Congratulations to Dr. Lauren Ninoshvili (PhD, 2010, Ethnomusicology), who has accepted a two year appointment as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow in the Department of Music at New York University!
Currently, Dr. Ninoshvili is an adjunct professor of music at Barnard College (2010-12), teaching courses on music history and offering a thesis seminar for Barnard Special Majors in Ethnomusicology.
Dr. Ninoshvili's doctoral dissertation is entitled "Singing Between the Words: The Poetics of Georgian Polyphony." It was sponsored by Prof. Fox. The abstract appears below.
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ABSTRACT
Singing Between the Words: The Poetics of Georgian Polyphony
There
is a strange paradox in Georgia‘s relation to the West which has
emerged in ever sharper detail with the passage of time since the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Geographically and culturally, Georgia is
borderline but not quite fully exotic, oriental: located at the gates of
Asia and the Muslim Middle East, it is one of the oldest Christian
countries and a rare Caucasian nation oriented primarily towards the
European sphere of influence for the last two centuries.
It is
precisely this slippery boundary between comfortable familiarity and
exotic impenetrability that language in Georgian song—my chief object of
inquiry in this dissertation—embodies. The search for meaning in the
obscure, archaic, or conventionally unintelligible often emerges
concomitantly with narratives of cultural loss at moments of radical
social, political, and economic upheaval or transformation, and the
Georgian case is no exception. The present dissertation therefore posits
the paired expressive-communicative modes of language and music as a
lens for inquiry into (un)intelligibility as a salient aesthetic and
political trope in the turmoil and ideological anomie of postsocialist
Georgia, approaching it through a specifically music-centered
ethnography of non-referential sung language, or vocables, in
traditional and newer, globally oriented Georgian song. It explores
variable and shifting tropes of interpretive ambiguity as produced by
artist-performers and intellectuals, poets and politicians in the
name
of everything from trans-rational linguistic futurism to the building
of civic consciousness based on a primordial, archaeological imagination
of the nation, to the need to make the Georgian language-music gestalt
globally accessible so that world music listeners will buy it. My
specific discussion of contemporary Georgian world music poses broader
questions for the discipline of ethnomusicology as a whole: How can the
study of language in world music serve as a forum for the exploration of
non- referential forms of intercultural communication and
meaning-making? How can studies of sound and listening as such be
rejoined to studies of properly musical creativity and expression,
beginning from the voice itself?