SEM 65Th Annual Meeting

SEM 65th Annual Meeting SEM 2020 Abstracts Book – Note to Reader The SEM 2020 Abstracts Book is divided into two sections: Individual Presentations and Organized Sessions. Individual Presentation abstracts are alphabetized by the presenter’s last name, while Organized Session abstracts are alphabetized by the session chair’s last name. Note that Organized Sessions are designated in the Program Book as “Panel,” “Roundtable,” or “Workshop.” Sessions without a designation are composed of individual abstract submissions and will not have an Organized Session Abstract. To determine the time and location of an Individual Presentation, consult the index of participants at the back of the Program Book. To determine the time and location of an Organized Session, see the session number (e.g., 1A) in the Abstracts Book and consult the program in the Program Book. Individual Presentation Abstracts Pages 1 – 84 Organized Session Abstracts Pages 85 – 103 Society for Ethnomusicology 65th Annual Meeting, 2020 Individual Presentation Abstracts The Sonic Dimensions of Placemaking: An Urban Street Festival on the Ground congregations are certainly capable of devising ways to connect composers to and Online melodies in their internal narratives of "our music," many do not do so. Instead, even Helen Abbot, University of Toronto relatively recent melodies have joined the anonymous ranks of "traditional" music. While this practice does threaten Jewish communities' conceptions of their own Once a month between May and October, the streets of Toronto’s Kensington Market tradition, I argue that such an engineered forgetting does serve a communal purpose. are closed to vehicular traffic while buskers, musicians performing on temporary Following sociologist Larry Ray's discussion of the role of migration and remembrance stages, and shoppers fill the neighborhood’s thoroughfares. Visitors are pushed by the in the contemporary klezmer revival (2010), I position the engineered forgetting of crowds and drawn in by sounds with mobile phones in hands to capture and eventually contemporary synagogue composers as a cultural response to the traumas of share online their recordings of the neighborhood. While Kensington is already a tourist migration, language disruption, the communal disruption of the Holocaust, and the attraction, the monthly event known as Pedestrian Sundays (PSK) operates as a kind resurgence of contemporary antisemitism that have marked the American Jewish of urban festival that draws new visitors and customers to the neighborhood--in part experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I suggest that this reluctance to through sound. Interdisciplinary scholarship on festivalization and on PSK itself engage with the source of its song allows American Jewish communities to construct a (McLean & Rahdher 2013) has explored the interrelationship between cultural and narrative bridge between a traumatic past and an uncertain present. I argue that economic agendas of cities and the use of festivals to brand cities with a specific scholars of Jewish music must engage with this requirement for narrative continuity in image as a marketing strategy. This paper investigates how PSK’s sound and music order to be truly effective as communal educators. contributes to attendees’ new associations with a familiar urban space in a process known as “placemaking” (Nunes 2019). Drawing on participant-observation in festival The Thing with Vaporwave: Reassessing Deconstruction events in 2019 and interviews with local businesspeople, musicians and visitors, I first Siel Agugliaro, University of Pennsylvania explore how attendees sense and experience (sonically and otherwise) PSK. I then follow these individuals into social media to observe how they represent the festival’s Emerged in the early 2010s, the avant-garde microgenre known as vaporwave has sonic dimensions and, in some cases, how these representations are used in since received growing critical and scholarly attention. Some authors have interpreted marketing. My paper asks how the festival might participate in newly branding this the genre’s reliance on highly recognizable samples, synthesized sounds, and visual already distinctive urban neighborhood through virtual space and sonic experience, elements from the last two decades of the past century as a critique of capitalism within larger cultural agendas of Canada’s largest city. (Tanner), or as a reflection on the changing status of personal and collective memory in the digital age (Trainer). Yet other scholars have considered the social and aesthetic The Hinchadas That Other Hinchadas Listen To: Digital Circulation and implications of the internet-based production and circulation of vaporwave (Born and Economies of Musical Creativity Among Argentine Soccer Fans Haworth) and have examined this genre’s association with techno-Orientalist fantasies Luis Achondo, Brown University and its malicious appropriation by far-right supporters in the U.S. (McLeod). In this paper, I build on this scholarship and on other contributions in critical theory (Brown, Latin American soccer fans tend to imitate Argentine hinchadas (organizations of fans) Certeau) and music studies (Eidsheim, Feld, Ochoa Gautier, Stokes, Villegas Vélez) to when creating soccer chants, signaling them as the most innovative fans on the advance a new argument. If vaporwave encourages a critique of past and present continent. These chants range from liminal speech utterances to contrafactum globalized consumerist fantasies by adopting and distorting their sonic and visual compositions involving verses, bridges, and choruses. The melodies of the songlike components, I suggest that it also uncovers the limits of a deconstructionist analysis chants come from political marches to jingles to the latest hits promoted by the culture that reduces previous emotional attachment to those same audiovisual worlds to a industries. The lyrics often interweave tropes of loyalty and passion with notions of mere byproduct of neoliberalism. In opposition to this deconstructionist approach, I strength, courage, and bravado. These chants circulate widely on social media, being argue that vaporwave, while exposing the possible risks connected with the global continuously consumed by other Latin American hinchadas. Drawing on ethnographic circulation of music, images, and ideas allowed by the internet, also demonstrates how material gathered in Argentina, this paper examines ideas about creativity and uses of acts of cultural appropriation and fabrication (what Martin Stokes has called “the digital media among Argentine fans. I argue that fans understand chant-creation as making of ‘worlds’”) are inevitable for the emergence of strategies of cultural and part of a noncommercial economy that grants notoriety and affirmation. Creativity is the political resistance. core element of a hit-making apparatus that creates distinctions among hinchadas and the dominance of the Argentine ones in particular. However, creativity not only points The Ethnomusicology of a ‘Forbidden Land’, and the Case of Iran: Contemporary to poetical originality but also to the imaginative capacity to find songs that would Mute Discussions in a Global Dialogue potentially work as soccer chants. In order to find undiscovered chants, fans are Nasim Ahmadian, University of Alberta constantly paying attention to the songs, jingles, and sounds circulating in the aural public sphere. I define this creative mode of listening as aural virtuality. Digital media Decades after Witzleben’s (1997) fundamental “Whose Ethnomusicology?”, academic plays a key role in this circulating economy of musical creativity. Alongside soccer ethnomusicology shares a globally-advancing dialogue. Conversely, Timothy Rice’s stadiums, views, likes, and comments on social media function as key arbiters in this (2017) approach to ethnomusicology’s contributions in times of trouble also evokes competition. questions of ethnomusicology’s timely contribution to itself: how are the academic ethnomusicological discussions becoming muted and marginalized by various forces of Engineered Forgetting: Migration, Cultural Trauma, and Anonymization in our troubled time? More than fifty years since Western ethnomusicologists’ primary Synagogue Repertoire publications on Persian/Iranian area-studies, 21a massive scholarly gap--around a Rachel Adelstein, American Society for Jewish Music fundamentally changed post-republic Iran--remains between local Iranian ethnomusicology, confined to a ‘politically sanctioned corner’ and global Every Sabbath, American synagogues resound with prayers sung to melodies that ethnomusicology with thin literature on Iran, as an ‘isolated’ or ‘left in distant history’ congregants describe as "traditional," or "as old as the hills." However, many of these research-field. While Iranian ethnomusicologists find many classic and frequently- melodies are more recent, having been composed by known, and in some cases living, consulted Western references (e.g., by Zonis, Nettl) as limited or far from the current composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although synagogue context of Iranian culture, the Western academy yet soak in a modest amount of 3 Society for Ethnomusicology 65th Annual Meeting, 2020 Individual Presentation Abstracts classic publications as seeking translated resources and short-term field-research. My Constructing Safe Spaces Through Sound: A Case Study of Kidznotes paper explores Iran’s current ethnomusicological paradigms

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