“Viral Cantopop: The Sound of Dangerous Music”

Hedy Law
Harper Fellow, Society of Fellows
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
The University of Chicago

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please call Andrew Mall at 773-677-4410.

• Eleven papers presented by University of Chicago graduate and post-doctoral students
• A live, interactive demo of the Rock Band video game
• Complimentary lunch and dinner with your pre-registration by May 21
• Keynote speaker Charles Carson

Admission is free, and pre-registration is recommended but not required. To pre-register, please email ethnoisesymposium2008@gmail.com with your name, affiliation, and any dietary restrictions. Please direct any questions or inquiries to this email address as well.

A .pdf of our flier is available for re-distribution, you can download it here: 2008 Symposium Flier

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please call Andrew Mall at 773-677-4410

EthNoise! The Ethnomusicology Workshop
2008 Symposium: Musical Meaning and its Media[tion]
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Classics 110, University of Chicago

8:45-9:30 Registration / Breakfast

9:30-11:00 Panel #1: Musical Identity as Mediation

1. Gesa F. Hartje, “From Music Ministry to Music Industry and Back – The Vineyard Churches”
2. Rumya Chatterjee, “Country-Rock, Emmylou Harris and ‘Real’ Country Music”
3. Feng-Shu Lee, “Moral and Aesthetic Dimensions of Musical Appropriation: A Case Study in Lisztomania“

11:15-12:15 Panel #2: Digital Gaming and its Musical Media[tion]

4. Peter Shultz, “Death Jingles and Musical Networks in Super Mario Bros.”
5. Roger Moseley, “Rock Band and the Birth of Ludomusicology”

12:15-1:15 Lunch / Rock Band demo

1:15-2:45 Panel #3: Sonic Structure and Social Meaning

6. David Bashwiner, “Musical Syntax and Musical Meaning: An Evolutionary Perspective”
7. Brian A. Horne, “Rethinking Fidelity: Reflections on Noise in Underground Soviet-Era Russian Bardic Recordings”
8. Jonathan De Souza, “Musical Categories in Everyday Life: Genre, Cognition, and (Extra)musical Meaning”

3:00-4:30 Panel #4: Versioning and Interpretation of Meaning

9. James Steichen, “The Metropolitan Opera Goes Public: Peter Gelb and the Institutional Dramaturgy of the Met ‘Live in HD’”
10. Jaime Jones, “‘Remain Calm and Sing Their Words’: Extensions and Extractions of Bhakti Liturgy Through Song”
11. Nathan Bakkum, “A Soul of Its Own: Dancers, Musicians, and the Embodiment of Difference at the Park Plaza, 1940-1950″

4:45-6:00 Keynote: Charles Carson, “‘Race is the Place’: Negotiating Blackness, from Hard Bop to Smooth Jazz and Beyond”

6:00-7:00 Dinner

“Counterfeiting China: Japanese Orientalist Pop Songs, 1931-1945″

Michael K. Bourdaghs
Associate Professor in Modern Japanese Literature
University of Chicago

Please take some time to read his paper prior to the workshop; it is available as a .pdf here: Bourdaghs Ethnoise Paper

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please call Andrew Mall at 773-677-4410.

“Self-critique in Ethnomusicology: Comments on the History of a Tradition”

Bruno Nettl
Professor Emeritus of Musicology
University of Illinois School of Music

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please call Andrew Mall at 773-677-4410.

“Our Law: Aboriginal music and Dance, Cosmopolitan Australia, and the problem of ‘the traditional’”

Gabriel Solis
Assistant Professor of Musicology
University of Illinois School of Music

(Click title to download a .pdf of the circulated paper.)

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please call Andrew Mall at 773-677-4410.

“Things Ain’t What They Used To Be: Swingin’ Toward the Center with Count Basie’s All-American Rhythm Section”

Nathan Bakkum
PhD Candidate, Department of Music
University of Chicago

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please call Andrew Mall at 773-677-4410.

Katalin Kovalcsik (Institute of Musicology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

“The Change of Storytelling in a Hungarian Vlach Romani Community from the 1980s to 2002″

Thursday, April 10, 2008
5:00 p.m.
Haskell 315

Reception to follow.

If you need assistance attending this talk, please contact CEERES at 773-702-0875.

Abstract: An analysis of tale telling in the Vlach Romani community in a northeastern village in Hungary will be drawn from recording sessions with Mihály Rostás, a Churari Vlach Romani man and other storytellers in the 1980s. In this village tale-telling in Romani was mainly a form of men’s entertainment. It became a community event through strict rules of behavior, through the use of a stock of elaborate speech formulas, and through compulsory audience participation. Women’s interpretation was reserved, and they concentrated on the essentials of the content. They could not tell stories at social gatherings where men were present. Women were important as storytellers mainly in the education of children. It was from the women that small children first heard simplified versions of the stories that they later learned from men to narrate at community events. The change of life style has altered the frame both of the public and private storytelling. People have told stories for children but the public storytelling has pushed to the background. At the same time the repertory changed as well. The new type of storytelling we can see on the vigil of Rostás in 2002 who was the last person telling stories on a traditional way. The lecture will be illustrated with video fragments.

“Classical Kampala: Expanding a Scene without an Infrastructure”

Suzanne Wint
PhD Candidate, Ethnomusicology
University of Chicago

Proponents of Western Classical music in Europe and the United States often advocate strengthening the “infrastructure” of classical music in order to build the dwindling audience. In Uganda, the classical audience has no classical radio stations, no shops in which to buy classical recordings, no professional symphonies or opera companies to do outreach in schools – in short, no “infrastructure” – yet it continues to expand along with a thriving performance scene. Based on fieldwork from 2006-2007, this paper investigates the mechanisms that drive the growth of classical music performance in Kampala. I consider the usefulness of the “scene” concept (T. Jackson, Becker, Goffman), while also revisiting work on kinship in Uganda (Fallers, Southwold), in identifying that which stands in for “infrastructure”. I also draw on media accounts and interviews with educators, performers, composers, government administrators and journalists, as well as knowledge won through participation in numerous performances, in assessing the applicability of Kittler’s theory of discourse networks to the shaping of both a discerning audience and an extraordinary amateur performance scene.

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please call Andrew Mall at 773-677-4410.

• Dance
• Everyday life
• Film
• Literary texts
• Ritual
• Subjectivities
• Video games
• Visual arts

Presentations will follow the standard format (20‐minute presentation followed by 10 minutes of discussion). Abstracts of 250 words or less should be submitted in two copies: one accompanied by the presenter’s name, departmental affiliation, and audio/video requirements and one which does not identify the presenter in any way. In order to be considered, abstracts must be submitted by Monday, April 7, 2008. They can be emailed to the program committee at ethnoisesymposium2008@gmail.com.

“Social Capital and Cinematic Song Producers in South India”

Kaley Mason, Post-doctoral Fellow in Ethnomusicology
University of Chicago

Thursday, February 28, 4:30-6:00
Goodspeed Hall 205

Persons with a disability who may need assistance in attending this event, please call Michael Figueroa at 904-614-1464.