Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest
en francais suivant
NOTE: Due to the ongoing nature of the protests and the official bilingualism of Quebec, Sounding Out! wanted to ensure Jonathan Sterne’s work could be read by as many participants of the manifs casseroles as possible. Therefore, we bring you his wonderful post in English and French, with the French below. This translation could not have happened without the lightning-fast English-to-French skills of the excellent Frédéric Milard, fredericmilard@yahoo.ca, and of course, Jonathan’s generous flexibility and patience. Merci beaucoup and bang on! –JSA, Editor-in-Chief
Every night around 8pm, in neighborhoods across Montreal and Quebec, you can hear the din of clanging pots and pans in manifs casseroles (manif is short for manifestation en cours, a street protest). About a block from our home in Montreal’s Villeray neighborhood, at the intersection of Jarry and St-Denis—one of the major epicenters—our local manif begins with people crossing in the crosswalks, banging loudly and rhythmically. We see neighbors and people from local businesses, families with small children, elderly and retired people, working adults, and many students.
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Sometimes a manif casserole sounds like random banging, but most I’ve experienced leave sheer raucous pounding for moments when one march meets up with another, or when someone on a balcony does something particularly cool to cheer on the marchers. A rhythm usually arises from the chaos, encircling the disorder and enveloping everyone. Sometimes the rhythms connect with chants like “la loi spéciale, on s’en câlisse,” which roughly translates to “we don’t give a fuck about your special law.”
Eventually, the numbers grow, and then all of a sudden, as if by magic or intuition, we stand in the middle of the intersection, blocking traffic. The police have taken to simply routing traffic away from the protest. Eventually, we march south on St-Denis toward other neighborhoods (the exact route varies), often swelling into a giant parade of thousands, or as E.P. Thompson might suggest, a parody of a formal state procession, announcing the “total publicity of disgrace” for its subject. (“Rough Music Reconsidered,” 6,8).
The numbers are part of the politics. For the last 100-odd days most Quebec students have been on strike against tuition increases of over 70% in five years. Some protests have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The Quebec government tried to suppress the student movement by passing Bill 78 on May 18, 2012. Among its many preposterous provisions, any spontaneous gathering of over 50 people is illegal without prior police approval—even a picnic. Protesters not only must disclose their planned route, but also their means of transportation, According to Law 78, people are criminals the minute they join a protest, which is why so many people have taken to the streets.
21st Century Charivari
In a piece I co-authored with Natalie Zemon Davis for the Globe and Mail, we connected the casseroles with a 700-year-old Francophone tradition of charivari. In English, the tradition is called “rough music”; there are also Italian, German and Spanish versions and the practice has spread from Europe throughout its former colonies. Groups of disguised young men would meet up at night and bang on pots and pans and make a grand din outside an offender’s home. Usually the offense was against some heterosexual norm, but they sometimes took on a political character, and older people would join in. As Allan Greer has shown in The Patriots and the People, they played an important role in Lower Canada’s failed rebellion of 1837-8, where charivaris greeted British officials who would not surrender their commissions (252-57).
Granville, “Eine Katzenmusik” lithograph published in La Caricature, 1 Sep. 1831
In the French tradition, charivaris were (usually) an alternative to violence on occasions where community reparation was possible. Charivaris were largely inclusive, as the subjects of harassment were usually allowed to return to good standing after paying some type of fine. This history may well have resounded in Jacques Attali’s ears when he described music is a simulacrum of violence in Noise: “the game of music resembles the game of power: monopolize the right to violence; provoke anxiety and then provide a feeling of security; provoke disorder and then propose order; create a problem in order to solve it” (28).
Of course, the broader multinational traditions of rough music have no guaranteed politics. Pots and pans were sometimes heard before lynchings in the American South, but also as improvised instruments for black musicians in New Orleans’ public squares. John Mowitt has even suggested that rough music is one of the cultural roots of the drummer’s trap kit, that backbone of rock and jazz music.
Image by Flickr User Scott Montreal
In the 20th century, varieties of rough music largely moved from domestic concerns to political protest, though again without guarantees. Rough music has greeted bank failures in Latin America and—most recently—Iceland; it was the sound of Spanish citizens opposed to their government’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq war. In Chile, protesters used pots and pans to protest Allende in the early 1970s, and later to protest Pinochet in the mid-1980s.
The casseroles thus have symbolic roots in charivari, but of course they are also creatures of social media and the particularities of Quebec culture and politics. A popular 2003 Loco Locass song “Libérez-nous des libéraux” (“Liberate Us From the Liberals”), written for the provincial election, mentions a charivari for Quebec’s liberal party.
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And, as the student movement has already demonstrated, the protest cultures here are extremely vital. While New York’s May Day Parade was happy to attract tens of thousands in a metropolitan area of over ten million, participation here can be counted in the hundreds of thousands for a region with three million.
Rhythm and Participation
We need to listen to the casseroles protests to understand them. They are, after all, embodied acts in the old-fashioned sense, performed loudly and defiantly by people in the streets. They have a politics of volume and frequency, as well as rhythm.
In Percussion, Mowitt writes: “there is something extraordinary about the importance of beating, of creating a specifically percussive din … as though a distinctly sonoric response was called for when a breach in the community’s self-perception was at issue” (98). Rhythmic participation in the casseroles is a kind of political involvement, and participation of various kinds plays a role in most of the positive political visions associated with music.
Image courtesy of Flickr User Juan Madrigal
“Participation is the opposite of alienation,” wrote Charlie Keil in his essay “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music”, and his account of music as a social process in “Motion and Feeling through Music” helps us better understand the casseroles’ particular combination of clangor and rhythm. Writing amidst massive changes in the 1960s, Keil challenged prevailing theories of musical affect, like Leonard Meyer’s, which assumed that musical meaning was lexical and syntactic, contained in melody and harmony. While Meyer attempted to draw universal conclusions about emotion from Western Art Music and its attendant values, Keil derived his theory of musical affect from African-American traditions like blues and jazz. Against the ideals of concert hall perfection and rational mastery, Keil—along with writers such as Christopher Small, Leroi Jones, and Steven Feld—argued that music should be understood as action. Thus, Small coined the term “musicking,” describing music not as a collection of rarefied texts performed by experts and professionals, but rather as a field of social action that includes all participants, from musicians to the people cleaning up after the event.
By the 1980s, Keil specified the affective power of music through its “participatory discrepancies,” the mixture of groove on one hand, and timbre and texture on the other (96): “music, to be personally and socially valuable, must be ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune.’” Over the minutes and hours, the casseroles sway in and out of both, as people join and exit, and as the procession happens to each new block. Because of their unique musical character, the nightly manifs casseroles are profoundly inclusive. They are in many ways closer to the utopian ideals of collective musicking one finds in Keil and Small’s work, and that of Attali’s “composition,” than the so-called digital revolution in musical instruments. They are also good fun, as any child will tell you.
Contre la loi spéciale : les casseroles!, May 23, 2012 in Quartier Latin, Montreal, QC, CA, image by Flickr User . . .bung
Despite Anglophone press caricatures that recast the protests as the product of entitled, rabble-rousing students, the casseroles transcend differences that often structure local politics–like language, class, and race–as well as gender and age, which can present barriers in music-making (especially drumming) in addition to politics. Because the instruments are simple, cheap and improvised, almost anyone can join. Because the music is deliberately non-professional, the ideals of mastery and perfection and the weighty gendered and aged assumptions about who can be a “good musician” are inoperative. The beats are easy to pick up and play in time—and if you swing a little out there, all the better. I have heard skilled drummers syncopate catchy rhythms on single drums or cymbals, but most people are content to simply move in and out of time with everyone else. (My partner and I join with maracas and an otherwise-rarely-used buffalo drum—I am a bassist at heart—though we offer guests pots and pans).
Casseroles 26 mai 2012, Place Emilie Gamellin, Image by Flickr User scottmontreal
Taken together, volume and frequency work to immerse some in its proximal footprint, while hailing others at a distance. The sheer power and volume for someone inside a casseroles protest is hard to convey. My neighbor on a pot is a lot like my drummer hitting a cymbal. The transient (the sharp, initial part of the hit) can be piercing at close range due to frequencies at the very top of the audible range traveling at a high sound pressure level (this is why drummers often lose their hearing faster than guitarists). Inside the casseroles march, our ears are percussed with every hit; many people show up wearing earplugs.
The frequencies dull a bit farther away, and the more pitched sounds of the casseroles tickle the ear’s center of hearing in a gentler cacophony that is both declarative and invitational. Since the point of the protests is to audibly flout Law 78, the fact that they can be heard much further than they can be seen helps make this lawbreaking an expressly public and political act. Montreal mayor Gerard Tremblay acknowledged as much: “They can stay on their balconies to make noise. I’m in Outremont [a wealthy enclave next to Mile End and the Plateau, another epicenter of the protests] and I can hear it. No need to go onto the street, to walk around and paralyse Montreal.”
The volume’s territorial reach also works as an invitation to join in, either by banging along on one of Montreal’s ubiquitous porches, or by entering the procession itself. While at the other end of the frequency spectrum from Steve Goodman’s “bass materialism,” it affords some of the “collective construction of a vibrational ecology” he describes in Sonic Warfare (196), as the whole of the pots and pans becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Participants’ overwhelming response to the casseroles has been a kind of weighty sentimentality, an outpouring of emotion and relief. One can hear it in the viral video that has been making rounds:
and one can see it in letters like this one to the editors of Le Devoir:
Now people greet and talk. Now neighborhood meetings, discussions, vigils start up casually among neighbours on the steps and balconies of Montreal. The neighborhood will be less and less alien. This is a true political victory!
We should repeat this friendly beating [the evocation of tapage doesn’t quite work as well in English] possibly in other forms, until the land is occupied by neighbors who recognize one another, encounter one another each day by chance, and have known one another over the years. That is how we live in a place, that is how we become citizens.
My heart swells with joy.
Because “the clashing of pots and pans […] is so blatantly percussive, it is hard not to hear in the retributive structure of rough music something like a beating back—a backbeat, in short, or a response on the part of the community to what it perceives as a provocation, a call to act,“ writes Mowitt (98). The connections to charivari matter: the casseroles protests are local, neighborhood, community movements asking for a simple redress—the repeal of a heinous law. Of course there are many other resonances: signs can be seen challenging various aspects of neoliberalism alongside symbols of Quebec nationalism (which, I must remind Anglophone Canadians, is not automatically separatist). In my neighborhood, people collect food donations.
“If you keep us from dreaming, we’ll keep you from sleeping,” Image from Flickr user ScottMontreal
When we recently spoke about the differences between student activists in the 1960s and now, my former teacher Lawrence Grossberg pointed to the central role of music in the 1960s. Those movements had songs that everyone knew, and through which shared affect grew. Like many other observers, he doesn’t see music playing the same role today (perhaps supplanted by a wider range of media practices, as the usual story goes).
Apart from viral videos and the revivified Loco Locass tune, I’m not sure the current Quebec movement has unifying songs.
But it certainly has a groove we can move to.
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Many thanks to Natalie Zemon Davis, Manon Desrosiers, Nicholas Dew, Dylan Mulvin, Derek Nystrom and Carrie Rentschler for comments on and conversations leading up to this piece. Thanks also to Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman for the space to do it and the engaged editorial eye.
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Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. He is author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003), MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.
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Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest
Tous les soirs vers 20 heures, plusieurs quartiers de Montréal et de Québec s’animent au tumulte des manifs de casseroles. J’habite tout près d’un des épicentres du mouvement, à l’intersection des rues Jarry et Saint-Denis, dans le quartier Villeray à Montréal. Ici, comme ailleurs, la manifestation démarre quand quelques personnes se mettent à traverser sans discontinuer des passages piétons en martelant poêles et chaudrons. Ce sont des voisins, des commerçants du coin, de jeunes familles, des personnes âgées, des retraités, des travailleurs et, surtout, des étudiants.
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Si, parfois, les manifestations de casseroles peinent à s’élever au-dessus du simple tapage informe, la plupart de celles dans lesquelles j’ai été tiennent en réserve le vacarme pur et simple pour les moments où l’on croise une autre marche ou lorsqu’il est question de saluer ceux qui, sur leur balcon, se distinguent par leur ferveur pour la cause. Autrement, le chaos cède généralement la place à une structure rythmique qui vient encercler chacun et contenir le désordre. Parfois même, les rythmes s’accrochent aux slogans qu’on scande, du type : « la loi spéciale, on s’en câlisse! ».
Bientôt, les rangs grossissent et, sans qu’on sache trop comment, comme par magie ou par intuition, nous voilà en plein milieu d’un carrefour à bloquer la circulation. Les policiers, dépassés, se contentent de faire dévier le trafic dans les rues adjacentes. La marche finit par descendre le boulevard Saint-Laurent vers d’autres quartiers plus au sud (les itinéraires varient sans cesse). Elle se transforme alors en un gigantesque défilé de plusieurs milliers de personnes ou, comme le suggère E.P Thompson, en une parodie des processions politiques, annonçant pour ses sujets une « total publicity of disgrace » (“Rough Music Reconsidered,” p.6,8).
En politique, les chiffres ont leur importance. Depuis plus de 100 jours, une bonne partie des étudiants du Québec fait la grève pour s’opposer à une augmentation des frais de scolarité de plus de 70 % sur cinq ans. Certaines des manifestations se sont chiffrées à plusieurs centaines de milliers de personnes. Le 18 mai 2012, le gouvernement du Québec a voté la loi 78 pour tenter de mater le mouvement étudiant. Une de ses nombreuses dispositions aberrantes rend illégale toute manifestation spontanée de 50 personnes et plus si celle-ci n’a pas été approuvée au préalable par les autorités; un pique-nique rentre dans cette catégorie. Les manifestants doivent révéler non seulement leur itinéraire, mais aussi le moyen de transport qu’ils entendent utiliser. Selon la loi 78, une personne est coupable dès qu’elle se joint à une manifestation; c’est pour cela que tant de personnes sont descendues dans la rue.
Un charivari du vingt-et-unième siècle
Dans un article écrit en collaboration avec Natalie Zemon Davis pour le Globe and Mail, j’ai rapproché le phénomène des manifestations de casseroles à la tradition du charivari, qu’on retrouve dans les pays francophones depuis 700 ans. En anglais, on appelle rough music cette tradition, qui existe aussi dans des variantes italienne, allemande et espagnole et dont la pratique s’est propagée de l’Europe vers ses anciennes colonies. Des groupes de jeunes hommes déguisés, auxquels se joignaient parfois des personnes plus âgées, se retrouvaient le soir pour faire du tapage devant la maison d’un individu au comportement jugé déviant, généralement à l’aune de quelque norme hétérosexuelle. La faute, cependant, pouvait être de nature politique. Ainsi, comme l’a montré Allan Greer (The Patriots and the People, p.252-57), les charivaris jouèrent un rôle important au Bas-Canada lors de la rébellion manquée de 1837-38 et visèrent les fonctionnaires au service de la Couronne qui refusaient d’abandonner leurs fonctions.
Granville, “Eine Katzenmusik” lithograph published in La Caricature, 1 Sep. 1831
Dans la tradition française, les charivaris étaient (habituellement) une solution de rechange à la violence dans des cas où il était possible d’expier sa faute envers la communauté. Les charivaris avaient un caractère inclusif, les victimes rentrant généralement en grâce après avoir fait amende honorable. Il est probable que Jacques Attali, dans son livre Noise ait eu en tête de telles pratiques quand il décrit la musique comme un simulacre de la violence : « The game of music resembles the game of power: monopolize the right to violence; provoke anxiety and then provide a feeling of security; provoke disorder and then propose order; create a problem in order to solve it » (p.28).
Les diverses traditions internationales de la rough music n’ont évidemment pas toutes cette dimension politique. Le son des casseroles a parfois servi de prélude aux lynchages du sud des États-Unis, mais a aussi enrichi les improvisations des musiciens noirs dans les squares publiques de La Nouvelle-Orléans. John Mowitt suggère même que la rough music est une des origines culturelles de la batterie, pierre angulaire du rock et du jazz.
Image by Flickr User Scott Montreal
Au 20e siècle, les variantes de la rough music ont migré, en grande partie, des affaires domestiques vers les manifestations politiques, avec encore une fois quelques bémols. La rough music a ainsi servi de bande sonore à la faillite des banques en Amérique Latine et, plus récemment, en Islande; c’est au son des casseroles qu’en 2003 les Espagnols se sont insurgés contre leur gouvernement au sujet de l’engagement de leur pays en Irak. Au début des années 70, au Chili, les opposants d’Allende sortirent leurs casseroles, imités quinze ans plus tard par ceux de Pinochet.
Le phénomène des manifestations de casseroles puise donc ses racines symboliques dans le charivari. Mais pas seulement : il est aussi, bien entendu, une créature des médias sociaux et le fruit des particularismes politiques et culturels du Québec. Une célèbre chanson du groupe Loco Locass, Libérez-nous des libéraux, composée au lendemain des élections provinciales de 2003, appelle ainsi explicitement au charivari contre le Parti libéral du Québec.
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Les traditions de militantisme, comme celle entre autres du mouvement étudiant, sont aussi très actives. Tandis que New York, forte de ses 10 millions d’habitants, s’enorgueillit d’attirer les manifestants par dizaines de milliers pour son défilé du premier mai, ils se comptent, à Montréal, une ville d’à peine trois millions d’habitants, par centaines de milliers.
Rythme et participation
Il faut écouter ces manifestations de casseroles pour en saisir le sens. En effet, elles sont avant tout des spectacles vivants (au sens classique du terme) donnés dans la rue, par bravade et à plein volume. Elles participent ainsi d’une politique du volume et des fréquences, une politique du rythme.
Dans son livre Percussion, Mowitt écrit : « There is something extraordinary about the importance of beating, of creating a specifically percussive din … as though a distinctly sonoric response was called for when a breach in the community’s self-perception was at issue » (p.98). La participation aux rythmes des casseroles est une forme d’engagement politique; de même, la participation sous toutes ses formes joue un rôle dans la plupart des visions politiques positives portées par la musique.
Image courtesy of Flickr User Juan Madrigal
Charlie Keil écrit dans son essai P“Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music”: « Participation is the opposite of alienation ». Sa description de la musique comme processus social permet de mieux saisir la combinaison particulière de bruit métallique et de rythme qu’on retrouve dans les manifestations de casseroles. Plongé au coeur des bouleversements des années 60, Keil entreprit de réfuter les théories alors dominantes de l’affect musical, comme celle de Leonard Meyer pour qui le sens de la musique était lexical et syntaxique, et résidait dans la mélodie et l’harmonie. Alors que Meyer cherchait à tirer des conclusions universelles sur l’émotion depuis l’art musical occidental et ses valeurs sous-jacentes, Keil, lui, élaborait une théorie de l’affect musical à partir des traditions afro-américaines, telles que le jazz et le blues. S’opposant aux idéaux de virtuosité formelle et de perfection des salles de concert, Keil — tout comme Christopher Small, Leroi Jones, et Steven Feld— soutenait que la musique doit avant tout être comprise comme action. C’est pourquoi Small a proposé le terme musicking : la musique doit être conçu non pas comme une collection de textes ésotériques joués par de rares experts et musiciens professionnels, mais plutôt comme un champ d’action sociale qui inclut tous les participants, des musiciens jusqu’à ceux qui s’occupent de nettoyer les rues après les manifestations.
Dans les années 80, Keil précisa la nature de ce pouvoir affectif de la musique grâce à sa description des participatory discrepancies (qu’on pourrait traduire par « hiatus dans la participation ») : un mélange de groove d’un côté, et de timbre et texture musicale de l’autre. Il écrit : « Music, to be personally and socially valuable, must be ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune » (p.96). Au fil des minutes et des heures, les manifs de casseroles passent d’un ton à l’autre, suivent et perdent le rythme pour en créer d’autres à mesure que la procession grossit en nombre à chaque pâté de maisons. En raison de leur caractère musical unique, ces manifestations nocturnes demeurent profondément inclusives. Elles se rapprochent, à bien des égards, de l’utopie du collective musicking des travaux de Keil et de Small, et de celle de la composition décrite par Jacques Attali. En plus, et ça n’importe quel enfant vous le dira, ces manifestations sont franchement amusantes.
Contre la loi spéciale : les casseroles!, May 23, 2012 in Quartier Latin, Montreal, QC, CA, image by Flickr User . . .bung
N’en déplaise à la presse anglophone qui aime à caricaturer les manifestations comme la seule oeuvre d’étudiants gâtés et dissipés, les manifestations de casseroles viennent transcender les différences qui souvent structurent la politique locale — la langue, les classes sociales, les différences de race, de genre et d’âge —, tout ce qui peut faire obstacle à la production de musique (particulièrement celle faite à l’aide de percussions) ainsi qu’à l’implication citoyenne. Parce que les instruments sont improvisés, simples et pas chers, tout le monde peut participer. Délibérément non professionnelle, la musique se départit de ses idéaux de virtuosité et de perfection, et l’argument éculé selon lequel il y a un âge et un sexe pour être un « bon musicien » devient soudainement caduc. Les rythmes sont faciles à suivre et à reproduire; qui perd la cadence en créer de nouvelles, et ne s’en porte que mieux. J’ai entendu des batteurs chevronnés se lancer dans des rythmes syncopés sur des tambours ou des cymbales, mais la plupart des gens se contentent de suivre les cadences capricieuses du groupe. (Ma compagne et moi — un bassiste invétéré — avons déterré nos maracas et un vieux tambour en bison pour l’occasion, et laissons les chaudrons aux invités.)
Casseroles 26 mai 2012, Place Emilie Gamellin, Image by Flickr User scottmontreal
Pris ensemble, volume et fréquences pénètrent complètement les marcheurs qui tombent dans leur aire, en même temps qu’ils interpellent ceux qui se tiennent au loin. Il est difficile de rendre compte du volume et de la puissance purs ressentis à l’intérieur d’une manif de casseroles. Mon voisin qui se déchaîne sur son chaudron produit le même effet que mon batteur qui frappe sur une cymbale : à proximité, le son transitoire (la partie initiale, suraiguë du coup) peut être perçant parce qu’il mobilise des fréquences au faîte du champ auditif et qui voyagent à un niveau élevé de pression sonore (c’est pourquoi l’audition d’un batteur se détériore souvent plus vite que celle d’un guitariste). À l’intérieur d’une manif de casseroles, chaque coup atteint l’oreille; on voit ainsi beaucoup de manifestants porter des bouchons.
Bientôt, les fréquences ardues s’estompent quelque peu, les sons les plus aigus des casseroles finissent par amadouer l’oreille et se fondent en une douce cacophonie, à la fois déclarative et invitante. Puisque le but de ces manifestations est de bafouer la loi 78 de la manière la plus assourdissante possible, le fait qu’on puisse les entendre plus loin qu’on puisse les voir transforme ce délit en un acte public et politique exprès. C’est d’ailleurs ce que le maire de Montréal, Gérard Tremblay, reconnaît bien malgré lui : « Ils peuvent rester sur leur balcon pour faire du bruit. On va l’entendre le bruit. Moi, je suis à Outremont [une riche enclave entre le Mile-end et le Plateau, deux des épicentres du mouvement] et je l’entends le bruit. Pas besoin d’aller sur la rue, de se promener et de commencer à paralyser Montréal ».
La portée territoriale du volume fonctionne aussi comme une invitation à se joindre à la manifestation, soit en faisant du tapage sur les porches (emblématiques) de Montréal, soit en entrant dans la marche même. Si elle se situe à l’extrémité opposée du spectre sonore de ce bass materialism dont parle Steve Goodman dans son livre Sonic Warfare, cette portée territoriale du volume participe de cette « collective construction of a vibrational ecology » qu’il décrit (p.196). Là aussi, le tout formé par les casseroles finit par dépasser la somme de ses parties.
La réaction souvent unanime des participants aux manifs de casseroles est pleine d’effusion et teintée d’un sentiment de soulagement, comme on peut l’entendre dans cette vidéo virale qui a beaucoup circulé :
et comme on peut le constater dans bon nombre de lettres, comme celle-ci, envoyée au journal Le Devoir :
Désormais, les gens vont se saluer, se parler. Maintenant, mine de rien, s’amorcent entre voisins des rencontres, des discussions, des veillées sur les perrons et sur les balcons de Montréal. Le voisinage sera de moins en moins étranger. Ça, c’est une vraie de vraie victoire politique !
Il faut répéter ce tapage sympathique, éventuellement sous d’autres formes, jusqu’à ce que le territoire soit entièrement occupé par des voisins qui se reconnaissent, se parlent, se fréquentent au hasard des jours et se connaissent au fil des ans. C’est comme ça qu’on habite un lieu, c’est comme ça que nous devenons citoyens.
J’ai le coeur gonflé de joie.
Mowitt écrit : « [Because] the clashing of pots and pans […] is so blatantly percussive, it is hard not to hear in the retributive structure of rough music something like a beating back—a backbeat, in short, or a response on the part of the community to what it perceives as a provocation, a call to act » (p.98). Le rapprochement avec le charivari est ici capital : les manifs de casseroles sont en effet des mouvements locaux, communautaires qui, à l’échelle d’un quartier, demandent réparation : l’abrogation d’une loi liberticide. Évidemment, d’autres éléments entrent ici en résonance : on y voit autant de signes de défi contre certains aspects du néo-libéralisme que de symboles du nationalisme québécois (qui, il est bon de le rappeler aux Canadiens anglais, n’est pas forcément indépendantiste). Dans mon quartier, on organise même des collectes de denrées alimentaires.
“If you keep us from dreaming, we’ll keep you from sleeping,” Image from Flickr user ScottMontreal
Alors que je discutais récemment des différences existant entre l’agitation étudiante des années 60 et celle d’aujourd’hui avec mon ancien professeur Lawrence Grossberg, celui-ci soulignait le rôle de premier plan joué par la musique à l’époque : ces mouvements avaient des chansons que tout le monde connaissait et qui venaient renforcer des affects communs. Comme beaucoup d’autres, il considère que la musique n’assume plus aujourd’hui le même rôle (supplantée, peut-être, par un ensemble plus large de nouvelles pratiques médiatiques, comme le veut l’analyse habituelle).
Mis à part les vidéos virales et la reprise de la rengaine de Loco Locass, je ne suis pas certain que le mouvement québécois actuel possède de tels hymnes rassembleurs.
Une chose est incontestable cependant : elle a un groove sur lequel il fait bon marcher.
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French Translation by Frédéric Milard, fredericmilard@yahoo.ca
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Many thanks to Natalie Zemon Davis, Manon Desrosiers, Nicholas Dew, Dylan Mulvin, Derek Nystrom and Carrie Rentschler for comments on and conversations leading up to this piece. Thanks also to Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman for the space to do it and the engaged editorial eye.
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Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. He is author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003), MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.
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Sound at SCMS 2012
I cannot tell you how utterly bummed I am that the Experience Music Project/IASPM joint POP conference falls on exactly the same weekend as the 2012 Society for Cinema and Media Studies meeting in Boston. A lot of scholars, the editorial board of Sounding Out! included, have been forced to make the excruciating choice between them, or—as, the newly nomadic EMP POP will be hosted in New York City this year—to crisscross the Eastern seaboard with heroic train, bus, and car jaunts in an attempt to make both meetings at once. The good folks here at SO! will be doing our utmost to make the best out of a bad situation; in addition to my SCMS offering, look for Liana Silva’s bonus EMP conference preview round-up post this Wednesday and our dueling live tweets from both joints (a little love for those unable or unwilling to go on tour). Our Twitter handle is @soundingoutblog
Given the huge crossover audience between the EMP/IASMP and the SCMS, I do think this planning snafu brings unfortunate consequences for both meetings, most noticeably a large dip in sound work at this year’s SCMS, including the massive downturn of scholarship on popular music. The dearth is a real disappointment considering how hard-fought its place has historically been in the organization (see Norma Coates’ 2008 Cinema Journal piece, “Sound Studies: Missing the (Popular) Music for the Screens?” for a compelling story of the institutional turf wars between sound studies, media studies, and popular music study writ large) as well as the fact that 2011’s SCMS New Orleans meeting positively brimmed with music and sound. Not to mention that this year’s Sound Studies Special Interest Group Meeting, helmed by Co-Chairs Norma Coates and Tim Anderson on Wednesday March 21 from 2:00-3:45, is more music-oriented than it has been in the past, featuring guest speaker Charles McEnerney, who has been the Host + Producer of Well-Rounded Radio, a music interview audio podcast series (more details below). I am excited that the SSSIG is working to bridge popular music study with an exploration of “new media sound” and its possibilities, and not solely because Sounding Out! hosts a podcast series of its own. Unfortunately, one of the few music panels at SCMS is scheduled at the same time as the Sound Studies Special Interest Group Meeting—and it is the panel of co-chair Anderson!!—another scheduling bummer.
Something Old, Something New, Radios by Flickr User woutervddn
Rather than dwelling on bad news, however, I want to amplify some of the unanticipated positive effects of the confluence of conferences this weekend, especially the dramatic upswing in research on radio and video game studies this year. There are seven free-standing radio panels at SCMS 2012 (!!!), featuring an excellent blend of radio’s top scholars and brightest emerging voices that dial in some strikingly fresh conversation about contemporary radio technology and programming (E10: Thursday, March 22, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM), the study of aesthetics in historical radio (D8: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 04:00PM-05:45PM), and transnational sonic exchange, both past and present (L21: Friday, March 23, 2012 02:15PM-04:00PM). We are especially excited to hear the new scholarship from Neil Verma, Shawn VanCour, and Alex Russo, the three radio scholars who Sounding Out! will feature this summer in our upcoming series on the life and legacy of radio innovator Norman Corwin—look for one post each month in June, July, and August 2012.
It is also wonderful for questions regarding sound and video game studies to emerge more prominently at SCMS, especially given their contemporary global cultural influence and the vibrancy of their sound design community, especially in the Twitterverse and via blogs like GameSound. We are especially excited that Aubrey Anable’s panel on Thursday, March 22, 2012(3:00-4:45) offers us the chance to listen at the intersection of sound studies with the growing scholarship on affect and play, something dear to hearts and minds over here at SO! (see Aaron Trammell’s recent “Orality and Cybernetics in Battleship”). Especially impressive is how the interventions of videogame scholarship are so fundamentally audio-visual, an articulation that took film studies many years—and even now still seems somewhat reluctant and tenuous. For a list of all video-game panels at SCMS, check theMarch 18th post from Mark Sample’s Sample Reality.
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The rise of different types of old and new sound media at this year’s SCMS, along with the retrospective roundtable on the pathbreaking scholarship of film sound scholar Rick Altman—featuring fellow heavy hitters Jay Beck, Norma Coates, John Belton, Donald Crafton, Michele Hilmes, Amy Lawrence, and Jonathan Sterne—has made me once again ponder the state of sound studies in film, one of the earliest fields to make the most recent “sonic turn” in scholarship. While certainly there are some innovative, boundary-crossing gems regarding sound and film at SCMS 2012—such as Friday’s “Sonic Approaches to Genre” (12:15-2:00) and Sunday’s “Interwar Sounds” (11:00-12:45), by and large, cinema studies remains overwhelmingly visually oriented as represented at this year’s meeting. Very few panels engage with sound as a primary modality and there are far less individual papers threading sound into panel discussions not explicitly about sound. We need more of both kinds of scholarly engagement, and perhaps the sudden resurgence of interest around silent film with the Oscar runs of Martin Scorcese’s Hugo and Michel Hazanavicius’s black-and-white silent film The Artist, which won Best Picture, will once again de-naturalize the relationship between film sound and image. Or, as Altman told us in the introduction to Sound Theory, Sound Practice (1992): “In a world where sound is commonly taken as an unproblematic extension of the image, within a comfortably unified text, the concept of multi-discursivity is bound to enfranchise sound, concentrating attention on its ability to carry its own independent discourses” (10). [By the way, guest writer April Miller, film and cultural studies scholar at the University of Northern Colorado, will be helping us think through the resurgence of silent film next month here at Sounding Out!].
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Speaking of trying to find sound where there doesn’t appear to be any, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my own roundtable on archival dilemmas, “You Are Who, Exactly?”: A Workshop on Working with Non-traditional Scholars,” moved from Wednesday to Saturday afternoon because of scheduling conflict (11:00-12:45, Room TBA in the hard copy SCMS program). A highly interdisciplinary and intermedia panel chaired by Visual Studies scholar Joan Saab, I will be chatting with sound scholar (and CB researcher) Art Blake, cinema scholar Philip Leers, and Media and Animation scholar Nicolas Sammond about the challenges (and breakthroughs) that arise for cultural studies scholars working in areas where, to quote our abstract, “there is no fixed archive nor even a reliable set of sources for our work.” Some questions we plan to collectively think through include: “Is there an ethics of interpretation that differs from those we use in the [traditional] archive? For those of us working in more ephemeral media (e.g. sound, graffiti, cartoons, everyday life), how do we begin to locate or name our archives, and subsequently how do we acknowledge and catalogue these collections? Where does collaboration begin and end, and where might exploitation and appropriation take over?” My introductory remarks, “Listening from the Margins: The Problem of Historical Sound” will focus on the challenges I face hunting for sound in visually-oriented archives—a methodology of marginalia, afterthoughts, and seemingly offhand remarks—as well as the difficulties of archival research when sound media matters. What happens when you are studying the editorial practice of a sound montage artist like Tony Schwartz, for example, as I was for “Splicing the Sonic Color-line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York” (Social Text 102, Spring 2010) but the Library of Congress will only provide access to seamlessly streaming digital reproductions of his work, rather than the painstakingly—and clearly—edited magnetic tape? While I definitely do not have all the answers, I hope you will join me and my stellar fellow panelists in in discussing solutions to such vexing dilemmas.
Ah, dilemmas. One last one. For all of you Sound Studies heads who aren’t totally exhausted by rushing all over the East Coast for our academic version of EMP/IASPM/SCMS “March Madness,” I highly recommend Cornell’s Resoundingly Queer conference next weekend—March 30—April 1st—featuring the work of John Waters, Charles Busch, D.R.E.D., Holly Hughes, Terry Galloway, Moe Angelos, David Savran, Jose Munoz, Jill Dolan, Stacy Wolf, Ann Pellegrini, Eng Beng Lim, Amy Villarejo, Nick Salvato, Shane Vogel, and Judith Peraino, among others. This groundbreaking event will “explore the utterances, echoes, moans, and groans that animate contemporary studies of sex, gender, and sexuality,” one of the first major conferences do so in such a deep and sustained way. I’ll be there, exhausted but enthused, and ready to Tweet for our reader-verse. I’m just thankful such excellence does not fall on this already insane weekend. See you in Boston! And New York City! And Ithaca!
Please comment to let SO! know what you think–both before and after SCMS 2012. If I somehow missed you or your panel in this round up, please let me know!: jsa@soundingoutblog.com
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Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
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Jump to WEDNESDAY, March 21
Jump to THURSDAY, March 22
Jump to FRIDAY, March 23
Jump to SATURDAY, March 24
Jump to SUNDAY, March 25
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WEDNESDAY, March 21
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 10:00AM-11:45PM (Session A)
A12: Music and Media Shifts
Room: Gloucester
Chair: Carol Vernallis (Arizona State University)
Kyle Stevens (University of Pittsburgh), “Singing the Pretty: Woman’s Voices and the Classical Hollywood Musical”
Daniel Bishop (Indiana University), “Sounding the Past in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde”
Andrew Ritchey (University of Iowa), “Moving in Time: Musical Analogy and the Emergence of Avant-Garde Film”
Carol Vernallis (Arizona State University), “What Was, What Is, ‘My MTV’: MTV’s First Broadcast and Music Video Now
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Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 12:00PM-01:45PM (Session B)
B4: 60s Experimental Cinema and Eccentric Embodiment
Room: Board Room
Chair: Juan Suarez (University of Murcia)
Co-Chair: Ara Osterweil (McGill University)
Lucas Hilderbrand (University of California, Irvine), “Sex Out of Sync: Christmas on Earth’s Queer Soundtrack”
Ara Osterweil (McGill University), “Yoko Ono: Philosophy in the Bedroom”
Juan Suarez (University of Murcia), “Film Grain and the Queer Body: Tom Chomont”
Marc Siegel (Goethe University Frankfurt), “The Sound Recordings of Mario Montez
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Wednesday, March 21, 2012 02:00PM-03:45PM (Session C)
***Sound Studies Special Interest Group 2012 Annual Meeting
Room: Stanbro Room on Level 4
Convened by SSSIG Co-Chair Norma Coates (University of Western Ontario), featuring special presentation by Charles McEnerney.
SSSIG Co-Chair Tim Anderson (Old Dominion) is scheduled to present at this time (see session C19 “Rebooting the Music Industry”)
Charles McEnerney
From the SSSIG’s Correspondence: “Charles is a talented marketer and has worked with clients such as HBO and WGBH. However, he has most recently worked with the Future of Music Coalition, a national education, research and advocacy organization for musicians based out of Washington D.C. to help them better understand how musicians are actually making money in a new music economy.
Since 2002, Charles McEnerney has been the Host + Producer of Well-Rounded Radio, a music interview audio podcast series that has included a wide range of genres and topics. Ranging from discussions of bluegrass, independent rock, folk, rap, new music industry, music festivals, and so on, the podcast has included interviews with musicians such as Dave Allen (Gang of Four/Shriekback), Ken Irwin (founder of Rounder Records), Lawrence Lessig, Erin McKeown, and Amanda Palmer.
McEnerney is also the ‘instigator’ behind the Musicians for Music 2.0 Venture Fund, an idea to create a new kind of funding organization for music discovery for taste makers and technology start-ups. Music 2.0 is dedicated to building ‘a better music ecosystem.'”
To join the SCMS Sound Studies Special Interest Facebook Group click here. To join the group via the SCMS website click here.
C9: The Culture and Practice of the Sound Image in Japan around 1930
Room: Constitution
Chair: Michael Raine (Independent Scholar)
Respondent: James Lastra (University of Chicago)
Masaki Daibo (Theatre Museum of Waseda University), “Before Reimei: Early Attempts to Produce Talking Japanese Cinema through the Phonograph”
Michael Raine (Independent Scholar), “‘No Interpreter, Full Volume’: The Benshi and the Sound Image in Early 1930s Japan”
Johan Nordstrom (Waseda University), “The Sound Image in Early Japanese Musicals”
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C17: Audiovisual Archives in the Digital Age
Room: Stanhope
Chair: Katherine Groo (University of Aberdeen)
Jasmijn Van Gorp (Utrecht University), “Unavailable Audiovisual Material, No Research? Improving Data Collection in the Audiovisual Archive”
Nanna Verhoeff (Utrecht University), “Visual Archives on the Move: Locative Media for Digital Heritage”
Katherine Groo (University of Aberdeen), “Cut, Paste, Glitch, and Stutter: Remixing Silent Film (History)
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C19: Rebooting the Music Industry
Room: Thoreau
Chair: David Arditi (George Mason University)
Alyxandra Vesey (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Women’s Work: Gendering the Music Supervisor, Mainstreaming Indie Culture”
Andrew deWaard (University of California, Los Angeles), “The Cultural Capital Project: Radical Monetization of the Music Industry”
Tim Anderson (Old Dominion University), “From Background Music to Above-the-Line: A System Analysis of the Newfound Importance of the Music Supervisor in Film and Television”
David Arditi (George Mason University), “Digitizing Distribution: The MP3’s Impact on the Album”
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Wednesday, March 21, 2012 04:00PM-05:45PM (Session D)
D4: Terrence Malick, Film Form, and Meaning: Exploring the Last Three Films
Room: Board Room
Chair: Chuck Maland (University of Tennessee)
Respondent: Walter Metz (Southern Illinois University)
Clint Stivers (University of Tennessee Knoxville), “‘What’s Your Name Kid?’: The Enigmatic Voiceover in The Thin Red Line”
Lloyd Michaels (Allegheny College), “Text, Author, Meaning: Reading the ‘Extended Cut’ of The New World”
Anders Bergstrom (Wilfrid Laurier University), “Voice-Over, Focalization, and the Cinematic Memory Image in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011)”
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D8: The Aesthetic Turn in Radio Studies
Room: Charles River
Chair: Neil Verma (University of Chicago)
Co-Chair: Shawn VanCour (University of South Carolina)
Allison McCracken (DePaul University), “‘Whispers and Pops’: Microphone Singing and the Invention of the Intimate Aesthetic, 1920s”
Shawn VanCour (University of South Carolina), “Reconstructing Early Radio Genres: The Case of Musical Variety”
Neil Verma (University of Chicago), “Impossible Scenes: The Fall of the City and the Problem of Representation in Radio Drama”
Elena Razlogova (Concordia University), “Radio Noise as Social Perception: From Wireless to Radio”
D16: Save to Continue: The State of Video Game Archiving and Preservation
Room: St. James
Chair: Matthew Payne (University of Alabama)
Workshop Participants:
Henry Lowood (Stanford University)
Ken McAllister (University of Arizona)David O’Grady (University of California, Los Angeles)
Judd Ruggill (Arizona State University)
Megan Winget (University of Texas, Austin)
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THURSDAY, March 22
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Thursday, March 22, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM (Session E)
E10: On the (Re)Death of Radio: Continuities and Changes in Radio in the 21st Century Part I : Technologies
Room: Constitution
Chair: Alexander Russo (Catholic University of America)
Tona Hangen (Worcester State University), “Troubleshooting the Wayback Machine: When Radio Goes Online”
Kathleen Griffin (University of Brighton), “Shifting Sands: The Changing Power Relations Between Listeners and Programme Makers”
Andrew Ó Baoill (Cazenovia College), “Degrees of Freedom: How Community Radio Stations Are Responding to New Distribution Channels”
Christina Dunbar-Hester (Rutgers University), “The Symbolic Value of Technical Practice in 21st-Century Radio Activism”
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E21: Digital Methodologies for Screen Histories: Performing Research in the 21st Century
Room: Whittier
Chair: Paul Moore (Ryerson University)
Workshop Participants:
Richard Abel (University of Michigan)
Janet Bergstrom (University of California, Los Angeles)
Ross Melnick (Oakland University)
Jan Olsson (Stockholm University)
James Steffen (Emory University)
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Thursday, March 22, 2012 11:00AM-12:45PM (Session F)
F7: Signal Traffic: Researching Media Infrastructures
Room: Cambridge
Chair: Cristina Venegas (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Lisa Parks (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Beaming the Audiovisual: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures”
Jonathan Sterne (McGill University), “Audible Infrastructures and Telephone Effects”
Nicole Starosielski (Miami University Ohio), “Disappearing Infrastructures: Undersea Cables and Narratives of Connection”
Shannon Mattern (The New School), “Deep Time of Media Infrastructure”
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F10: On the (Re)Death of Radio: Continuities and Changes in Radio in the 21st Century, Part II: Programming
Room: Holmes
Chair: Christina Dunbar-Hester (Rutgers University)
Cynthia Conti (New York University), “Localizing Localism: The Complexities of LPFM Broadcasting”
Alexander Russo (Catholic University of America), “‘Beyond’ the Terrestrial?: Distribution, Formats, and the Place of the Local in Satellite Radio”
Christopher Cwynar (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “I Want My NPR.org/Music: ‘Independent’ Popular Music Culture and American Public Broadcasting in the Digital Convergence Era”
Jason Loviglio (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), “NPR’s Useful Crises”
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Thursday, March 22, 2012 01:00PM-02:45PM (Session G)
G21: Sound Thinking: Rick Altman and Sound Studies
Room: Whittier
Chair: Jay Beck (Carleton College)
Co-Chair: Norma Coates (University of Western Ontario)
Workshop Participants:
John Belton (Rutgers University)
Donald Crafton (University of Notre Dame)
Michele Hilmes (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Amy Lawrence (Dartmouth University)
Jonathan Sterne (McGill University)
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Thursday, March 22, 2012 03:00PM-04:45PM (Session H)
H7: Playing With Feelings 1: Video Games and Affect
Room: Cambridge
Chair: Aubrey Anable (University of Toronto)
Seth Mulliken (North Carolina State University, Raleigh), “The Order of Hardness: Rhythm-Based Games and Sonic Affect”
Laura Cook Kenna (George Washington University), “Feeling Empathetic? . . . Ironic? . . . Postracial?: Grand Theft Auto’s Offers of Affective Engagement with Ethnic and Racial Difference”
Allyson Shaffer (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), “Playing Life, Managing Play”
Aubrey Anable (University of Toronto), “Casual Games, Serious Play, and the Affective Economy
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Thursday, March 22, 2012 05:00PM-06:45PM (Session I)
I2: Music on Television
Room: Back Bay
Chair: Matt Delmont (Scripps College)
Mikal Gaines (Emmanuel College), “Undead Carnival: Monsters, Magic, and Black Self-Making in Michael Jackson’s Thriller”
Norma Coates (University of Western Ontario), “How Commercial Is Too Commercial? Hootenanny and the Struggle Over Folk Authenticity”
Matt Delmont (Scripps College), “‘They’ll Be Rockin’ on Bandstand, in Philadelphia, PA’: Imagining National Youth Culture on American Bandstand”
I8: “Time to Smile”: Conceptualizing the Form and Place of Radio Comedy in the 1930s
Room: Charles River
Chair: Cynthia Meyers (College of Mount Saint Vincent)
Co-Chair: David Weinstein (National Endowment for the Humanities)
Cynthia Meyers (College of Mount Saint Vincent), “‘Resist the Usual’: Young & Rubicam’s Soft Sell Strategies in Radio Comedy Programming”
David Weinstein (National Endowment for the Humanities), “‘The Apostle of Pep’ Tackles the Airwaves: Eddie Cantor and Broadway Style in 1930s Radio”
Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (Georgia State University), “Reinventing Jack Benny: Developing the Character-Focused ‘Comedy Situation’ for Radio”
Jennifer Wang (Independent Scholar), “Why Women Aren’t Funny?: The Marginalization of Comedy in 1930’s Daytime Radio”
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I25: Video Essays: Film Scholarship’s Emergent Form
Room: Longfellow
Chair: Girish Shambu (Canisius College)
Workshop Participants:
Christian Keathley (Middlebury College)
Catherine Grant (University of Sussex)
Benjamin Sampson (University of California, Los Angeles)
Richard Misek (University of Bristol)
Craig Cieslikowski (University of Florida)
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Thursday Individual Papers of Interest:
Deniz Bayrakdar (Kadir Has University), “Silence of Sound and Image in the New Cinema in Turkey, 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Constitution
David Gurney (Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi), “‘Put These in Your Ear-Holes’: The Sonic Assemblages of [adult swim], 03:00PM-04:45PM, Room: Cabot
Krin Gabbard (Stony Brook University), “‘Throw It Away’: Abbey Lincoln in Hollywood,” 03:00PM-04:45PM, Room: St. James
Hannah Frank (University of Chicago), “The Invisible Visible and the Inaudible Audible: Testing the Limits of Vertov’s Kino-Eye,” 05:00PM-06:45PM, Room: Board Room
Events:
The Sound Studies SIG and the Television Studies SIG are co-sponsoring a party at Scholar’s Bistro Boston, 95 School Street, a nice walk through the Public Garden and Boston Common from the conference site. The festivities start after the Television Studies SIG meeting, which lasts until 8:45, so plan on arriving at Scholars after that. .
The Boston Typewriter Orchestra
Friday, March 23
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Friday, March 23, 2012
Friday, March 23, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM (Session J)
J6: The iPad for Cinema and Media Studies: A Hands (and Fingers)-on Workshop
Room: Cabot
Chair: Andrew Miller (Sacred Heart University)
Co-Chair: Judd Ruggill (Arizona State University)
Workshop Participants:
Michael Aronson (University of Oregon)
Elizabeth Ellcessor (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Phoebe Bronstein (University of Oregon)
Dan Leopard (Saint Mary’s College of California)
Heidi Cooley (University of South Carolina)
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Friday, March 23, 2012 12:15PM-02:00PM (Session K)
K6: Sonic Approaches to Genre
Room: Cabot
Chair: Mark Kerins (Southern Methodist University)
Co-Chair: William Whittington (University of Southern California)
Benjamin Wright (University of Southern California), “The Sonic Compass: Re-recording Mixing Choices and The Bourne Ultimatum”
Vanessa Ament-Gjenvick (Georgia State University), “‘How Would You Like To Work on a Monster Movie?’: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Technological Convergence, and Sound Design Authorship”
Mark Kerins (Southern Methodist University), “Genre Effects on Surround Sound Gaming”
William Whittington (University of Southern California), “The Cinema of Disorientation: A Hearing on Horror
Friday, March 23, 2012 02:15PM-04:00PM (Session L)
L17: Bridging Disciplines in Media and Urban Studies
Room: Stanhope
Chair: Joshua Gleich (University of Texas, Austin)
Workshop Participants:
Mark Shiel (King’s College London)
Joshua Gleich (University of Texas, Austin)Merrill Schleier (University of the Pacific)
Erica Stein (University of Arizona)
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L21: Over the Borderline: Transnational Radio Histories
Room: Whittier
Chair: Derek Vaillant (University of Michigan)
Derek Vaillant (University of Michigan), “Sounds Too French: The Challenges of US-France Transatlantic Broadcasting, 1920-1939”
Gisela Cramer (University of Colombia-Bogota), “The Shortcomings of Shortwave: US Programming to Latin America during World War II”
Jennifer Spohrer (Bryn Mawr College), “Visions and Realities of International Commercial Broadcasting: Radio Luxembourg in the 1930s”
Michele Hilmes (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Building Bridges, Crossing Wires: The BBC’s North American Service”
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Friday Individual Papers of Interest:
Juana Suarez (New York University), “Beyond Entertainment: Radio, Comedia Ranchera, and the Political Agenda of Colombian Films from the 1940s,” 12:15PM-02:00PM, Room: Constitution
Julianne Pidduck (University of Montreal), “Thinking the Audiovisual Relation: Su Friedrich’s Experimental Kinship Documents,” 02:15PM-04:00PM, Room: White Hill
Friday Events:
The organizational meeting to establish a Radio Studies SIG is Friday morning, March 23, from 9am – 10:45am in the Stanbro Room Level 4.
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Rob Nokes, Sound Effects Field Recordist, for the 2008 miniseries JOHN ADAMS recreating the sounds of Boston Harbor.
Sound were created for the Supervising Sound Editor, Steve Flick, who won an Outstanding Sound Editing Emmy for JOHN ADAM (2008)
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Saturday, March 24
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Saturday, March 24, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM (Session M)
M6: Why Apps Can’t Argue . . . Or Can They? The Critical Essay, Screen Cultures, and the Digital Humanities
Room: Cabot
Chair: James Tobias (University of California, Riverside)
James Tobias (University of California, Riverside), “Histories and Futures of the Critical Audiovisual Essay: Kit Literatures, Audiovisual Composition, and Scholarly Uses of Vernacular Media”
Holly Willis (University of Southern California), “The Letter and the Line: Text in Film and Video”
Steve Anderson (University of Southern California), “Technologies of Critical Writing: On the War between Data and Images”
Ian Ross (University of California, Riverside), “Hardware as Argument: Finding the Essayistic in Hardware Modding Considered as Material Semiotic Practice”
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M13: Violent Images
Room: Holmes
Chair: Ora Gelley (North Carolina State University)
Asbjorn Gronstad (University of Bergen), “Archives of Violence”
Jacqueline Waeber (Duke University), “Revisiting an Empathetic Music: Visible Violence and the Audible Offscreen”
Julian Hanich (Freie Universtitaet Berlin), “Suggestive Verbalizations: Evoking Cinematic Violence through Words”
Ora Gelley (North Carolina State University), “Narrative Form, Violence, and the Female Body
Saturday, March 24, 2012 11:00AM-12:45PM (Session N)
N3: Unforgettable: Popular Music and Memory on Film
Room: Beacon Hill
Chair: Katherine Spring (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Respondent: Jeff Smith (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Michael Dwyer (Arcadia University), “Old Time Rock and Roll: Fifties Nostalgia on Hollywood Soundtracks”
Sangeeta Marwah (University of Southern California), “The Hindi Film Song: Narrative, Cultural Memory, and Identity”
Ethan de Seife (Hofstra University), “Old Times Were Good Times: Neil Young Remembers Greendale”
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N15: A Scholarship of Audiovision: Theory/Praxis/Production in the 21st Century
Room: Newbury
Chair: Brigitta Wagner (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Workshop Participants:
Brigitta Wagner (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Charles Musser (Yale University)
Gabriel Paletz (Prague Film School)
Hanna Shell (Harvard University)
Jesse Shapins (Harvard University)
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N23: “You Are Who, Exactly?”: A Workshop on Working with Non-traditional Scholars
Room: Franklin
Chair: Joan Saab (University of Rochester)
Workshop Participants:
Art Blake (Ryerson University)
Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (State University of New York Binghamton)
Philip Leers (University of California Los Angeles)
Nicholas Sammond (University of Toronto)
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Saturday, March 24, 2012 01:00PM-02:45PM (Session O)
O1: Laughter That “Encounters a Void?”: On Humor and Cinema in the Middle East
Room: Alcott
Chair: Hossein Khosrowjah (California College of Arts)
Perin Gurel (Dickinson College), “America, the (Oppressively) Funny: Humor and Anti-Americanisms in Modern Turkish Cinema”
Roberta Di Carmine (Western Illinois University), “Israeli Comedy’s Multiple Voices/Languages in The Band’s Visit”
Elise Burton (Harvard University), “Ethnic Humor, Stereotypes, and Cultural Power in Israeli Cinema”
Iris Fruchter-Ronen (University of Haifa), “Humor and Gender in Nadin Labaki’s Films: Caramel and Where Do We Go Now?”
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O8: Contemporary Latin American Cinema and the New Latin American Cinema: Aesthetic and Ethical Continuities and Discontinuities
Room: Charles River
Chair: Cynthia Tompkins (Arizona State University)
Respondent: Claudia Ferma (University of Richmond)
Ana Forcinito (University of Minnesota), “Almost a Voice Over: Echoes and Distortions in the New Argentina Cinema Directed by Women”
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O9: Sound Across Media and Genre
Room: Emerson
Chair: Todd Decker (Washington University, St. Louis)
Kristen Hatch (University of California, Irvine), “Harlem in Hollywood: The ‘Negro Vogue’ of the Early Sound Era”
Hannah Allen (Michigan State University), “The Obscene Scream: Aurality in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”
Michelle Puetz (University of Chicago), “Projecting Sound as Image”
Todd Decker (Washington University, St. Louis), “Elegies in Waltz Time: Meter, Memory, and Remembrance in Band of Brothers (2001)
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O13: New Perspectives in Cinema and Multilingualism
Room: Holmes
Chair: Tijana Mamula (John Cabot University)
Co-Chair: Peter Sarram (John Cabot University)
Brian Hochman (Georgetown University), “Plains Indian Sign Language and the Protocinematic Aesthetic”
Charles Linscott (Ohio University), “The Talking Money Order: Mandabi and the Languages of Globalization”
Mara Matta (University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’), “Talking Back: The Issue of Multilingualism in Northeast Indian Cinema”
Jaap Verheul (New York University), “Divided in Unity: European Integration versus Regional Language in Dutch and Flemish Cinema”
Saturday, March 24, 2012 03:00PM-04:45PM (Session P)
P8: DVDs UnpackedTales of Glocal Piracy and Stardom
Chair: Monika Mehta (University of Binghamton, SUNY)
Room: Charles River
Jasmine Trice (National University of Singapore), “Action Stars and Indie Cinema: Global Media Piracy and Local Cultural Production in the Philippines”
Suzanne L. Schulz (University of Texas, Austin), “Law, Order, and the DVD: On the Containment of Discs in India”
Monika Mehta (University of Binghamton, SUNY), “DVD Compilations of Hindi Film Songs: (Re) Shuffling Sound, Stardom, and Cinephilia”
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Saturday, March 24, 2012 05:00PM-06:45PM (Session Q)
Q2: Sing-a-longs and Dance-a-thons: Re-visioning the Contemporary Musical on Film and Television
Room: Back Bay
Chair: Aviva Dove-Viebahn (University of Northern Colorado)
Kenneth Chan (University of Northern Colorado), “Swinging and Swaying the Body Cultural Politics: Musicalizing the Already Musical Hairspray”
Jesse Schlotterbeck (University of Iowa), “Notorious and the Apparent Contradictions of the Contemporary Musical Biopic”
Tamar Ditzian (University of Florida), “Transgender’s Transgressions Undone in Hedwig and Rocky Horror: Reviewing Queerness in the Glam Rock Musical”
Kyra Glass von der Osten (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Musical Marriage: The Mash-Up as Governing Principle in Glee”
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Q12: Materialities of Film Sound
Room: Gloucester
Chair: Delia Konzett (University of New Hampshire)
Delia Konzett (University of New Hampshire), “Sound in War/Combat Film”
Walter Metz (Southern Illinois University), “‘Here’s to Ben!’: Visual Sound in the Films of David Lynch”
Michael Wutz (Weber State University), “Notes toward a Media-Historical History of Sound in Film
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Q16: Collective Scholarship in Digital Contexts
Room: St. James
Chair: Kristina Busse (Independent Scholar)
Workshop Participants:
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Modern Language Association)
Jason Mittell (Middlebury College)
Richard Edwards (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis)
Louisa Stein (Middlebury College)
Francesca Coppa (Muhlenberg College)
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Saturday Individual Papers of Interest
Karen Backstein (Sterling Publishing), “Documenting Musica Brasileira: Culture, History, Memory in the Brazilian Music Documentary,” 09:00AM-10:45AM, Room: Constitution
Jason Zuzga (University of Pennsylvania), “The Violent, Silent World: Affect, History, and Ethical Orientation on Screen and at Sea,” 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Stanhope
Andrea Kelley (Indiana University), “From the Factory to the Ferry: Soundies’ Sites of Exhibition,” 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Stuart
John Connor (Yale University), “The Modern Sounds of Modern Massachusetts: The Friends of Eddie Coyle and the Voice of Southie,” 01:00PM-02:45PM, Room: Winthrop
Lisa Coulthard (University of British Columbia), “Dirty Sound: The Ethics of Noise in the New Extremity,” 01:00PM-02:45PM, Room: Constitution
Nina Cartier (Northwestern University), “Supa Soul Cinema: Blaxploitation Narration,” 01:00PM-02:45PM, Room: Newbury
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SUNDAY, March 25
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Sunday, March 25, 2012 09:00AM-10:45AM (Session R)
R18: Radio Dynamics
Room: Stuart
Chair: David Uskovich (University of Texas, Austin)
Mette Simonsen Abildgaard (Southern University Denmark), “Intimate Messages: A History of Interactions in Youth Radio”
Catherine Martin (Boston University), “Re-imagining the City: Contained Criminality in The Radio Adventures of Sam Spade”
Adrienne Foreman (Texas A&M University), “From Revolt to Style: Movements in Advertising and Text from The Maltese Falcon and The Adventures of Sam Spade”
David Uskovich (University of Texas, Austin), “Programming Practice and Musical Genre: 1980s College Radio and the hifting Meanings of ‘Alternative’”
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R25: Expanded Cinema in Four Dimensions: Origins, Senses, Interactivity, Publicness
Room: Longfellow
Chair: Dimitrios Latsis (University of Iowa)
Dimitrios Latsis (University of Iowa), “Expanding Cinema: Genealogies of the Para-cinematic within American AvantGarde Cinema”
Justus Nieland (Michigan State University), “‘The Scale Is the World’: Expanded Cinema and the Midcentury Sensorium”
Marina Hassapopoulou (University of Florida), “Interactive Cinema: Expanding and Updating Film Theory”
Annie Dell’ Aria (CUNY Graduate Center), “Critical Synthesis: Reading Krzysztof Wodiczko through Film Theory”
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Sunday, March 25, 2012 11:00AM-12:45PM (Session S)
S3: Interwar Sounds
Room: Beacon Hill
Chair: Michael Slowik (University of Iowa)
Jessica Fowler (University of California, Los Angeles), “Open to Interpretation: Multiple Language Versions (MLVs) in the Early Sound Era”
Matthew Perkins (University of California, Los Angeles), “Can You Hear Me Now? Sound Department Creation and Personnel During the Transition to the Talkies”
Brian Hanrahan (Cornell University), “Radio, Film, Radio-Film: Intermedial Comparison in Discourses of Early German Broadcasting”
Michael Slowik (University of Iowa), “Why Max Steiner Was Wrong, Or, Re-recording and the Hollywood Film Score, 1929 to 1931”
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Sunday Individual Papers of Interest:
Paul Fileri (New York University), “Documentary Voices in the Algerian War: State Violence, Colonial Bureaucratic Filmmaking, and the Figure of the Refugee,” 09:00AM-10:45AM, Room: Whittier
Kiranmayi Indraganti (Ramoji Academy of Film and Television), “Song Taxonomies: New Categories of Songs in the Telugu Language Cinema in the Decade of 2000-2010,” Room: Back Bay
Robert Buerkle (University of Pittsburgh), “At a Loss for Words: Portal 2 and the Silent Avatar,” 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Cambridge
Craig Cieslikowski (University of Florida), “Writing Sounds: Cinematic Writing and Cinephilia,” 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Emerson
Inez Hedges (Northeastern University), “White Flash: Silence and Amnesia in Japanese A-Bomb Films,” 11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: St. James
Aniruddha Maitra (Brown University), “‘Narcissisizing’ the Locally Global: Language, Image, and a ‘Touch’ of Untranslatability in Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone,”11:00AM-12:45PM, Room: Stuart
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