Sound at AMS/SEM/SMT 2012
This week brings us #musicon12, the megaconference of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and the Society for Music Theory (SMT). This will be the third joint conference of these societies, after Oakland in 1990 and Toronto in 2000. These roughly decennial gatherings of the three principal scholarly societies of music scholarship provide increased opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversations and amazing live performances. A fact augmented even more by the selection of New Orleans, a city known for its music, for this year’s meeting.
The conference takes place in the Sheraton and Astor Crowne Plaza hotels from this Wednesday, October 31st through Sunday, November 4th. It will be preceded by two events. The first, occurring Monday, October 29th and Tuesday, October 30th, at Tulane University’s Rogers Memorial Chapel, is Ecomusicologies2012, a pre-conference organized by the AMS Ecocriticism Study Group and the SEM Ecomusicology Special Interest Group. The second, all day Wednesday, October 31st, is the Preconference Symposium on Crisis and Creativity, held at the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life at Tulane University.
The disciplines of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory have focused on sound for centuries. They are the disciplines that Michael Bull argues Sound Studies “goes beyond” in the upcoming anthology Sound Studies. While such a description could lead to the categorization of these disciplines as theoretically or methodologically antiquated, #musicon12 is too large and significant for Sound Studies to ignore, with over 600 individual presentations that all deal with sound or music somehow. The first eleven papers, in chronological order, should give some idea of the overall scope:
• Dorcinda Knauth (State University of New York, Dutchess), “Composing the Future by Listening to the Musical Past: Islamic Exegesis in Javanese Folksongs”
• Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge), “The Pilgrimage to ‘El-Ghriba’ and the Musical Aesthetics of a Muslim-Jewish Past”
• Abigail Wood (University of Haifa, Israel), “Sound, Aesthetics, and the Narration of Religious Space in Jerusalem’s Old City”
• Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), “Musical Lives and Aesthetics in the Worship Wars”
• Kim Carter Muñoz (University of Washington), “‘¡Todos somos huastecos! ‘We are all Huastecan!’: Performance of the Democratization of Son Huasteco at El Festival de la huasteca (The Festival of the Huasteca)”
• Raquel Paraíso (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Festival Son Raíz: Building Community and Signifying Identity and Culture Ownership across Mexican Regions”
• Ian Middleton (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), “Identity, Peace, and Learning at Rural Music Festivals in Colombia’s Caribbean Coast”
• Brenda M. Romero (University of Colorado, Boulder), “‘El Carnaval de Río Sucio No Es Festival’ / ‘The Carnival of Río Sucio is Not a Festival’”
• Michael O’Toole (University of Chicago), “Rehearsing Publics in a ‘Turkish Art Music’ Ensemble in Berlin”
• Suzanne Wint (University of Chicago), “Rehearsing the Social: Becoming a Performer in Kampala’s Classical Music Scene”
• Gregory Weinstein (University of Chicago), “Recording Rehearsing: The Hidden ‘Process of the Classical Studio Session’”
But for the sake of argument, if Sound Studies is something more than simply the application of long-standing disciplinary approaches to sonic works and events, if, as Jonathan Sterne proposed this year in his introduction to The Sound Studies Reader, “the difference between sound studies and… other fields is that they don’t require engagement with alternative epistemologies, methods, or approaches” (4), then we are inclined to pay attention to that work that reaches beyond the limits of conventional music scholarship, namely the sort which strives for some sort of critical self-reflection or interdisciplinary ambition.
Lost Bayou Ramblers. Borrowed from phillipleroyer on Flickr.
This is not an easy task given the vast number of papers and performances at such a large conference and the scarcity of information found in brief titles and abstracts. We can assume that every presentation challenges these conventions to some extent, but for the sake of this preview, here are a few items that venture beyond the traditional limits of music scholarship. You can find the full #musicon12 program here.
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Featured Image: Mardi Gras 2005, By Robert Garcia, The City Project
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Bill Bahng Boyer is an adjunct professor of music, writing and rhetoric at Dartmouth College. He is also a doctoral candidate in music at New York University, completing a dissertation on public listening in the New York City subway system.
Jump to MONDAY, October 29
Jump to TUESDAY, October 30
Jump to WEDNESDAY, October 31
Jump to THURSDAY, November 1
Jump to FRIDAY, November 2
Jump to SATURDAY, November 3
Jump to SUNDAY, November 4
New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, 2005, Borrowed From Robert Garcia, The City Project
Ecomusicologies2012
All events at Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University
5-6pm Soundwalk
Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), “Environmental Listening and the Tulane Soundscape” (meeting place outside the entrance of the Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University)
7-9pm Paper Jam
Chair: Aaron S. Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Joe Browning (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) (virtual presentation), “Crane Calls and Shakuhachi Sounds: Interconnections, Disjunctures and New Directions in the Tsuru no Sugomori Pieces”
Travis Stimeling (Millikin University) (virtual presentation), “Music, Television Advertising, and the Green Positioning of the Global Energy Industry in the United States”
Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska (Northwestern University) (virtual presentation), “Theorizing the Musical Landscapes of John Luther Adams”
Andrew Mark (York University) (virtual presentation), “Consciousness, Solidarity, and Musicking: Ecoethnographic Justice”
Leah G. Weinberg (University of Michigan), “Orchestrating Nature: Music, Manipulation, and 1950s America in Disney’s True- Life Adventure Films”
Settimio Fiorenzo Palermo (Middlesex University), “Sounds Heard: the Environmental Ethics & Aesthetics of Hugh Davies’s Music”
Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), “Negotiating Nature & Music Through Technology: Ecological Reflections in the Works of Maggi Payne & Laurie Spiegel”
The Canal Street Line. Borrowed from Hmeriomx on Flickr.
Ecomusicologies2012 (cont.)
All events at Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University
8:30-10:30am Panel: Beyond Metaphor
Mark Pedelty (University of Minnesota), Chair
Marc Perlman (Brown University), “Instrument Builders As Environmental Activists: A Tale of Two Tonewoods”
Kevin Dawe (University of Leeds), “Small is Beautiful: Guitar Making, Sustainability and Community Building in Britain and Africa”
Jeff Todd Titon (Brown University), “Why Thoreau?”
Jennifer C. Post (New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University, Wellington), “Beyond Birds: (Ethno)musicologists, Environmental Scientists & the Evolution of Soundscape Ecology”
11am-1pm Panel: 20th & 21st-century Composers
Denise Von Glahn (Florida State University), Chair
Eric Drott (University of Texas at Austin), “The Peasant’s Voice and the Tourist’s Gaze: Listening to Landscape in Luc Ferrari’sPetite symphonie intuitive pour un paysage de printemps”
You Nakai (New York University), “An Electronic Ecology: The Natures of David Tudor’s Electronic Music”
Jacob A. Cohen (The Graduate Center, CUNY), “Carl Ruggles, Walt Whitman, and the Gendered Place of Men and Mountains”
Joseph Finkel (Arizona State University), “Searching for a Sonic Ecology: John Luther Adams’s Dark Waves”
2-3:30pm, Panel: Contemporary Issues
Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), Chair
Melissa J. de Graaf (University of Miami), “‘The Music of Nature Makes Me Dream and Sleep’: Intersections of Nature, Gender, and Ultramodernism”
Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State University), “Agency and Aural Rights: Negotiating the Soundscape, 1948 to the Present”
Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), “Emergent Soundscapes: Uses of Nature and Technology in Two Electroacoustic Compositions”
4-6pm, Panel: Ethnographic Approaches
William Bares (University of North Carolina, Asheville), Chair
Dan Bendrups (Queensland Conservatorium Resarch Centre, Griffith University), “Mapping Outdoor Music Festival Engagement with Ecological and Environmental Issues in Australia”
Robin Ryan (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University), “Eucalyptus as Musical Resource: Some Ecological Considerations”
Michael Silvers (University of California, Los Angeles), “Birdsong, Popular Music, &Predicting Rain in Northeastern Brazil”
Charlotte D’Evelyn (University of Hawaii), “Sounds of the Grasslands: An Ecomusicological Crisis of Romanticism, Loss, & Inheritance in Inner Mongolia, China”
6:30-8pm, Panel: Canadian Perspectives
Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Chair
Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Sounding the Environmental Past and Present: Repurposing and Representing Soundscape in Contemporary Canadian Compositions”
Erin Scheffer (University of Toronto), “The Mis-imagined Native: Musically Constructing Nativeness in 1940s Canadian Radio and Film Docudramas”
Jeremy Strachan (University of Toronto), “Sounding Empire: Coloniality and Environment in Canadian Art Music”
8-9pm, Reception & Concert
James Harley (University of Guelph), computer, and Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), amplified flutes, “Birding,” an eco-improvisational performance by ~spin~
Borrowed from mattbyrne on Flickr.
SEM Pre-conference Symposium, Crisis and Creativity
All events at Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life, Tulane University
9:00-10:30am, Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans
Matt Sakakeeny (Tulane University), Chair
Nick Spitzer, Professor of Anthropology (Tulane University), Holly Hobbs, Director of the NOLA Hip-Hop Archive (Tulane University), Bennie Pete, leader of Hot 8 Brass Band
10:45-12:15pm New Realities: Haitian Performing Arts and the Built Environment
Joyce Jackson (Louisiana State University), Chair
Gage Averill, Dean of Arts (University of British Columbia)
Michael Largey, Professor of Ethnomusicology (Michigan State University)
Jean Montes, Director of Orchestral Studies (Loyola University New Orleans)
1:15-2:45pm, Environmental Crises in South Louisiana: Scientific, Sociological, and Ethnomusicological Perspectives
Mark DeWitt (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), Chair
Tommy Michot, Research Scientist (UL Lafayette), and member of Les Frères Michot
Robert Gramling, Professor of Sociology (UL Lafayette)
Mark DeWitt, Professor of Music (UL Lafayette)
3:00-5:00pm, Field Trip by Bus to Musician’s Village, New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity (Upper Ninth Ward), House of Dance and Feathers (Lower Ninth Ward)
Milterngerger House. Borrowed from DavidPaulOhmer on Flickr.
8:30-10:30am, The Beautiful, The Good, and The Story: Aesthetics and Narrative in Religious Music
Session 1-1 (SEM) A: Astor Ballroom 1
Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), Chair
Dorcinda Knauth (State University of New York, Dutchess), “Composing the Future by Listening to the Musical Past: Islamic Exegesis in Javanese Folksongs”
Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge), “The Pilgrimage to ‘El-Ghriba’ and the Musical Aesthetics of a Muslim-Jewish Past”
Abigail Wood (University of Haifa, Israel), “Sound, Aesthetics, and the Narration of Religious Space in Jerusalem’s Old City”
Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), “Musical Lives and Aesthetics in the Worship Wars”
12:30-1:30pm, SEM Sound Studies Special Interest Group Meeting
S: Oakley
3:30-5:00pm, On Bells, Bugs, and Disintegrating Tape: Listening for Metaphysics in Ambient Sound
Session 1-44 AMS/SEM S. Edgewood
Mitchell Morris (University of California, Los Angeles), Chair
Paul Chaikin (University of Southern California), “Clattering Bells as a Field of Experience and Cognition”
James Edwards (University of California, Los Angeles), “Nature and the Metaphysics of Voice in Edo Period Aesthetics”
Joanna Demers (University of Southern California), “The Ethics of Apocalypse”
4:00-5:30pm, Musically Meaningful Soundscapes
Session 1-52 SEM S: Maurepas
Tom Porcello (Vassar College), Chair
Alison Furlong (Ohio State University), “Sound, Space, and Social Practice in the Zionskirche”
Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Sounding and Composing the Harbour: Performing Landscape and Re-contextualizing the Soundscape of Place in the Harbour Symphony (St. John’s, Newfoundland)”
Jessamyn Doan (University of Pennsylvania), “‘Bringin’ Back the Roots’: Rearticulating a Creole Sound in Southern Louisiana”
5:30–6:30pm, SEM First-Time Attendees and New Members
Reception S: Sheraton Grand B
5:30–6:30pm, AMS Ecocriticism SG* and SEM Ecomusicology SIG Joint Business Meeting
S: Oak Alley
7:30–midnight, Zydeco Dance Lesson and Evening at Rock’n’Bowl
Organized by the SEM 2012 Local Arrangements Committee and the SEM Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section
Dance Lesson at Sheraton Grand E (no ticket required), 7:30–8:30 p.m.
Evening at Rock’n’Bowl. Bus Departs Sheraton: 8:45 p.m. Bus Departs Rock’n’Bowl for Sheraton: 12:00 midnight
8:00–11:00 AMS Music and Philosophy SG Session
A: Astor Ballroom III
8:00-11:00pm, Fantasy, Cinema, Sound, and Music
Session 1-58 AMS S: Oak Alley
Mark Brill (University of Texas at San Antonio)
James Deaville (Carleton University)
J. Drew Stephen (University of Texas at San Antonio)
Jamie Lynn Webster (Portland, Ore.)
8:00-11:00pm, Music and Nature: Relations, Awareness, Knowledge
Session 1-64 AMS S: Borgne
Sponsored by the AMS Ecocriticism SG
Aaron Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Chair
Kevin Dawe (University of Leeds), “RELATIONS—A Social and Environmental History of Small Guitar Workshops in England”
Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), “AWARENESS—‘Hello, the Earth is Speaking’: Four Case Studies of Ecological Composition, Performance, and Listening”
David E. Cohen (Columbia University), “KNOWLEDGE—Nature, Culture, and the First Principle(s) of Music: Two Myths of Theoretical Revelation”
Borrowed from prayitno on Flickr.
7:00–8:00am, SEM SIG for Voice Studies
S: Estherwood
7:00–8:30am, SMT Committee on the Status of Women
S: Roux Bistro Private
9:00-noon, The Ecomusicology Listening Room
Session 2-17 AMS/SEM S: Gallier
Co-Sponsored by the SEM Sound Studies Interest Group and the AMS Popular Music Study Group
Mark Pedelty (University of Minnesota), Chair
Robert Fallon (Carnegie Mellon University), Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), Aaron Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Denise Von Glahn (Florida State University), Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Naomi Perley (CUNY), William Bares (Harvard University), Rachel Mundy (Columbia University), Jeremy Woodruff (University of Pittsburgh), Justin D. Burton (Rider University), Michael Austin (University of Texas at Dallas), Michael B. Silvers (University of California, Los Angeles), Miki Kaneda (Museum of Modern Art), Zeynep Bulut (Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry)
10:30-noon, Beyond Hearing: Soundscapes and Ideoscape in Early Nineteenth-Century America
Session 2-25 AMS/SEM A: Iberville
Deane Root (University of Pittsburgh), Chair
Sarah Gerk (University of Michigan), “Love, Loyalty, and Fear: American Reception of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies”
Bonnie Gordon (University of Virginia), “Mr. Jefferson’s Ears”
12:00–2:00pm, AMS/SMT Music and Philosophy SG/IG
S: Sheraton Grand A
12:30–1:30pm, SEM Medical Ethnomusicology SIG
A: Astor Grand A
12:30–1:30pm, SEM Section on the Status of Women
S: Bayside C
2:00-5:00pm, Embodiment and Gesture
Session 2-38 AMS/SMT S: Oak Alley
Arnie Cox (Oberlin College), Chair
Margaret Britton (University of Texas at Austin), “Four Gestural Types in Chopin’s Mazurka in C-sharp Minor, Op. 50, no. 3”
Drew Massey (Binghamton University), “Thomas Adès’s Glossary”
Meghan Goodchild (CIRMMT / McGill University), “Towards a PerceptuallyBased Theory of Orchestral Gestures”
Zachary Wallmark, Marco Iacoboni (University of California, Los Angeles), “Embodied Listening and Musical Empathy: Perspectives from Mirror Neuron Research”
4:00-5:30pm, SEM Charles Seeger Lecture
Session 2-49 SEM S: Sheraton Grand C
Portia Maultsby (Indiana University), “‘Everybody Wanna Sing my Blues . . . Nobody Wanna Live My Blues’: Deconstructing Narratives of Race, Culture and Power in African American Music Scholarship”
Cheryl L. Keyes (University of California, Los Angeles), Introduction
6:00pm, Sound Studies Special Interest Group Soundwalk
Meet in front of the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street
Matt Sakakeeny (Tulane University), organizer
8:00-11:00pm, Music and Video Games: History, Theory, Ethnography
Session 2-55 AMS S: Gallier
William Cheng (Harvard University), Moderator
Mark Katz (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Respondent
Neil Lerner (Davidson College), “Musicological Contributions to Early Video Game Studies”
Roger Moseley (Cornell University), “Digital Analogies”
William Gibbons (Texas Christian University), “Framing Devices for Gaming Devices: Applying Film Music Theory to Video Games”
Elizabeth Medina-Gray (Yale University), “Modularity and Dynamic Play: Video Game Music and Its Avant-garde Antecedents”
Kiri Miller (Brown University), “Dance Central and the Listening Body”
Borrowed from squared2x on Flickr.
7:00–8:30am, SMT Music and Disability IG
S: Salon 828
7:00–8:45am, AMS Committee on Women and Gender
S: Salon 825
8:30-10:30am, Emergent Forms of Music Tourism, I: Music Tourism in the Aftermath of Rupture in New Orleans, Berlin, Bali
Session 3-2 SEM S: Bayside B
Daniel Sharp (Tulane University), Chair
Elizabeth Macy (University of California, Los Angeles), “Music and Cultural Tourism in Post-Disaster Economies”
Luis-Manuel Garcia (Tulane University), “Consuming Atmospheres and Social Worlds: ‘Techno-Tourismus’ and Post-Tourist Tourism in Berlin’s Electronic Dance Music Scenes”
Daniel Sharp (Tulane University), “Dithyrambalina: A Shantytown Sound Installation in Post-Katrina New Orleans”
SherriLynn Colby-Bottel (University of Virginia), “Authenticity Seekers: Music Post-Tourists and the Shifting Sound-Scapes of New Orleans”
8:30-10:30am, Online Musical Communities
Session 3-7 AMS/SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
Marc Gidal (Ramapo College of New Jersey), Chair
Tara Browner (University of California, Los Angeles), “Bach Culture: Performers, Scholars, and Bachfreunde in the Twenty-First Century”
Olga Panteleeva (University of California, Berkeley), “Für Kenner und Liebhaber 2.0: Modes of Expertise in Online File-Sharing Communities”
Tom Artiss (University of Cambridge), “Solitary Socialities: Music Surf-Sharing in Nain, Labrador”
Charles Hiroshi Garrett (University of Michigan), “Joking Matters: Music, Humor, and the Digital Revolution”
9:00-10:30am, Language and the Senses
Session 3-10 AMS/SMT S: Edgewood
Donald Boomgaarden (Loyola University New Orleans), Chair
Charles Dill (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Le Cerf’s Epistemology of Music”
Amy M. Cimini (University of Pennsylvania), “René Descartes’ Unfinished Compendium of Music: Rethinking Music and the Politics of Sensation after the Thirty Years’ War
9:00-10:30am, Music and Gaming
Session 3-12 AMS A: Iberville
Kiri Miller (Brown University), Chair
Christopher Tonelli (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “The Chiptuning of the World”
Neil Lerner (Davidson College), “Investigating the Origins of Video Game Music Style, 1977–1983: The Early Cinema Hypothesis”
9:00-noon, Performing Music, Performing Disability
Session 3-19 AMS/SEM/SMT S: Bayside A
Joseph Straus (Graduate Center, CUNY), Chair
Michael Bakan (Florida State University), Michael Beckerman (New York University), Stefan Honisch (University of British Columbia), Blake Howe (Louisiana State University), Stephanie Jensen-Moulton (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Bruce Quaglia (University of Utah)
9:00-noon, Sound, Language, and Mysticism from Vienna to L.A.
Session 3-22 AMS S:Borgne
Brian Kane (Yale University), Chair
Clara Latham (New York University), “The Impact of Sound and Voice on the Invention of Psychoanalysis”
Sherry Lee (University of Toronto), “‘Still, o schweige’: Music, Language, OpernKrise (Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand )”
Nicholas Attfield (Edinburgh University), “A Medieval Model for the 1920s: Anton Bruckner as Mystic”
J. Daniel Jenkins (University of South Carolina), “I Care If You Listen: Schoenberg’s ‘School of Criticism’ and the Role of the Amateur”
10:30-noon, Twentieth-Century Music and Advertising
Session 3-28 AMS A: Iberville
Jason Hanley (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum), Chair
Paul Christiansen (University of Southern Maine), “‘It’s Morning Again in America’: How the Tuesday Team Revolutionized the Use of Music in Political Ads”
Jonathan Waxman (New York University), “I Went to the New York Philharmonic and Came Home with a Cadillac: The Alliance Between Business and the Arts in the Early Twentieth Century
12:00–2:00pm, SMT Committee on the Status of Women Brown Bag Open Lunch
S: Salon 828
12:30–1:30pm SEM Gender and Sexualities Taskforce
S: Bayside C
1:45-3:45pm, Acoustics and Experiences of the Limit
Session 3-39 SEM S: Maurepas
Louise Meintjes (Duke University), Chair
Louise Meintjes (Duke University), “Pushing at the Edge of the Social”
Jairo Moreno (University of Pennsylvania), “Signatures of the Audible”
Ana Maria Ochoa (Columbia University), “South American Acoustics: Amerindian Perspectivism and Non-Linear Musical Histories”
Gary Tomlinson (Yale University), “Singing at the Limit of the Human”
1:45-3:45pm, Emergent Forms of Music Tourism, II: Multimedia, Spectacles and Memorials
Session 3-43 SEM S: Grand Chenier
Sponsored by the Popular Music Section (PMSSEM)
Lynda Paul (Yale University), Chair
Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment (University of Georgia), “Elvis Presley and the Reanimation of Robert E. Lee”
Lynda Paul (Yale University), “Las Vegas and Virtual Tourism: Sonic Shaping of Simulated Worlds”
Michael Heller (Harvard University), “Deployments of Deadness at the Louis Armstrong House Museum”
Nicol Hammond (New York University), “‘The History Is in the Music’? Music, Museums, and the Politics of Presence in Post-Apartheid Cultural Tourism”
8:00-11:00pm, Music and Disability: Works in Progress Seminar
AMS/SMT S: Bayside A
Sponsored by the AMS Disability SG and SMT Disability IG
Michael Bakan (Florida State University), James Deaville (Carleton University), Stefan Honisch (University of British Columbia), Jeanette Jones (Boston University), Anabel Maler (University of Chicago), Julie Saiki (Stanford University), Joseph Straus (Graduate Center, CUNY)
9:00pm, KNOCKABOUT: wandering beats from across urban America.
Handsome Willy’s at 218 South Robertson St. No cover. 21+
5 DJs converge on Handsome Willy’s for KNOCKABOUT, a dance party featuring every genre you’ve ever loved and fly beats that you neva eva heard before.
DJ Yamin (NOLA): Hip-hop, funk, reggae, Afrobeat www.nolamix.com
DJ Super Squirrel (Boston): Dancehall, global mashup www.djsupersquirrel.com
The Attic Bat (L.A.): Hip-hop and dubstep www.derricomusic.com
LMGM (Chicago, Berlin): House and disco www.thelusisgarcia.com
Shilo Bourne (L.A.) UK bass
Roger Lewis. Borrowed from fantailmedia at Fiickr.
8:30-10:30am, Music and YouTube: Sound, Media, and Sociality
Session 4-5 SEM A: Astor Grand A
Sponsored by the Popular Music Section (PMSSEM)
Monique M. Ingalls (University of Cambridge), Chair
Fabian Holt (Roskilde University, Denmark), “Social Media Video and the Festivalization of Electronic Dance Music in Europe”
Monique M. Ingalls (University of Cambridge), “Worship on the Web: Building Online Religious Community through Christian Devotional Music Videos”
Patricia G. Lange (California College of the Arts), “In Synch with Lip-Synching: A Riff on Teen Sociality”
Trevor S. Harvey (University of Iowa), “Dulcimerica: Mediating a Musical Community through Video Podcasts”
8:30-10:30am, Musical Propertization in the Digital Age:
Session 4-7 SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
From “Piracy” to Ontological Politics
Andrew Eisenberg (University of Oxford), Chair
Andrew Eisenberg (University of Oxford), “M-Commerce and the (Re)making of the Music Industry in Kenya”
Aditi Deo (University of Oxford), “Folk Music in the Digital Realm: Public Commons or Cultural Property?”
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), “Pirates of the Caribbean: Music Circulation in Late Socialist Cuba”
Henry Stobart (Royal Holloway, University of London), “Shifting Properties: Ownership, Informality, and the Digital Music Video in Bolivia”
9:00-noon, The City is a Medium
Session 4-16 AMS/SEM/SMT S: Edgewood
Alexander Rehding (Harvard University), Chair
Veit Erlmann (University of Texas at Austin), Respondent
Benjamin Tausig (New York University), “The City is Burning: Informal Musical Commerce at Urban Protest Movements”
Tiffany Ng (University of California, Berkeley), “An Instrument of Urban Planning: Bells and the Sonic Remediation of Community Space in the Southeastern United States”
John Melillo (University of Arizona), “Phatic Emphatic: Listening to New York City in Downtown Poetry and Punk”
Peter McMurray (Harvard University), “Heterophony of a Metropolis: Rites of Passage and Contestation Turkish Berlin”
10:45-12:15pm, Feminist Approaches to Music and Sound Technologies: History, Theory, and Practice
Session 4-29 SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
Sponsored by the Section on the Status of Women (SSW)
Tara Rodgers (University of Maryland), Chair
Tara Rodgers (University of Maryland), “Feminist Approaches to Electronic Music and Sound Historiography”
Charity Marsh (University of Regina), “Reluctant Hip Hop Warriors”: Feminist Approaches to Hop Hop Community Projects”
10:45-12:15pm, Intersections of Ethnomusicology with Other Fields
Session 4-31 SEM S: Bayside B
Theresa Allison (University of California, San Francisco), Chair
Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson (Brigham Young University), “Has Ethnomusicology Met Its Calling? An Ethnomusicologist’s Response to Biomusicology”
Monique McGrath (University of Toronto), “What Does Ethnomusicology Have to Say to Music Therapy?”
Jeremy Day-O’Connell (Knox College), “‘Motherese’ and Universals of Musical Pitch
10:45-12:15pm, Sounds and Space in New Orleans
Session 4-35 SEM S: Maurepas
Marié Abe (Boston University), Chair
Danielle Adomaitis (Florida State University), “Sonic Fixtures and Drifting Buskers: Soundmarks of New Orleans and the Street Musicians Who Construct Them”
Zarah Ersoff (University of California, Los Angeles), “Treme’s Aural Verisimilitude”
Julie Raimondi (Tufts University), “Music, SEO Agency, and the Social Construction of Space in New Orleans
2:00–6:00pm, AMS Ecocriticism SG and SEM Ecomusicology SIG Outing:
Barataria Preserve Hike
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Rallying Cries as Suffering Sounds: “Allah-O-Akbar” and the Aurality of Feminized Iranian Suffering
By July of 2009 dozens of pitch-black videos began to appear on YouTube. Documenting ambient noise, in some cases narration and, most prominent of all, impromptu collective outcries of “Allah-o-Akbar,” these videos resonate with an urgent gusto, punctuated with an eerie sense of desperation through faint echoic reverberations. By the level of desperation audible in every voice, at once dulcet and melancholic in tone, there is a distinct sense that Allah very well may be called forth. While most of these videos received scant attention, one entitled “Inja Kojast”](translated as “Where is this Place”) received over 174,000 hits (as of writing).
It was dubbed with English, Spanish, and Japanese subtitles, was sampled by a music producer (“Tehran’s Roof Tops _Remix”) and also played a prominent role in the 2010 French film Fleur du Mal. What is enabled, invoked, and signified by the layering of these multiple and disparate incantations? What is affectively evoked in the widespread circulation of these chants by YouTube and in Fleur du Mal? Why was this video circulated so widely and deemed so affectively resonant by disparate audiences?
Due to the fact that the Iranian government had barred entry to representatives of foreign media and systematically jailed Iranian journalists accused of being hostile to the regime, the disputed 2009 Iranian elections and ensuing protests were largely reported on by a new breed of “citizen journalists”. Filling in the information vacuum, citizen journalists tweeted and uploaded to the Internet raw video footage of protest marches and confrontations with Basiji militiamen by day – and the voices of dissent performed on Iran’s many rooftops by night. Donning the cloak of darkness, residents of Iran’s major cities climbed to the rooftops of their buildings to chant “Allah-o-Akbar” in numbers – a brief reprieve from the violent suppression of their street protests by Basiji militiamen.
“Women Smash the Shah’s Crown,” Poster from the Iranian Revolution, Courtesy of Flickr User Voyou Reserve
As Negar Mottahedeh has written in her online essay “Allah-o-Akhbar”: “The cry of “Allah-o-Akbar” was the defining sound of the 1978 protests against the Shah of Iran, during a revolution that toppled the Pahlavi monarchy and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.” This earlier revolutionary context is represented in the video for “Allah o Akbar, Khomeini Rahbar”, which hailed a politically diverse citizenry to stand behind this “rahbar” or new “leader.” The chanting of “Allah-o-Akbar” was further exploited as a nationalistic call-to-arms during the Iran-Iraq war in the music video for the anthemic “Allahu Akbar Iran, Iran.” The chant’s versatility and instrumentality in this immediate post-revolutionary period is due not only to its capacity to appeal to the pious and patriotic backers of the newly formed Islamic Republic but also because of its power as a performative political rallying cry. Mottahedeh’s essay title employs a pun: the addition of ‘h’ to the word “Akbar” in transliteration changes the word to “Akhbar” or news. Although she does not elaborate on this, her title suggests that this chant is itself a form of citizen journalism, a broadcast calling forth the revolutionary spirit that Iranians pride themselves for always having at the ready. But what kind of journal is “Allah-o-Akbar”? Is it a call to arms, a rallying cry, a collective sound of suffering or all of the above?
Despite its pious provenance and deployment as the paradigmatic cry of the revolutionary uprising against the Shah, the Islamic Republic currently led by Ali Khamenei and Mahmood Ahmadinejad–which was inaugurated by these earlier revolutionary calls–has interpreted the post-2009 chanting of “Allah-o-Akbar” as blasphemous and an affront to their authority. Journalist Jalal Hosseini argues that this is due in part to the fact that opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi called upon his supporters to remember the revolutionary history of this performative chant in an open letter, stating “Let’s not abandon the green colour which is a symbol of spirituality, freedom and religious mentality and moderateness and the Allah O Akbar slogan that tells us of revolutionary roots.”
Women at the Front, 2009, Image by Flickr User Raymond Morrison
As Hosseini has written, “In a religious state, where religion is present in every aspect of life, Iran’s protestors have managed to turn religion against their government…Allah-o Akbar is perhaps the single most symbolic phrase in the Muslim world, yet Iran’s current rulers, who themselves employed this slogan in their struggle against the Pahlavi regime in the 1979 Revolution, did not tolerate the protesters’ cries of Allah-o-Akbar after the 2009 presidential election. Allah-o Akbar has essentially become a forbidden phrase.” Hosseini goes on to quote numerous Tehranis who testify to their disparate intentions behind the chanting, highlighting the ambivalence inherent to the slogan, which makes it available to Iranians of many stripes, and, as he argues, allows the calls to resonate even beyond the nation by appealing to other Muslims globally. But the widespread circulation of these videos and their popular impact on global YouTube audiences also suggests that the chanting has had an impact on non-Muslims as well.
Susan Moeller, who penned a Huffington Post piece right around the time of “Inja Kojast’s” semi-viral circulation, argues that this most recent phase of the chant’s resignification has helped to win Americans over to the protesting Iranian’s cause, writing, “watching Americans are learning to reframe the meaning of ‘Allah O Akbar’ and re-imagine the people of Iran. The pictures from Tehran are showing that Iranians are not monolithic in their beliefs.” Moeller suggests that this collective chanting has somehow cut through the status quo Islamophobic representations of a fundamentalist Iran to create an affective and empathetic pathway through which Americans can “re-imagine the people.” Moeller’s argument echoes the sentiment of the comments written on the YouTube page for “Inja Kojast,” comments like “This breaks my heart!” left by Annabanana23663 or “I have listened to this so many times already that you would think I would have moved on BUT I continue to listen and will continue to listen for there is truth in that voice of pain. And only by embracing pain can we love truth. And truth not only will set us free but without truth we cannot be free. Go you beautiful Persians. The people of the USA love you for your defiance” (by YouTube viewer HulkSmashPunyHumans).
“Where is this Place?” San Francisco, CA, 20 June 2009, Image by Flickr User Steve Rhodes
Not only were YouTube users impacted by “Inja Kojast” but the video’s representation of Iran’s rooftop chants inspired the narrative arc of French filmmaker David Dusa’s Fleur du Mal (Flowers of Evil, 2010), a film that explores the precarity and instability of Iran after the 2009 elections. Through a chanting scene in which the two main characters, Gecko (Rachid Youcef) and Anahita (Alice Belaïdi), vociferously call out “Allah-o-Akbar” on the edge of a rooftop in the avowedly anti-Islamic nation of France, they thumb their noses at both nation-states at once while also sealing their romantic bond. Perhaps in an ironic play on Khomeini’s exile in the same city, the beautiful, educated and upwardly mobile Anahita is incubated in Paris for a time while the political instability following the 2009 elections settles down. Completely obsessed with the post-election struggles that she and her friends were actively engaging in on the streets of Tehran, she daily follows every new tweet and YouTube video. She bides her time in Paris by convincing Gecko, the bellhop at her swanky hotel, to give her a tour of the city and the two soon become lovers.
Despite the somber context of the film’s main narrative preoccupations with Iran’s botched 2009 elections, this plot point, I argue, enables the cathexis of an Orientalist drive that is shared by Western audiences: a drive to consummate the desire for the feminized Muslim woman seen to have suffered under the despotic rule of Muslim masculinity. It is this same desire that gets sublimated in a consumption of feminized Muslim suffering which has led to a reductive popular reading of “Inja Kojast” that eclipses the ambivalence of and disparate intentions behind the chanting it documents. In particular, it is through the cries of the narrator’s own female sounding voice that “watching Americans are learning to…re-imagine the people of Iran” as finally available to and eligible for their empathy, attention and yearning.
Fleur du Mal weaves narrative scenes with YouTube footage of Iranian post-election street protests and, in one scene, an image of Neda Agha Soltan’s assassination. Viewed over 1,200,000 times (as of this writing), there has been a wide-scale promotion through documentary films, video diaries, songs and various other imagery of what has been called Neda’s martyrdom for Iran’s “green revolution”. This representation of a feminized Iranian suffering at the hands of an Islamic fundamentalist Iranian masculinity has become a privileged symbol for Iran’s Green Movement outside of Iran. This has enabled an affective attachment to be made which has, quoting Moeller yet again, enabled Americans to “re-imagine the people of Iran.” This time, somewhat counter to Moeller’s claim, it is not only “pictures” that are functioning to transform perceptions of Iranians; sound operates as a critical conduit to an interiority characterized by pain and suffering that has particular appeal.
Image by Shahin Edlata, San Francisco
I argue that the suffering sounds of “Inja Kojast” resonate within what I have elsewhere termed an “aural imaginary” through which Americans and the West “re-imagine[s] the people of Iran.” Through the suffering sounds of an anonymous feminine-sounding voice–reflecting upon and poetically translating the suffering sounds of a nation’s nightly chanting of “Allah-O-Akbar”– a direct link has been made to the feminized victim of Islam.
As US-backed Israeli war-drums are beaten, and as conspiracy theories regarding Iran’s hand in the recent spike in oil prices resuscitate decades-long antagonisms, we must be mindful of the multi-sensorial cooptations of empathetic and affective attachment that have constructed feminized suffering as justification for military intervention and the instrumentalization of sound in support of this. The old Orientalist desire for a feminized opening through which to re-imagine and know the radical other that is Iran has been found through a new gateway: aurality.
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Featured Image: “Iran 06” courtesy of Flickr User Chong Head
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Roshanak Kheshti is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliate faculty in the Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled “Modernity’s Ear: The Aural Imaginary and the World Music Culture Industry,” which theorizeshow an other to the listening self is racialized and gendered within the world music listening event. She has published in American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Hypatia and Parallax.
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