The Call: Interpellation and the Ethical Turn in Electronic Dance Music
12 October 2017, 5pm
The Barn at St John’s College (Kendrew Quad)
Luis-Manuel Garcia (University of Birmingham)
Recently, electronic dance music (EDM) discourse in cities around the globe has shown an increasing interest in rediscovering the genre’s roots in subaltern communities. Prompted by the contemporary “EDM boom” and concomitant worries about historical “whitewashing,” this trend is most visible in the proliferation of revisionist-historical articles, polemics, “thinkpieces,” and oral histories published in EDM media. This discursive shift coincides with a period of increasing political polarization, which has re-politicized dancefloors by making explicit the affinities and aspirations already implicit in these nightlife worlds. These conditions have given rise to an “ethical turn” in EDM discourse and practice, which has taken a markedly activist form in Berlin. This paper tracks the “call to ethical action” in that city, attending to the various forms it takes as nightlife organizers summon dancer-listeners to political engagement. Such appeals manifest as musical invocations, sonic conjurations, verbal appellations, and visual demonstrations. Althusser’s notion of “interpellation” highlights the coercive ideological force of the call as well as its impact on subjectivity. In Berlin’s EDM scenes, such calls often oscillate between a “call out,” addressing listeners as complacent or complicit with hegemony, and a “call on,” hailing them as the politically progressive, “woke” subjects that many of them imagine themselves to be. Importantly, these calls are usually intended for the same audiences, using negative/confrontational language to shake them awake and then positive/encouraging language to channel their energies towards concrete political action. This paper provides an account of this emerging appellative practice, which seeks to reshape audiences by hailing them as political subjects.
Music as Technology
19 October 2017, 5pm
The Barn at St John’s College (Kendrew Quad)
Mark Katz (University of North Carolina)
In this lecture I argue that technology does not stand apart from music, influencing it from the outside, but is a part of music, integral to every aspect of musical activity and musical life. Technology has been a part of human music-making since at least the Paleolithic Age. In fact, history has no record of a pre-technological age of music. Humans are, and have always been, creatures of technology and of music. If we want to understand how music is made and experienced, if we want to know how music travels and how it gains meaning in human societies, we must investigate its relationship—ancient and inextricable—with technology.
Polyphony – Systematics and Ontogenesis
26 February 2018, 5pm
The Barn at St John’s College (Kendrew Quad)
Simha Arom and Robert Kaddouch
To produce a melody is one thing; to couple it with a second one is yet another; but to create unity between several different parts at the same time is a major problem that has called for solutions in different historical epochs and in various cultural contexts. Polyphony – the simultaneous unfolding of several voices – is precisely the art of making different melodic sequences coexist as a whole, which transcends each one of them separately, while preserving its own individuality. It is fascinating to observe how, across places, eras and cultures, people have used similar polyphonic techniques. Through comparative listening, we will identify polyphonic processes common to different musical heritages, chosen independently of epochs and geographical areas. We will discover unsuspected kinships, particularly between the polyphonies of the Pygmies of Central Africa and those composed in Europe in the Middle Ages, as well as between the traditional polyphonies of Georgia and those of the early Renaissance.
After Simha Arom’s presentation involving comparative listening to various polyphonic processes common to different forms of musical heritage, chosen independently of the time periods, geographical areas and modes of transmission (written or oral), Robert Kaddouch will comment on videos of very young children (between eight months and six years old) in improvisation situations during which they spontaneously draw on some of these processes. The concept of conductibility will shed light on these manifestations.
"Working Catfish Row: Writing, Teaching, and Singing Porgy and Bess"
10 May 2018 at 5pm
The Barn at St John’s College (Kendrew Quad)
Naomi André (Associate Professor, University of Michigan)
Through an evaluation of the historical context for Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, set in the 1920s and first performed in 1935 during Jim Crow, I also consider how this work creates multiple meanings when it is performed today. Now over 80 years later we have seen the Civil Rights movement, an era where policies around incarceration have been called the “New Jim Crow,” and a current climate where many contend that #blacklivesmatter. Porgy and Bess has a special place in American music history and Gershwin referred to it as a “folk opera.” Yet these three terms—“American,” “folk,” and “opera”—resonate differently for black and white communities; the sonic representation of blackness through language (dialect) and vocal style projects meaning through embodiment. While the work was created by a white and Jewish American compositional team, it was performed by black artists. Indeed, Porgy and Bess voices many experiences. After singing in the chorus of a recent production of this work, it is clear that it has withstood the test of time with such memorable tunes and lyricism, even while it is embedded in problematic stereotypes. In writing about, teaching, and singing Porgy and Bess, I find it an opera that is easy to love and so difficult to hate; yet the bigger story is more complicated.
The Itineraries of Portuguese Fado: From the Afro-Brazilian Roots to UNESCO’s Patrimonialization
29 May 2018, 5pm
The Barn at St John’s College (Kendrew Quad)
Rui Vieira Nery
Abstract: The history of Portuguese Fado is a long process of intercultural exchange. In the multicultural context of colonial Brazil, African rhythms and dance patterns combine with European harmonies and musical forms to generate a sung dance of a strong sensuality which in the 1820s and 30s crosses the Atlantic to reach the Lisbon working-class neighborhoods along the harbor of the Tagus. The interaction between the Brazilian original model and the local Portuguese song and dance traditions will lead to a gradual disappearance of the dance component and the softening of the syncopated rhythms, in favor of a nostalgic and plaintive narrative song, usually performed with a strong rubato and an intense emotional expression of the poem. When the bohemian aristocracy and the urban middle classes come into contact with Fado, in the 1860s and 70s, the genre reaches the Vaudeville stage, is published in sheet music for domestic performance and will eventually become, from 1900 on, one of the pillars of the record industry in Portugal. But at the same time, in its original working-class context, it is used as a militant song associated with the beginnings of the Labor and socialist movement in the country.
Subjected to a stern censorship and to strict regulations under the Dictatorship established by the military coup of May 1928, Fado becomes a professional activity located mostly at the new “Fado houses”, but also expands throughout the country thanks to the beginnings of Radio (mid-1920s), and later of Television (1957). Thanks to the iconic figure of Amália Rodrigues, from the mid-1940s on, it enters the world show business circuit. Both Amália and later Carlos do Carmo will have a decisive role in the poetical and musical renovation of the genre, but the frequent association of Fado to the official ideology of the Dictatorship will lead to its temporary rejection after the democratic revolution o April 1974. Starting in the 1900s, however, a new generation of Fado singers emerges, with great impact not only within the younger audiences in Portugal but also internationally, in the context of the so-called “World Music”. On November 27th, 2011 Fado is inscribed by UNESCO in the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Douglas Kahn and Seth Kim-Cohen
13 June 2018, 3pm
The Barn at St John’s College (Kendrew Quad)
Douglas Kahn: “Sounds and Vibrations Are Two Energies among Others”
Sound is one energy among others—physically, sensorially, experientially, rhetorically, artistically, technologically, culturally, environmentally, historically, etc.—as is vibration. On aggregate early sound studies were grouped around the ear, especially viz. the eye, cinema analysis with the sound turned off, visual studies and the visual arts, whereas over the last decade cultural theories of vibrations in music and the arts have moved from the ear out over the body and onward to other hopeful sites of materiality, have pulsed across dance floors and further still across the vacuum of outer space since the big bang downbeat in rhythmic beats-per-universe. This talk will ask how larger fields of energies beyond the mechanics and acoustics of sound and vibration might provide possibilities to artistic and analytical practices closer to home.
Seth Kim-Cohen: “The Pages Are In French: Scritti Politti’s Messthetics”
Scritti Politti’s work in the 1980s, despite their avowed intentions, is “conceptual” in a particular sense of that term. It relies explicitly on its parerga: on history (writ large) and the band’s own history, as well as a set of discursive supplements, to formulate its meanings. As slick as Scritti Politti’s music gets, it is never slippery enough to fully evade the entanglements of its sites and citations. Whatever meaning the music generates or acquires, it does so via this dispersed interaction with context. While the band may have turned their collective back on the lessons of Art & Language, and of conceptual art more broadly, the extrinsic construction of meaning is not something the artist can accept or reject. This construction is the product of the unconscious (Lacan), of hegemony (Gramsci), of differance (Derrida). All aesthetics is messthetics.
