)
Julio Gaitán (Law, Universidad del Rosario, Colombia)
Brian Larkin (Anthropology, Barnard)
Ronaldo Lemos (law and information society, Getúlio Vargas Foundation)
Lawrence Liang (Alternative Justice Forum, India)
Louise Meintjes (Music and Anthropology, Duke University, USA, South Africa)
Ana María Ochoa (Music and CSER, Columbia University)
Elizabeth Povinelli (Anthropology and IRWAG, Columbia University)
Chie Sakakibara (Music, Earth Institute and CSER, Columbia University)
Anthony Seeger (Music, UCLA)
Henry Stobart (Music, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Alan Story (Law, University of Kent, Copysouth, UK)

Concert/Installation - (Date still to be defined). Co-organized by the Computer Music Center, The Music Library, The Center for Ethnomusicology with the collaboration of visual artist, Elena Climent. Pieces by: Brad Garton, Douglas Repetto and others.

We wish to thank all those that have made this semester possible and look forward to an exciting semester in Spring 09.

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