Please join us for the second of two workshops in which students will present their conference papers in preparation for the Society for Ethnomusicology conference. This Thursday, we’re excited to hear Meredith Aska McBride, and Michael O’Toole. (Please see the abstracts below).
As always, we will meet from 4:30-6:00pm in Goodspeed 205. We look very much forward to seeing you!
Single Moms and Tiger Moms: the Politics of Parenting in Chicago’s Music Education Programs (Meredith Aska McBride)
This presentation explores the contested politics of parenting in Chicago’s music education programs. I examine two competing, and equally imagined, parental models implied by different types of programs: the low-income “single mom” who is unable to meet her children’s educational and developmental needs, and the affluent, hyper-competitive “tiger mom” who uses music education as one weapon in an arsenal of intensive parenting tools. Both of these models are, of course, inaccurate in various ways and are gendered, raced, and classed. My paper explores how these models shape program design, funding, and curriculum and the ways in which parents, students, and program staff work within and against these parental specters. I further connect these politics of parenting to ongoing public and academic discourses of urban citizenship.
“My personal longing to tell this story”: Anatolian Music and Armenian Silence in Marc Sinan’s Hasretim: An Anatolian Journey (Michael O’Toole)
Since the early twentieth century, composers of western art music in Turkey and its diasporas have frequently drawn on the diverse musics of Anatolia as a source of musical material and inspiration. Composers in the early years of the Turkish Republic often regarded the diversity of Anatolian musics as a problem to be overcome in creating a national school of composition. More recently, several composers have more explicitly embraced the pluralism inherent in the cultural, linguistic, and musical diversity of Anatolia. In this paper, I discuss the work of Marc Sinan, a German composer of Armenian and Turkish descent, who has engaged in several ways with Anatolian musics as a source of creative material, compositional inspiration, and transnational collaboration. I focus in particular on Sinan’s 2010 multimedia composition Hasretim: An Anatolian Journey, which involves multiple forms of collaboration between musicians in Armenia, Germany, and Turkey. Drawing on discussions with the composer, fieldwork at the debut performance in Dresden, and analysis of the concert film released by ECM, I discuss Sinan’s strategies for representing the presence and absence of Armenian music and culture in Anatolia, and how Sinan relates Hasretim to his own experiences as a descendent of survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Situating my analysis in ethnomusicological discussions of music and trauma, I discuss the ways in which Sinan creatively reworked his own ethnographic recordings of Anatolian musicians, shaping the images, sounds, and narratives of Hasretim to represent Anatolia as a site of both musical abundance and musical loss.