Conference Program

Ethnomusicology and historical musicology are experiencing a moment, if not of convergence, then of a leaning into one another. While ethnomusicology seems to be reassessing the centrality of the ethnographic present, historical musicology has turned toward studying non-European repertories and their global transmission, particularly in the Early Modern period, and is increasingly oriented towards the notion of a global music history. In short, the traditional binary distinction in which ethnomusicology studies the music of living cultures outside the West and musicology the music of (mostly) dead people within it, seems to have eroded.

 

What we face in the current moment, however, is not merely the inclusion of new topics of inquiry into the disciplines’ traditional methods of study. Instead, methodologies, structuring philosophies, and underlying ideological principles are all being increasingly called into question. For example, what impact does historical research have on the accepted role of ethnography in ethnomusicology?  And how does historical musicology include unnotated (and even unrecorded) traditions in the historical record? Behind these questions lurk specters of colonialism and cultural hierarchies. While these issues have been increasingly acknowledged and debated in recent years, different understandings of how to work in (and out of) the shadow of our traditional research and institutional orientations have put the sub-disciplines under intense pressure, both in scholarship and in the classroom.

 

The increasing alignment between the disciplines notwithstanding, the emergence of a new methodological and philosophical orthodoxy is unlikely – and, perhaps, also undesirable. Perhaps the next convergence, as current trends suggest, will map new networks of dynamic heterogeneity, multiplicity, and flexibility – plural, unruly, but still in dialogue. In this conference, we seek to discover the horizons of this new disciplinary formation – what we are calling “the critical musicologies.” Where do they end? What is their relationship, for example, with performance and with music theory? How do the affordances and obstacles of the academy affect the concrete activities and the material basis of what we do in pedagogy, in curriculum, in music performance, and in the employment of academic musicologists? How is the institution itself an object of critical inquiry? 

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Special Thanks to

 

Jill Pearson, Boston University School of Music

 

Kumera Genet, Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology

 

Boston University College of Fine Arts

 

BU London Academic Center: Christine Goodfellow, Judy Hart, Rubén Parra

 

Disciplinary Crossings was organized by Michael Birenbaum Quintero & Victor Coelho

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, 8 March, 9:00 – 9:15

 

Welcome by Michael Birenbaum Quintero 

(Chair, Boston University Dept. of Musicology & Ethnomusicology)

&

Gregory Melchor-Barz (Director, Boston University School of Music): 

“Musicologies at Boston University: 

The 150th Anniversary of the CFA School of Music” 

 

I. Praxis for the Critical Musicologies, 9:15-10:45

(Victor Coelho, Boston University, Chair)

 

Patrick Nickleson (University of Alberta): “Music Study as a Mode of Address in the Critical Musicologies: Lessons from Black and Indigenous Studies”

 

Running in parallel to the emergent critical musicologies, one can find a “music _study_” that recognizes, well before any other “underlying ideological principle,” that everyone loves music and knows it—intimately, intellectually, and critically. Music scholarship has traditionally expected specific, pre-requisite knowledges, canons, or performance practices (as in university entrance requirements and curriculum) from its readers and students. Instead, music study insists that we in academic music research and pedagogy let our greatest strength be the constant influx of students who love music into universities (Cheng 2020, Cusick 1994). Music study reiterates that our “object”—across sub-disciplines—is a familiar, beloved, and common resource. I borrow music _study_ from black studies scholars Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. In _The Undercommons_ (2013), they refuse institutional “calls to order” and modes of explication in favour of a “study” that is always ongoing. Rather than a "theoretical lens," I learn from these scholars a mode of _addressing_ music—constantly, critically, and lovingly—as a familiar interlocutor in ethico-relational practice. I find this mode of address, too, in the work of other black studies scholars like McKittrick (2021), Best (2004), and Weheliye (2005), and mirrored in Stó:lö music scholar Dylan Robinson’s (2020) call to refuse extractivist reading. In all, I suggest that we practice addressing music as a shared commons rather than our resource-full and proprietary disciplinary domain. Music study would be a reflective practice that reminds us that whenever we “start” class or “begin” an essay, we are most likely interrupting a conversation about music already in progress.

 

Amanda Hsieh (Durham University): “Slow Down, the Anglo-American ‘Global’ Turn!” 

 

Anglo-American musicologies are having a ‘global’ moment. The word ‘global’ is popping up everywhere, in conferences, publications, and job advertisements. This moment seems to have come fast, especially after the summer of 2020, when Black Lives Matters protests erupted on both sides of the Atlantic. The personal and institutional urge to do the right thing – or be seen to do the right thing – has been pervasive. Because music studies are often wrapped up in anxieties about ‘lagging behind’ its sister disciplines in adopting socially equitable approaches to its objects of study (see, for example, debates around New Musicology), this current rush to explore the potential redeeming powers of ‘global’ musics, ‘global’ methodologies’, and ‘global’ perspectives are unsurprising and understandable. This paper, however, calls on Anglo-American musicologies to slow down, especially in respect to publication. Publications shape scholarly debates, but publications also serve as cultural currency within academia. They have the power to direct opinions and to ‘fix things’ in place. Yet not all publications are considered equally and treated the same. Those stemming from the ‘Global North’ often too easily displace those from the ‘Global South’ (scholars of postcolonial studies from the ‘Global South’ have long complained about being unheard). This paper suggests that in this Anglo-American musicologies’ ‘global' turn, it is alright to move slowly, so we may listen more carefully and reach a little further. Instead of claiming space in the globe, perhaps Anglo-American musicologies can do well to create spaces that allow the ‘global’ to come in.

 

Alexander Carpenter (University of Alberta) “The Future is Already Here: Pop Music Scholarship at the Nexus of the Critical Musicologies”

 

The notion of “Disciplinary Crossings” suggests that the ongoing dissolution of the formerly disparate disciplines of historical musicology and ethnomusicology betokens the future of musical scholarship, and that the disciplinary divide will be bridged by heterogeneous “critical musicologies” in dynamic dialogue with each other, with porous borders and in a state of methodological flux. If this is to be the case, then, as this paper argues, the future is already here: the nexus of the convergence of musicological disciplines is pop musicology—a discipline already defined by many of the characteristics of the putative new discipline of “critical musicologies.” Pop musicology has, from the outset, challenged institutional norms and orthodoxies. The disciplinary boundaries of pop musicology, moreover, have long been ill-defined, if not non-existent, with music and non-music specialists alike wading in; as a corollary, its methodologies are promiscuous and evolving. And as an object of study, pop music itself is ontologically undecidable, ensuring that the pop music scholarship retains a kind of dynamic ambivalence at its core. This paper makes that case that a future musicology, one imagined as an “unruly dialogue” between musicology and ethnomusicology, would be better imagined as a three-way conversation.

 

 

II. Keynote Lecture, 11-12

 

Anna Busse Berger (University of California, Davis): “How a Little-Known Music Scholar from Sierra Leone Changed the Agenda of a German Mission Society”

 

Nicholas Ballanta (1892-1962) was a comparative musicologist, yet he differed from all the others of his generation. While Erich Moritz von Hornbostel gave the first description of African music from a Western perspective, Ballanta tried to do the same from an African point of view.  Even though he was the first recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he was unable to get his manuscript published and ended up as a teacher in Sierra Leone.  And yet, it turns out that he had a strong influence on a German mission society when he gave a talk in 1926 at the International Missionary Conference in LeZoute, Belgium.  After his talk all missionaries were instructed to use African music in the church and try to do ethnographic research.  

 

Lunch

 

III. Africa in the Musicologies  1:15-2:45 

(Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Boston University, Chair)

 

Janie Cole (University of Cape Town): “Africa in the World and the World in Africa: Rethinking Entangled Music Histories in a Global and Early Modern Indigenous Knowledge Systems” (v)

 

Recent major contributions to a global early modern music history have tended to focus on European empires in Africa, Asia, South America and the New World, European art music therein, or musical contacts in early colonial ventures through trade, missionisation and settlement, with a general neglect of indigenous and diasporic African and Asian musical lives and practices in early music histories due to their marginalization or perceived absence in and of sources. This paper discusses the validity of oral traditions containing indigenous knowledge systems as legitimate source, neglected African written sources in tandem with the colonial archive (with all its limitations and possibilities), material culture and musical iconography, in the context of the long history of entanglements and musical migrations between East Africa and the Indian Ocean World long before European intervention, and the centrality of Africans to musical modernity in Europe. Challenging conventional music historical narratives that tend to overemphasize change and ‘modernity’ in the West versus stasis and ‘traditional’ outside Europe, it questions notions of exclusivity in global knowledge, a North-South binary and uneven power structures, African agency, and a chasm between a monolithic European essentialism in historiographical music discourse and the reality of continuities between European and non-European practices, and global interactions and musical flows. A ‘global turn’ and radical non-centrism may lead to decoloniality in early music studies, with an emphasis on indigenous knowledge systems and a move away from traditional narratives limited by Eurocentric paradigms to reconstruct Africa’s musical developments on an indigenous platform that speaks to Africa’s early modern musical past that has until now remained largely misrepresented or entirely unexplored.

 

Gregory Melchor-Barz (Boston University): “Encountering the History and Influence of African Music in the Critical Musicologies” 

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In this abbreviated (and admittedly biased) overview of the history of African music in ethnomusicology, I address distinctions in how musical materials from Africa, America, and Europe specifically have been represented in ethnomusicology. Early writers on African music such as A. M. Jones (1958), understood that part of their primary goal in providing knowledge of “African music” as a collective whole was to contribute to a greater understanding of the entire world of music. So, rather than debate the translation of African music systems from local contexts and forms of analyses into Westernized forms of representation—as evidenced in the early work of local scholars such as Kyagambiddwa and others or in the more contemporary efforts of Arom to transcribe polyrhythmic hocketing patterns in Central Africa – this paper instead presents ethnomusicological thought that contributed to a greater system of knowledge about music throughout the world. This paper considers the historical ability of African music scholarship to support the needs of multiple and disparate populations. From the start, representations of African expressive culture have assumed a comfortable position on both coffee tables and library shelves. Ethnographies of African music in everyday life appealed to the public as they also did to students and scholars.

 

Martin Scherzinger (New York University): “Precolonial African Music and the Antinomies of Colonial Time” 

 

One of the challenges facing representations of historical processes of cultural globalization, transnationalism and hybridization concerns the legacy of their colonial-capitalist coordinates. How then do we frame global musical thought in the historical period before settler colonialism? Some key ideas have begun to emerge. The concept of absolute time, for example, gained ascendancy (following considerable intellectual efforts to locate the correct measure of time in 16th- and 17th-century astronomy) and was efficiently and militaristically leveraged in service of colonial governance. Matrices for framing musical time were theorized along similar lines; and, along with frameworks for pitch tuning and temperament, musical instruments, technical devices, electrical currents, instruments of measurement, political nation-states, legal policy regarding intellectual property—regimes of instrumentality itself—were standardized and scaled. How might we shed light on, if not disrupt, the antinomies of 19th-century colonialism wrought by attendant standards—temporal, technical, legal, political, economic, cultural, and, above all, musical? This paper argues that a close analysis of African musical techniques and technologies from the precolonial era might serve as an entryway. To this end, the paper addresses the question of time and tonality in precolonial African musical practices; in particular, an ephemeral fragment of amadinda music from the Kampala region in southern Uganda from the era before the colonial assault on the Lubiri Court in the 1890s.

 

 

IV.  Cultural, Disciplinary, and Temporal Crossings, 3-5

 

Rachana Vajjhala (Boston University): “Lords of Dance, Gods of Blue”

 

Nearly fifty years ago, Joann Kealiinohomoku wrote: “[t]he question is not whether ballet reflects its own heritage.  The question is why we seem to need to believe that ballet has somehow become acultural.  Why are we afraid to call it an ethnic form?”  While Kealiinohomoku aimed to challenge her fellow dance scholars, this paper recasts—and begins to answer—her question by considering its prehistory.  My case study will be the Ballets Russes’s Le Dieu bleu (1912).  As usual, the production featured superstar collaborators: scenario by Jean Cocteau, choreography by Michel Fokine, music by Reynaldo Hahn, and Vaslav Nijinsky as the titular blue god himself.  But even that roster, coupled with audience appetites for orientalist ballets, did not ensure success.  While some critics lauded Léon Bakst’s sumptuous décor and others remarked on Fokine’s “translation of representative Hindu iconography into the dynamics of dance,” many found the music quite trite.  In this way, the work presents an opportunity to unfurl cultural intersections in several different expressive registers.  Hahn’s score utilizes sonic shorthand—such as sinuous chromaticism—to signal a generic eastern-ness from its opening measures.  Fokine’s archaeological study of Indian artifacts for Le Dieu bleu coincides with his examination of Greek antiquities forDaphnis et Chloé, which premiered just a few weeks later.  But how are we to read this connection when the former ballet staged an ongoing dance tradition while the latter attempted to reconstruct lost gestural practices?  This paper confronts ballet’s supposed aculutural status, to recall Kealiinohomoku’s turn of phrase, through a consideration of Le Dieu bleu's multifarious crossings.

 

Marié Abe (Boston University): “The Poetics of Mishearing: Reimagining Historical Affinities through Ethiopian and Japanese Popular Musics”

 

Mishearing is a common acoustic byproduct of human encounters across difference. As global circulation of sound recording is often marked by uneven access and obduracy (Steingo 2015), cultural imaginaries that emerge from listening to such recordings across geographical, historical, and cultural difference can generate unexpected and generative “mishearing.” How might we understand the potentialities of sound when it is misheard? What do we make of hearing when it creatively transcends the limits of aural intelligibility? This paper is a preliminary exploration of the phenomenon of aural apophenia (Lelpselter 2016)—error of perception, a kind of mishearing—, to theorize the potentialities of sound to confuse, allure, and bring to life yet-to-exist, imagined affinities across difference. I pursue this inquiry by tracing the unlikely aesthetic resonances and cultural affinities between Japan and Ethiopia through the circulation of musical sounds of enka, a sentimental popular music genre from 1950s Japan. By tracking the circulation of enka from Japan to Ethiopia—via Japan’s former colony Korea, where Ethiopian soldiers fought along the UN troops during the Korean War—, I explore how imagination and desire conditions our hearing and formation of affective alliances, and how these uncanny resemblances are listened to by others in return. Through this analysis, this paper aims to contribute to the growing body of literature historicizing the Africa-East Asia ties, and the critique of the Anglophone-centric discourses of global circulation within music studies. Further, the paper probes methodological questions around what it means to practice “sounded anthropology” of mishearing across difference. What happens if we take seriously the quirky, misheard imaginaries of musical affinities across difference? How can we track affordances of sound as both material objects in circulation and as ephemeral imaginaries produced through generative mishearings? 

 

 

Supeena Insee Adler and Decha Srikongmuang (UCLA): “Recovering a Lost Voice from Siam’s Earliest Musical Ambassadors” (virtual)

 

This paper is developed from both archival research and contemporary applied research done in Thailand and the United Kingdom, concerning a group of Siamese musicians that travelled to London to perform at the International Inventions Exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall, in 1885. Travelling under orders from the King of Siam (Thailand), this is the first group of Siamese musicians in history to travel to Europe. The authors focus on one musician in particular who died while in London and whose body was buried in 1885 in a private plot at Brompton Cemetery in London. Currently, his grave is unmarked, and his story is not widely known, even in Thailand. We work to uncover his story and the story of the extraordinary journey of these musicians, beginning from a travel diary written by another one of the musicians. One goal of this project is to generate support for honoring the service of this musician in modern Thailand, by officially marking his grave in London and celebrating this important legacy with performances by contemporary musicians. The researchers have located his grave and visited the site, and have secured the support of the Thai Embassy in London to pursue this project further. This project is an example of combining methodologies from both applied ethnomusicology and historical ethnomusicology, bringing historical research into contact with contemporary musical communities.

 

 

7:00 Dinner

The Coopers Arms

87 Flood Street, London, SW3 5TB

 

 

Thursday, 9 March 

 

V. Discipline and Musicological Labor in the Academy, 9-11

(Marié Abe, Boston University, Chair)

 

Hedy Law (University of British Columbia): “Assembling Global Music History in the Academy” (v)

 

Despite interest in global music history shared by musicologists and ethnomusicologists in major music scholarly associations (i.e., the IMS, SEM, and AMS), a comparable level of interest is typically not shared within a North American university music department or School of Music. By contrast, ethnomusicology and musicology often coexist within the university knowledge ecosystem as "subdivisions." Each represents its respective discipline's values, histories, and historiographies but shows more local-level divergence than convergence. Moreover, structural, institutionalized factors—low turnovers of faculty members, limited resources, traditions of curriculum, and big ensembles—discourage deep inter-divisional dialogues, further delaying the development of global music history as a trans- and post-disciplinary subject. Thus, the academy that fosters music studies often poses recalcitrant challenges to the teaching of global music history. In this paper, I share some of my observations at the University of British Columbia that help to steer around institutionalized constraints. I apply Bruno Latour's Actors-Network-Theory framework to "assemble" global music history by "actors" outside the School of Music. In particular, I focus on the course offerings by the departments of history; English; Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies; Asian Studies; critical indigenous studies; and anthropology—that have introduced elements of global history into their curriculum. By collaborating with these actors in the academy, I note that even music students who come to learn Western art music may become more open to learning a global music history that they consider meaningful. Some see the subject as preparatory groundwork for becoming socially responsible global citizens.

 

Richard David Williams (SOAS University of London): “Early Modernists teaching Bollywood: Present Trends and Possible Futures in the Study of South Asian Musical Pasts”

 

It is an exciting time to be working on South Asian music history. While music from the region—especially India—has had a significant presence in ethnomusicology programmes for decades, more recently, historical studies have been proliferating. This expanding field of inquiry has been informed by ethnographic methodologies, but also responds to the questions posed across South Asian cultural history, area studies, philology, literary studies, religious studies, and, often, Euro-American historical musicology. Given this efflorescence, we might reflect on whether South Asian music history is a distinctive field, with a different texture to research on other regions: for one thing, South Asia has extensive archives that relate to music, including historical traditions of written scholarship and musicology, which are not available for many other musical systems. We might also consider whether this work should be read as “historical ethnomusicology”, a decentred (or “global”) historical musicology, or as a branch of South Asian cultural history. This nomenclature would have a bearing on how scholars might frame their work, and the audiences their research would reach. It would also have a bearing on the curricula, structures, and employment practices of music departments: should scholars of sixteenth-century music be expected to teach ethnographic methods and Bollywood? In this paper, I survey recent trends in South Asian music history and explore their interdisciplinarity and mixed methodologies. I will then consider which aspects of music history have been neglected in recent times, and question how far this speaks to the disciplinary framings of this research.

 

Ana-María Alarcón Jimenez: “Disciplinary Walls and Music Research in Spanish Academia” (virtual)

 

In this paper, I aim to put into practice what scholar Sara Ahmed has called “complaint as testimony”. Departing from my own experience as a Colombian ethnomusicologist, professionally educated in the United States but working in Spain for the past decade, I wish to reflect on the impact that local disciplinary walls can have on the development of Ethnomusicology and ethnomusicologists. Focusing on the circulation of discourses on disciplinary crossings in the critical musicologies, I will show how institutional settings can collide with up-to-date scholarship, even though these same settings would support and encourage the production of leading and internationally updated research. What strategies have ethnomusicologist developed, as both students and professionals, to walk this uneven terrain in the realm of Spanish academia? How has this impacted the development of ethnographic and historical research?

 

Natalie Farrell (University of Chicago): “On Working Through It: Labor as Theory and Praxis in Critical Musicologies”

 

What “works” in historical musicology starts to fall apart when we ask who is working when, and the answer is us, now. Recent inquiries into musical labor by Marianna Ritchey and Will Robin have demonstrated how institutional orientations place strain on once-reliable underlying ideological principles in work that is both historical and ethnographic. Meanwhile, the start of a new labor movement in academia has raised questions about the consequences facing us as researchers crossing ideological borders with real fences in the form of funding, grants, and teaching assignments. In this paper, I contend that shifting ontologies of labor—both within the material conditions of scholarship and as an object of inquiry—have contributed to the the emergence of critical musicologies and its necessary reconsiderations of disciplinary divides. Drawing on work by Gabriel Winant, Sarah Jaffe, and Kirsten Speyer Carithers, I place contemporary labor theory in conversation with traditional ethno- and historical musicological methodologies as I reflect on my experiences as a graduate worker in a historical musicology track studying contemporary classical music labor while organizing a union at a major American academic institution. I posit several ways in which the scholarly traditions of labor history might ameliorate tensions between the two musical subdisciplines while providing a model for what ethical, equitable critical musicology might look like within the increasingly interdisciplinary university. I identify concrete pedagogical needs and provide suggestions for how they might be met for students whose work blurs subdisciplinary boundaries without furthering divisions of cognitive labor.

 

 

VI.  Reframing Histories, 11:15-12:45

 

Brian Barone (Boston University): “‘No Such Thing as Music?’ Historical Ethnomusicology and the Music Concept”

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The twentieth-century disciplinary history of the Anglophone musicologies was marked by a series of critical irruptions—ethnomusicology, the “New Musicology,” and sound studies most prominent among them. One striking twenty-first century inheritance of these developments is a broadly-accepted skepticism toward the category “music,” which is criticized as a false universal on the one hand and a misleading abstraction on the other. There is, it is sometimes said, actually “no such thing as music.” As productive as this critique of music has been, however, there is much still to be gained from “music”—if it is re-approached from a particular angle. Drawing on examples from around and across the history of the Black Atlantic, this paper suggests understanding “music” as the distinctly modern and increasingly pervasive condition of doing and understanding one’s sonic practices in relation to those of other places, times, and people. Music in this sense is not a mere abstraction, but rather what some philosophers have called “real abstraction:” an outcome of particular social practices that itself becomes an agent in the world. And music is not a false universal, but a relentless process of growth that strives for totalization. Based on these premises, this paper outlines a historical ethnomusicology that would track this ramifying music as it abstracts, grows, and interacts with non-musics across time and space. By homing in on these points of crossing, this method hopes to make “music” newly useful within and beyond the critical musicologies.

 

Miki Kaneda (Boston University) “‘The John Cage Shock was a Fiction’: The 1960s Japanese Avant-Garde and Experimental Music as a Transnational Practice”

 

Lore has it that the 1962 trip to Japan by John Cage with David Tudor shocked the Japanese musical avant-garde into action. The impact of this visit is now recalled alongside the much-circulated idea of the “John Cage Shock.” Cage’s trip indeed coincides with the period when the Japanese avant-garde began entering the international scene on an institutional scale. But the narrative of the John Cage Shock forecloses a story about how Japanese artists formed their own musical avant-garde in the same contemporary moment as the United States and Europe in the 1960s. This presentation rejects the assumption that the John Cage Shock instigated the 1960s Japanese avant-garde and challenges the notion of the dominance of Western Europe and North America as the uncontested sites of origin in narratives about experimental practice. Combining ethnomusicological and musicological approaches sheds light on a perspective on Japanese experimental music as a transnational practice that the lens of the Cage Shock occludes. From the vantage point of 1960s Japan, I argue that the elements understood as inappropriate or illegitimate in hegemonic Euro-American frameworks of the avant-garde in fact constitute the very terms of a transnational avant-garde rooted in the social and cultural conditions of 1960s Japan. 

 

Julia Byl (University of Alberta): “Sonic Ecologies of the Sumatran Highlands”

 

This paper considers the discourse of indigeneity within the music history of the North Sumatran highlands. In doing so, it pushes back against the tendency within global music history to privilege networks of connection, found in archives assumed to be universally legible and audible. For a few decades, cultural historians of Indonesia have championed the legacy of Islam in Southeast Asia, an effort to correct willful colonial prejudice (Sears 1996, Laffan 2011); earlier Dutch and French colonial scholars had themselves touted Southeast Asia’s place within “Greater India,” a broad cultural domain that influenced the religious, textual and musical practices of the archipelago (e.g. Bosch, Coedes, Mus). Yet both historiographical traditions make the same move: Java, Sumatra, and Bali are important insofar as they exist within a global network, or a religious cosmopolis. Transformative scholarship by historian Faizah Zakaria on Sumatran indigeneity pushes back against finding value only in contact: in theorizing “sacral ecologies,” she indicts a “geographical flattening” that accompanied “converting out of indigeneity” (2017:2). In light of Zakaria’s insights, I re-evaluate my own account of North Sumatran ritual music (redacted 20__)—which leaned strongly on the prestige of the global—by considering highland sounds within a multi-species, ecological framework, concentrating on the Indragiri nobat and the Toba gondang ensembles. By listening in this way, I aim to imagine a global music history that makes room for archives that resist reading, peoples that resist contact, and sound that can best be interpreted within the landscapes that formed it.

 

Lunch

 

VII.  Reframing Histories II, 1:45-3:15

(Rachana Vajjhala, Boston University, Chair)

 

Michael Iyanaga (William & Mary): “Reconstructing the Life of Anna Vieira dos Santos, c. 1895-1933: Notes on Ethnography as Atlantic History” (v)

 

In this paper, I reconstruct the life of a woman named Anna Vieira dos Santos, who lived her relatively short existence in the small city of Cachoeira, in the northeast of Brazil. Although her historical footprint as found in archival documents is about as light as they come, her historical presence in the myths, memories, and songs performed by her descendants is formidable, vibrant, and fascinating. As such, any attempt to reconstruct Anna's life requires a reliance on methods that go beyond the types of material evidence––documents, photographs, artifacts––that have typically served as source material for the modern Western craft of history. Indeed, we gain far more historical insight about Anna's life by turning to the stories people tell, the songs people sing, and the foods people eat than we do by consulting the documents found in archives. As I will demonstrate, our ability to construct a historical narrative about Anna is reliant on the types of information retrievable almost exclusively through ethnographic fieldwork. What's more, by reconstructing her life we are also doing Atlantic history, given how embedded Anna was in the cosmological, social, and aesthetic processes that gave birth to what we now call the Atlantic world. This case study thus suggests not only the benefits of reconfiguring ethnographic fieldwork as a historical methodology––and as a method for doing Atlantic history no less––but it also compels us to question the century-old assumptions that continue to allow scholars to place "ethnography" in opposition to "history," an erroneous binary if ever there was one.

 

Michael Birenbaum Quintero (Boston University): “What Is This ‘Globe,’ ‘Music,’ and ‘History’ in Global Music History? (And What Does It Mean for the Musicologies?)”

 

Olivia Bloechl (University of Pittsburgh): “Indigenizing Sound Materials in the Ohio Country Fur Trade” (v)

 

Sound instruments and soundmaking materials were part of the trans-Atlantic fur trade from its beginning, and by the 1700s Europeans were transporting large quantities of bells, jaw harps, and other manufactured soundmakers westward to the multiethnic Indigenous world of the Ohio country. Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, Seneca-Cayuga, Wyandot, and other peoples acquired these imported soundmakers as diplomatic gifts and as goods purchased on credit in frontier stores. As in other aspects of the fur trade, Ohio peoples’ preferences shaped the kinds and quality of sound materials they acquired, and they used them in ways that indigenized them. Women sewed bells, tinkling cones, or pierced thimbles onto clothing, while men remade kegs or kettles into drums. Scrap tin became fiddles, lead shot lent its sound to rattles, and jaw harps were gifted to children or buried with loved ones. My work with colonial trade and diplomatic records has yielded distinct patterns of acquisition that, read alongside other evidence, can help us understand how Indigenous peoples purposively used and reused foreign sound materials in the “convergence zone” (Tenzin 2017) of the Ohio. As a case study, I discuss the 1775-76 negotiations with American representatives at Fort Pitt, where Indigenous diplomats acquired many soundmakers as gifts and trade goods. The logics of their efforts to garner soundmakers and other goods only really emerge when understood from the “Native ground” (DuVal 2006) of their communities’ flourishing agrarian towns, and consumption patterns and other information in traders’ records can provide an unexpected opening onto this soundworld.

 

 

VIII. Discipline, Pedagogy, and the Institution, 3:30-5:00

 

Brett Boutwell and Blake Howe (Louisiana State University): “The Musician in Society: A Post-Disciplinary Framework for the Undergraduate Music Classroom” (v)

 

If a convergence between the methods and objects of historical musicology and ethnomusicology is indeed afoot in scholarship, stubborn structural barriers can nevertheless inhibit its application to the undergraduate classroom. Legacy courses, frequently taught by untenured and contingent faculty, may come saddled with built-in frameworks that stymie efforts at disciplinary boundary crossing. Such is the case with both the area-studies framework that often structures surveys of “world music” and the diachronic one that guides most overviews of western notated music, many of them still misbranded as “music history” in course catalogs. A forthcoming textbook from W.W. Norton titled The Musician in Society aspires to give music scholars of diverse methodological backgrounds a flexible, modular structure for examining the cultural practice of music making without the limitations of either an explicitly geographical or chronological framework and without a wholly presentist or historicist perspective. In this presentation, the book’s authors explore its value for the post-disciplinary music classroom. Each of the book’s twelve chapters examines a role that individuals play vis-à-vis other people in a musical network, emphasizing neglected concepts such as adaptation and dissemination alongside familiar ones like performance and composition. Each chapter’s role is explored across eight independent case studies spanning time and place; instructors are free to pick as many or as few as they prefer without compromising the chapter’s pedagogical utility. Taken individually, the case studies offer snapshots of cultural particularity; juxtaposed, they allow instructors to explore cultural difference and similarity in a non-hierarchical and non-tokenistic framework.

 

David R. M. Irving  (ICREA & Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, CSIC): “The Dolmetsches Between the Disciplines: Convergences and Collaborations in the Early Music Revival”

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Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) and Mabel Dolmetsch (1874–1963) are well known for their pioneering contributions to the ‘early music revival’ in western Europe and North America. Together with their family, friends, and colleagues they researched, restored, reconstructed, and revived historical instruments that had fallen out of use, and performed and taught music and dances pre-dating the nineteenth century. Their activities have been well documented by musicologists and historians, and the influence of several generations of their descendants and students has reached far and wide. Less well known, however, are their interactions with scholars of other cultures, including Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Ratan Devi (Alice) Coomaraswamy, Henry George Farmer, A. H. Fox-Strangways, Marie-Thérèse de Lens, Devar Surya Sena, and others. Primary materials in the Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch Collection (Cambridge University Library) and the Zayas Archive, Seville, show that the Dolmetsches engaged in discussions about the convergence and diffusion of various music cultures; they also collaborated with performers from traditions outside ‘western art music’. In recent studies of the early music movement, a number of musicologists and practitioners (such as John Butt) have noted synergies that have existed since the 1970s between this field and ethnomusicology. Here I attempt to explore analogous – but quite different – links between comparative musicology and the early music revival in the first few decades of the twentieth century, through the lens of the ‘Dolmetsch Circle’. I suggest that disciplinary crossings and experimentation in the interstices of musical practice and research were significant aspects of the Dolmetsches’ work.

 

 

Victor Coelho (Boston University): “Translational Musicology”

 

The theory and practice of Translational Research are well-known in the sciences, in medical research, and even to a lesser degree in some fields in the Humanities. As an activity that understands how clinical research, for example, is leveraged into public value through the production and distribution of new drugs and treatments to patients, Translational Research is essentially an interface between basic research and the “market” (or for us, at least, “any”

market). In American universities, where external funding is the backbone of the sciences, the move towards translational research has been a prerogative for almost twenty years, given the prioritization of research envelopes and the creation of centers dedicated to this activity by the National Institutes of Health and other major sources of funding.

 

In this talk I will outline how translational research can help re-engineer the musicologies that are the topics at the center of this conference. I will identify research that has already been “translational,” but never acknowledged as such, and suggest ways how our existing and future work can influence how we ask and (importantly) resolve questions about music, find entrepreneurial value for students, and retool our knowledge into application.

 

 

5 pm Closing Reception (on site)