Society for Ethnomusicology 58Th Annual Meeting Abstracts
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Society for Ethnomusicology 58th Annual Meeting Abstracts Sounding Against Nuclear Power in Post-Tsunami Japan examine the musical and cultural features that mark their music as both Marie Abe, Boston University distinctively Jewish and distinctively American. I relate this relatively new development in Jewish liturgical music to women’s entry into the cantorate, In April 2011-one month after the devastating M9.0 earthquake, tsunami, and and I argue that the opening of this clergy position and the explosion of new subsequent crises at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in northeast Japan, music for the female voice represent the choice of American Jews to engage an antinuclear demonstration took over the streets of Tokyo. The crowd was fully with their dual civic and religious identity. unprecedented in its size and diversity; its 15 000 participants-a number unseen since 1968-ranged from mothers concerned with radiation risks on Walking to Tsuglagkhang: Exploring the Function of a Tibetan their children's health to environmentalists and unemployed youths. Leading Soundscape in Northern India the protest was the raucous sound of chindon-ya, a Japanese practice of Danielle Adomaitis, independent scholar musical advertisement. Dating back to the late 1800s, chindon-ya are musical troupes that publicize an employer's business by marching through the From the main square in McLeod Ganj (upper Dharamsala, H.P., India), streets. How did this erstwhile commercial practice become a sonic marker of Temple Road leads to one main attraction: Tsuglagkhang, the home the 14th a mass social movement in spring 2011? When the public display of merriment Dalai Lama. A spiritual soundscape has been created on this thoroughfare was discouraged in the name of national mourning, who were these musicians over the past five decades, since Tibetans began to flee Chinese-occupied Tibet who chose to sound out festively against the government's energy policies and in 1959. In contrast, today inside Tibet the soundscape surrounding the Potala its much-criticized reactions to the disasters? Contextualizing the anti-nuclear Palace (former residence of the Dalai Lama) is pervaded by a Chinese protests within a larger arc of Japanese social movements, this paper explores soundscape: mainly nationalistic propaganda and Chinese popular music. In how the particular sounds of chindon-ya transposed from the commercial to Mcleod Ganj, the soundscape surrounding the new temple complex is achieved the political, how they mobilized the crowd physically and affectively, and through processes of chanting monks, reverent visitors, and vendors selling what historical moments, translocal relations, and social differences were Tibetan-made goods, often with music pouring out of their makeshift stalls being articulated through chindon-ya sounds. Specifically, this paper pays onto the concrete street, and down the mountainside. These sounds particular attention to the affective principles that inform chindon-ya amalgamate throughout Temple Road, creating a unique space that performance by considering their role in the anti-nuclear protests vis-à-vis supplicates anticipation of a visit to the Dalai Lama's temple. In addition to Anne Allison's notion of affective activism" in a time characterized by the exploring the function of this soundscape, my discussion will address a precariousness of economic and social life in contemporary Japan." commentary by locals and visitors, laity and sangha, on this crafted environment and what it means to a community grasping onto their diasporic Sing to the Lord a New Song: Music and the Creation of an American Tibetan identities. Ultimately, by using the soundscape as an outlet through Judaism which to explore this area, I converse with the community and those vested in Rachel Adelstein, University of Chicago it, which results in the unquestionable function of sound in the creation of a spiritual nucleus. I will argue that in McLeod Ganj, Temple Road is a sonic Although Jewish communities have been part of American society since the landmark that helps to create an atmosphere of reverence and the evocation of seventeenth century, it was the twentieth century that saw the creation of a spiritual energy and autonomy. distinctive American Jewish cultural identity. Benjie-Ellen Schiller observes that, after the Holocaust severed cultural ties between American Jews and Negotiating (Post?) Orientalism: White Women and North American their countries of origin, liberal Jewish communities began to devise new ways Taiko of worship, with the result that the sound of the American synagogue took on Angela Ahlgren, Ohio University a character of its own. In this paper, I explore the ways in which liberal American Jews developed a sonic worship environment that reflected their Since the late 1960s, Asian American taiko players have harnessed the form’s perception of themselves as Americans. Working from field research and potential for empowerment, its expansive choreographies and thundering recent historical accounts and memoirs, I discuss the rise of synagogue music drums challenging post-war images of Asians as silent, passive, and weak. derived from the sounds of summer camp songs and the folk-rock music Taiko’s physical and sonic largesse have similarly inspired women, who popular in the 1960s and 1970s. I trace the ties between the rise in summer comprise the majority of North American taiko players. For white women, camp attendance and the current popularity of synagogue composers who taiko can be both a site of coalition and contradiction. White women work in the guitar-based singer-songwriter tradition, including Debbie participate widely in taiko not only as performers, but also as students and Friedman, Shlomo Carlebach, Jeff Klepper, Craig Taubman, and some teachers, yet performance contexts point up their oft-unmarked whiteness as members of the Women Cantors? Network. Following Jeffrey Summit, I visible and exceptional. Based on ethnographic interviews and my experience 1 Society for Ethnomusicology 58th Annual Meeting Abstracts as a white, female taiko player, this paper theorizes the relationship between diverse audience, mostly comprised of young enthusiasts who felt identified gender, whiteness, and Orientalism from an embodied, practice-based with the rebellious and revolutionary attitude of the group. Lavista, and a perspective. I contextualize contemporary white women’s interest in taiko group formed by Nicolás Echevarría, Fernando Baena, and Juan Cuauhtémoc within a longer history of white women’s engagements with Asian performing Herrejón -later substituted by Antero Chávez-, were "transgressing" arts. I examine contemporary white women’s political and emotional conventional instruments while reviving the microtonal harps and pianos of investments in taiko performance to ask why we gravitate to Asian/American Julián Carrillo. The emphasis placed on the sensorial aspect of the experience art forms and how we negotiate taiko as a contradictory site of cross-racial by performers and audience members alike, granted Quanta an coalition and (post?)-Orientalist pleasure. unconventional positive reception. By blending musique concrète, electronic, and microtonal sounds, theirs was regarded by critics and audiences as a "true Challenges and Opportunities in Mapping Traditional/Folk Music: new music." Performing on the streets opened sites of contradiction, where Musical World Map as A Case Study social expectations and musical traditions collided. Through a combination of Ozan Aksoy, The Graduate Center, CUNY oral history and archival research, this paper explores Quanta's trajectory, focusing on how its activities functioned as a "popularizing democratic I developed Musical World Map, a digital mapping project about folk and movement " suitable for a moment of much social upheaval in Mexico City." traditional music around the world, as a pedagogical framework for my students. The Musical World Map was designed to map audio examples The Son "San Miguel Chicaj": Stylistic and Theoretical Considerations selected from free archives and sources such as the Library of Congress, of Mayan Marimba Music and Discourses of Racialization in Smithsonian Institution, and other public and private archives including my Guatemala own. Built in the Google Maps environment, this web-based project enables Andrés Amado, University of Texas at Austin users to navigate online while listening to the music associated with that particular location on the map. The project's content is drawn from current While Guatemalans widely acknowledge the son as a significant genre in the scholarship in ethnomusicology and comparative analyses. The goals of the national marimba repertoire, very few sources have attempted to sketch its project were to highlight sonic commonalities in neighboring countries and to musical characteristics. This neglect obscures dynamics of racialization and demonstrate the tension between sonic, cultural, and national borders. In this nationalization of the son, and thus perpetuates notions of folklore that serve roundtable, I will talk about the challenges I faced during the mapping nationalist agendas. However, musical analysis not only offers a more process, especially questions of representation of specific ethno-religious nuanced understanding of the relationship between the son and other genres groups. I will also talk about the technical challenges in digitizing, of Guatemalan marimba music; it also shows how music mediates racial and