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- Convenor:
-
Shayne Dahl
(University of Lethbridge)
- Stream:
- Moving bodies: Sounds and Resonance/Corps mouvants: Sons et résonnance
- Location:
- SMD 430
- Start time:
- 5 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
In what ways do humans arrange music to relate to others around them, human or non-human? How do these sonic affinities encode the landscape and movement through it? In this panel, we explore some of the ways in which music influences perceptions of movement through space and time.
Long Abstract:
In this panel, we explore some of the ways in which music influences perceptions of movement through space and time. We consider how a shared affinity for certain sounds and songs can serve as a nostalgic bridge between generations, how it can create a sense of continuity in the wake of historic rupture, and how it figures into narratives of colonial displacement, migration, journeying, and pilgrimage. The case studies engaged with in this panel will speak to central questions in ethnomusicology and the anthropology of music, such as: In what ways do humans organize sound and arrange music to relate to others around them, human or non-human? How do these sonic affinities encode the landscape and movement through it? How do sound and music create place? By thinking beyond the referential components of the lyrical and harmonic conventions of music, we propose to better understand how the intensity, texture, and social context of music encourages people through the movements of life.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Contemporary Swiss folk music lets an emerging generation maintain dynamic relationships with place and heritage over time. I explore how key spaces of experience offer sites for cultivating relationships between the new and the traditional, through participation in a community of musical practice.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how contemporary Swiss folk music provides a means of allowing its performers and participants to maintain deeply-rooted associations with place over time, while engaging in dynamic negotiations of value, meaning, and heritage. Folk music in Switzerland has fluctuated between discourses of tradition and innovation over the last century and a half, having navigated periods of extensive openness as well as intense nationalism. Following decades of competing standards and ideologies, an emerging generation of Swiss folk musicians is learning and participating in this established community of musical practice while bringing their own interpretations and nuances to their musical tradition. My ethnographic research with members of this group provides the material for this paper; I will discuss the way in which a perception of collective heritage forms the basis of a musical genre that remains locally grounded and indisputably Swiss while navigating a constantly forward-moving trajectory. Numerous significant folk music festivals, as well as a recently-developed postsecondary program in Swiss folk music, provide spaces of experience in which relationships between new and established musical idioms, values, traditions, and participants can be discovered and developed. Through processes of learning, interaction, and engagement with local legacy, the meanings and values attached to the country's musical heritage are continuously negotiated and co-constituted in a vibrant social landscape. New creative activity and processes exist alongside, and rooted in, traditional practice and repertoire, as both vertical and horizontal experiences of place are mediated though multigenerational participation in Switzerland's folk music community.
Paper short abstract:
How are the geographical stereotypes in library music tracks created and circulated internationally, shaping perceptions of the “sonic labels” of different countries, while remaining themselves rather rigidly fixed, despite of (or because of) their international dissemination in audiovisual products?
Paper long abstract:
The catalogues of library music offer us a microcosm in their variety of categories: from "Australian" to "French", the musical imaginary of different regions is represented under headings like "Exotic" or "Ethnic". With the appearance of an endless number of sites, the production of library music has become a markedly transnational phenomenon. In keeping with the increasingly unpredictable and uncontrollable movement of cultural objects on the internet (Palumbo-Liu 1997), the possibility that the composer, catalogue manager, user and listener of the same track all belong to different countries is now stronger than ever. Thus a German youtuber might find the perfect "oriental" music for his project, courtesy of an English composer, in a wide circulation of musical stereotypes that, somewhat contradictorily, remain fixed and "congealed" themselves.
Focusing on the specific case of library music tracks associated with Lisbon and Portugal (via their titles, descriptions or keywords), I explore the ways in which library music plays a vital and unacknowledged role in shaping our sonic perceptions of different locales, from advertisement to documentaries. By organizing their tracks in neatly labeled drawers, library music sites offer a peremptory vision of which sounds should be assigned to which places. In that context, it is interesting to question to what extent those tracks are a reflection and, at the same time, a reinforcement of musical imaginaries and stereotypes present in audiovisual products (DeNora 2004; Tagg 2006), rather than compositions concerned with an accurate representation of Lisbon or Portugal's musical reality.
Paper short abstract:
Responding to a decline in salmon stocks, the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in First Nation have created a song calling the fish home. This paper explores this practice of calling in through song, examining its foundations in the stories of the region and tracing its resilience through periods of colonial impact.
Paper long abstract:
In response to a critical decline in Chinook salmon stocks, members of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in First Nation of Dawson City, Yukon created a song called 'Luk Cho Anay', or 'Big Fish Come'. The song calls the fish back home through the water, and was inspired by Elder Angie Joseph-Rear. When asked by other community members what made her such a successful fisher, Angie responded that she'd sing to the fish, calling them in to her; 'You gotta sing to it!' she said. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, this paper will explore this practice of calling in the non-human through song. 'Luk Cho Anay' is a contemporary continuance of similar musical practices that are central in Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in ethnohistory and oral tradition. As such, I will examine the foundations of this musical phenomenon in the 'long ago stories' of the region, tracing its resilience through periods of colonial impact and historic rupture in the oral history of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, and finally, exploring its role in both contemporary subsistence practices and expressive culture. This practice of calling in, but one example of the broader, under-examined diversity of shared musical practices at the human-animal interface, both demonstrates and reaffirms the sociality and personhood of non-human beings within the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in lifeworld.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore the conch trumpet in Japanese mountain asceticism and its contemporary significance
Paper long abstract:
The signature possession of a serious Japanese mountain ascetic is the hora gai or conch trumpet. It usually hangs from the neck by a bright red rope or is cradled, like an infant, in the right arm while the ascetic ascends upon the mountain for their austerities. In centuries past, ascetics would have had to purchase their conch from fishermen or shell distributors near the coast, then craft them into playable trumpets, but these days the hora gai can be ordered online through shops that buy them in wholesale from tropical countries in the Asia Pacific. When a skilled ascetic puts the hora gai to their lips and blows, it generates a piercing tone that rebounds off the surrounding mountain range as if it were a natural amphitheater. The various melodies of the hora gai are sounded by ascetics to mark transitional points in their pilgrimage and rituals, but it also serves as a visible sign of cultural capital between modern ascetics. In this paper, I consider how the hora gai, a millennium old religious instrument, is played with 21st century sentiments. I argue that as a musical relic of pre-industrial religiosity it symbolizes for nostalgic and eco-minded ascetics of the present, the sound of a "new return," to an imagined harmony with the earth that was lost in the wake of modernity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores a Fijian song-dance as a site for decolonizing social relations and accomplishing action in post-2006 coup Fiji. I focus on why and how sonic, rhythmic, and movement-based expressions—all implicated in shifting relations of power—are effective aspects of a decolonizing strategy.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the traditional Fijian song-dance genre called meke as a site for decolonizing social relations and accomplishing action in post-2006 coup Fiji. Specifically, in a time of dramatic change, this paper explores iTaukei (original and native settlers of Fiji) resilience, inclusion, and efficacy in the chant, choreography, sounds, and rhythms of Meke ni Loloma (song-dance of kindly love) created by Damiano Logaivau that is inspired by the trans-local story of the loloma (kindly love) that was given to my mother by her iTaukei nanny, Anna Qumia, during British colonial rule. This chapter critically examines how loloma expressed in Meke ni Loloma as a "freely given gift" is verbally and non-verbally narrated as connected to Fijian mana (as a power of bringing-into-existence (Sahlins 1985), a source of agency in ritual performance (Tomlinson 2006), and a gift from God). In the chant and movement of this dance, loloma and mana migrate and connect Fiji with its Canadian diaspora in the form of a gift. I focus on why and how the trans-local migrations of gifts of the energy within danced expression opened up loloma and mana¬—both notions that have evolved with shifting relations of power, economics, politics, and religion—are active and effective aspects of Logaivau's decolonizing strategy. This meke, as a gift, involves a delayed reciprocity and long-term/long-distance exchange whereby danced expressions of spirit and energy are active aspects of extending the time and space of the social between Fiji and its diaspora.