AMS/SEM/SMT New Orleans 2012: Abstracts
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AMS/SEM/SMT Abstracts American Musicological Society Society for Ethnomusicology Society for Music Theory New Orleans 2012 Abstracts New Orleans 1–4 November 2012 g Abstracts the joint meetings of the American Musicological Society Seventy-eighth Annual Meeting Society for Ethnomusicology Fifty-seventh Annual Meeting Society for Music Theory Thirty-fifth Annual Meeting 1–4 November 1 Sheraton New Orleans Astor Crowne Plaza New Orleans g AMS/SEM/SMT 2012 Annual Meetings Abstracts Edited by Emma Dillon, Jocelyn R. Neal, and Bonnie C. Wade Co-Chairs, 1 AMS/SMT/SEM Program Committees Program Committees AMS: Emma Dillon, Chair, Dana Gooley, 13 Chair, Nadine Hubbs, Mary Hunter, Gayle Sherwood Magee, Giulio Ongaro, Jeffrey Sposato SEM: Bonnie C. Wade, Chair, Judah M. Cohen, Judith Gray, Paul Greene, Frank Gunderson, Eileen M. Hayes, David Novak, Jeff Packman, Tina K. Ramnarine SMT: Jocelyn R. Neal, Chair, Michael Buchler, Peter Martens, Jan Miyake, Stephen V. Peles, Philip Rupprecht, Harald Krebs, ex officio Abstracts of Papers Read (ISSN 3-13) is published annually for the Annual Meeting of the American Musi- cological Society, where one copy is distributed to attendees free of charge. Additional copies may be purchased from the American Musicological Society for $. per copy plus $. U.S. shipping and handling (add $3. shipping for each additional copy). For international orders, please contact the American Musicological Society for shipping prices: AMS, 61 College Station, Brunswick ME 411-41 (e-mail [email protected]). Copyright © 1 by the American Musicological Society, Inc., the Society for Ethnomusicology, Inc., and the Society for Music Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. Cover design: Gabriel Sim-Laramee Abstracts PDF Guidebook (mobile app) Contents Thursday Morning, Sessions 1-1 to 1- . 1 Thursday Afternoon, essionsS 1-1 to 1-. 3 Thursday vening,E Sessions 1-6 to 1-6. 66 Friday Morning, Sessions -1 to - . 7 Friday Noontime, Sessions -3 to -33 . 17 Friday Afternoon, Sessions -34 to -4 . 1 Friday Evening, Sessions - to - . 133 Saturday Morning, Sessions 3-1 to 3-36 . 143 Saturday Noontime, Sessions 3-37 to 3-3 . 17 Saturday Afternoon, Sessions 3-3 to 3-71 . 1 Saturday Evening, Sessions 3-7 to 3-74 . Sunday Morning, Sessions 4-1 to 4-36 . 31 Index of Names . 73 Maps . 1 Thursday Morning, 1 November Session 1-1 (SEM), 8:30–10:30 The Beautiful, The Good, and The Story: Aesthetics and Narrative in Religious Music Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), Chair Composing the Future by Listening to the Musical Past: Islamic Exegesis in Javanese Folksongs Dorcinda Knauth (State University of New York, Dutchess) Java’s rich literary past has long provided a source of inspiration for scholars and theologians, as they interpret ancient texts in a way they hope can be relevant for contemporary Indonesian society. This literary, hermeneutic method provides com- posers with a model to similarly interpret historic musical works and folk songs, many of which are anonymously authored or ascribed to mystical figures such as Islamic saints. By focusing on ethnically Javanese works, the exegete gives power to local rather than foreign philosophies, and mainstream concepts promoted in the media as non-Indonesian (such as Western democracy or Legalist Islam) can be challenged by the alternate wisdom of ancient Javanese writers. The hermeneutic process has inherently spiritual implications as historic texts are believed to belong to an idealized past. With repeated study and a contemplative heart, the reader or listener gains access to great spiritual knowledge in their own lives. When these techniques are applied to folk music, the resulting compositions are more than simply arrangements, but creative works that allow both the performer and audience to engage in a meaningful dialogue between the present and an imagined Javanese past. This complicates the notion of composition, and provides the opportunity for the composer to gain authority as a spiritual leader, beyond simply being a musician. Examples are provided from original ethnographic research on popular Islamic music artists, with focus on the world music fusion gamelan ensemble Kiai Kanjeng and their director, the award-winning author Emha Ainun Nadjib. The Pilgimage to “El-Ghriba” and the Musical Aesthetics of a Muslim-Jewish Past Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge) Premiered in 1986, Tunisian Nouri Bouzid’s landmark film “Man of Ashes” provoked charges of “Zionism” from Arab audi- ences for its sympathetic portrait of a master carpenter played by the Tunisian Jewish musician Jacob Bsiri. In the same film, the disembodied voice of the Jewish media star Cheikh El-Afrit accompanying an old prostitute’s reminiscences of the colo- nial era, went unremarked. El-Afrit was among the many Jewish singers who showcased their latest hits adapted to Hebrew texts at the annual pilgrimage to El-Ghriba, the miraculous synagogue and shrine revered by local Muslims and Jews, on the Tunisian island of Jerba. By the 13s, El-Afrit was accompanied on the harmonium by the young Jacob Bsiri. With the mass emigration of Jews following Tunisian independence, El-Ghriba became the site of annual homecoming for the Tunisian Jew- ish diaspora. Bsiri continued to lead the musical rituals until , his distinctive vocal style, accent, and repertory providing a direct link to the multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual colonial past. The rituals culminate with a public display of religious symbolism, including the parading of a multi-tiered candelabrum decked with multi-coloured shawls round the predominantly Muslim village, cordoned by armed police. In this paper I show how the pilgrimage to El-Ghriba is as much a temporal as a physical homecoming, a time bubble in a circumscribed physical space in which Jewish-Arab tensions temporar- ily resolve as musicians recreate the distinctively Arab-Jewish popular musical aesthetic of the colonial era, evoking a shared Muslim-Jewish past. Sound, Aesthetics, and the Narration of Religious Space in Jerusalem’s Old City Abigail Wood (University of Haifa, Israel) Discussions of religious space in Jerusalem’s Old City are often grounded in static, structural imagery, incorporating visual metaphors (four quarters divided by religious affiliation; iconic views of the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre). Nevertheless, listening to—rather than looking at, or writing about—the city offers new perspectives on the dynamic construction of religious space in this complicated, conflicted, enticing place. Sound is a physical phenomenon, shaped by landscapes and built space, and experienced as part of a wider sensory environment. Yet sound also opens up aesthetic and affective space, adding texture to a conflicted and over-narrated place. Based on examples drawn from extended fieldwork in the Old City, I will consider the roles played by the aesthetic ear in (re-)creating and parsing religious spaces in Jerusalem. By performing music in the city, by citing religious texts or by pronouncing aesthetic judgements on the soundscape, inhabitants and visitors alike open up interpretative spaces that contest everyday life, invoking instead the transcendental quality of music or the analogical capacity of textual exegesis, while drawing upon a broad corpus of literary, artistic, historical and narrative interpretation of the city. Nevertheless, the powers attributed to sound and music deserve Thursday Morning: Session 1- 2 AMS/SEM/SMT New Orleans 01 fine interrogation: aesthetic narratives are also vehicles for the wielding of power—and will a performance piece involving a hundred triangle players really create a space for redemptive discourse? Musical Lives and Aesthetics in the Worship Wars Jonathan Dueck (Duke University) What is at stake in the “worship wars,” the central musical conflict in Western Christianity? Since the 16s, Western Protestants have engaged in a debate over whether to sing hymnody or popular music in church. Periodicals like Christianity Today contain a public transcript of this conflict: popular music is lauded because of its connections with contemporary mass culture and a Biblical tradition of embodied, direct praise; or it’s seen as threatening theology and liturgy tied to hymnody and thus threatening the church’s self-constitution through corporate worship. Here, drawing on my ethnographic study of the “worship wars” among Canadian Mennonites, I argue that aesthetics, not theological principle or liturgical function, is centrally at issue in “the worship wars.” While the Mennonites I studied often defended their positions on music theologi- cally, they also told complicated musical life stories that accounted for the ways music became beautiful to them. I therefore argue that “aesthetics “ when used as an analytic category concerning music, needs to take into consideration the musical life histories of individuals—in other words, the contingent set of relationships a person has had through music, and the ways they link that person’s memory with their feelings and understandings of beauty. In making this argument, I, connect the “ethnomusicology of the individual” with musicological reflections on aesthetics as category; and I complicate the divide that both Christians and scholars commonly make between the sacred as the realm of functional ritual and the secular as the realm of the aesthetic.” Session 1-2 (SEM), 8:30–10:30 Between Festival, Celebration, and Carnival: Reclaiming, Resignifying, and Performing Tradition and Identities