EthNoise!

Please join us on today (Thursday, March 3) from 4:30-6pm on Zoom for a presentation from Anjelica Fabro, Ph.D. Candidate in Music.

“What Sweeten de Goat Mout, Bun he Tail: Overconsumption, Morality, and Health in Barbados”

Please join us on today (Thursday, February 17) from 4:30-6pm on Zoom for a presentation from Kate Brucher, Associate Professor of Music and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at DePaul University School of Music, and the incoming editor for the journal Ethnomusicology. Ailsa Lipscombe, Ph.D. Candidate in Music, will serve as the respondent.

“Public Infrastructure and Musical Life During the COVID-19 Pandemic”

Abstract: Public spaces such as city parks, plazas, and streets have been used as outdoor performance venues to provide communities with safer spaces to gather during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Open air performances have been viewed as consistent with good public health practices, but these events have also been considered beneficial for fostering a sense of connection among participants and spurring economic recovery during the pandemic. In this presentation, I examine how over the course of the pandemic, recreational and political infrastructure – public spaces, municipal agencies– have taken on greater significance to local music scenes and how, in turn, musical endeavors have promoted engagement with these infrastructures.

The City of Chicago provides a case study for this project. In March 2020, lockdown ended public performances throughout the city, and musicians of all genres lost opportunities to perform. Professional musicians and the many people working in supporting roles in the music industry lost income along with the institutions and businesses that host performances. While many performers pivoted to online platforms, open air spaces –especially those maintained by the Chicago Park District – offered opportunities for in-person musical activity. This includes events sanctioned by the city through initiatives such as Night Out in the Parks as well as block parties, concerts, and festivals organized by community organizations, local park councils, non-profit groups, and private businesses. Through interviews with musicians, audience members, park district employees, and other stakeholders and observation of ongoing activities, I explore how these performances have engaged local communities with public spaces. This project sheds light on how public spaces help sustain musical life and potentially revive cultural economies in a post COVID 19 pandemic world.

Kate Brucher is an Associate Professor of Music and teaches courses in ethnomusicology, music research methods, and global musics at the DePaul University School of Music, where she currently serves as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. She is Incoming Editor for the journal Ethnomusicology and previously served as its Book Reviews Co-Editor. Kate has published on Chicago’s music scenes, global brass band traditions, music and locality, and Portuguese music. She has edited, with Suzel Ana Reily, Brass Bands of the World: Militarism, Colonial Legacies, and Local Music (2013) and the Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking (2018).

Please join us on Thursday, December 2 from 4:30-6pm on Zoom for a presentation from Joseph (Joe) Maurer, Ph.D. and Humanities Teaching Fellow in Music, with a response from Music Ph.D. candidate Hannah Judd:

“Anemoia Listening: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Despair”

Abstract: In the twenty-first century, a new style of listening has emerged among members of the Gen-Z and Millennial generations. Characterized by fantasy and nostalgic longing for something they’ve never experienced, this style of listening can be observed online in various niche musical communities. In YouTube comments under synthwave and vaporwave music compilations, listeners discuss fantasies of future-pasts and retro-futures, of lives they might live if not constrained by their current late capitalist conditions. Reddit threads about sea chanteys abound with fantasies of life at sea, of sailing out beyond the service industry or office jobs in which the posters are trapped.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for this new breed of listening practice, developed through analysis of the sound aesthetics of specific musical genres but with potential applicability beyond. Anemoia, a neologism coined by John Koenig for his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, is “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.” Internet users have taken up the word, often deploying it in a literal historical sense, e.g., in the comments under YouTube videos of actual music from the 1980s (Ward 2021: 13–14). I propose a more expansive application of the term to young people’s listening practices today, particularly their listening to fantasy musics like synthwave or pirate chanteys that play with past and future, fact and fiction. This framework, which I call anemoia listening, offers a window into the fantasies of young people struggling with the dismal lack of opportunity and looming decline of present day society. However, it also illuminates the limits of imagination under capitalist realism (Fisher 2009). Just as these listeners cannot imagine the end of capitalism, they cannot imagine life before capitalism. Nonetheless, through anemoia listening—and the sheens of irony, anxiety, and despair so characteristic of these generations—they fashion fantasies that help them to escape at least their current conditions of decline.

Joe Maurer is a postdoctoral Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he recently completed a PhD in Ethnomusicology. He researches music education in Chicago immigrant communities, maritime music revivalism and aesthetics, and U.S.-based political music. His public and nonprofit-sector work includes research, strategic planning, and program evaluation for Chicago arts education organizations. Prior to his doctoral studies, Joe worked with high school students as a college access counselor in Providence, RI and Boston, MA.

Please join us this evening for a presentation from PhD student Chris Batterman Cháirez, with a response from Siting Jiang.

“So Let’s Bang on Some Pots”: Sound, Intimacy, and the Political Anatomy of Affect in Brazil’s Panelaços

Join us tonight for a presentation from PhD student Ronit Ghosh!

“Mapping Jazz in India and India in Jazz: Improvisations and Encounters”

Abstract: Studying jazz in early twentieth century India involves tracking its myriad routes, its multiple mediations and the discursive horizons it forged and within which it operated and still operates. Even a cursory glance at the ways in which jazz has unfolded over specific locations and across boundaries firmly establishes the status of jazz as a shifting signifier, always spilling over, adapting to and in a promiscuous proximity with local genres and practices of musicking, both subsuming and reshaping not only repertoires, but also the very cultural attitudes towards what music and music-making mean. This presentation looks at the little-attended-to moments during the mid-twentieth century when American popular music rubs sonic shoulders with a plethora of other musical and performative genres within the complex soundscape of colonial modernity in India and asks whether the “Indian” in “Indian Jazz” is just an adjective, which otherwise denotes an essentially African American musical genre. To address this question, the presentation engages with the personal archives of the Chicago jazzman Roy Butler, who was among the most important and influential figures during the late-colonial jazz age in India. Engagement with the personal archives of Butler, I hope, will bring out the ways in which Indian Jazz during the late-colonial period was less an achieved form and more a result of complex financial, racial, technological, linguistic and most importantly racial negotiations of colonial metropoles in India during the 1930s. I navigate the archive as a space of consonance and dissonance, encounters and displacements, resonances and inconsistencies, all of which, I hope, will bring out the myriad twists, turns and meanderings that have punctuated the diffusion of not only jazz but more broadly Western popular musical entertainment in India. Jazz, I try to show, resides in local histories and travels of musicians and is the result of complex cultural negotiations, always occupying a space of liminality and working often as a trope that makes visible histories of migration, appropriation, globalization and diaspora.

Please join us this evening at 5:00pm CT for a presentation from U Chicago alumnus and visiting Senior Fulbright Fellow Chun-bin Chen!

Abstract: This paper aims to support and expand James Clifford’s debate on indigenous diasporas. He notes that indigenous diaspora is not a condition of exile, and a return of indigenous diasporas may take many forms. Although work with urban indigenous people has employed the concept of diaspora, the experience of those indigenous people who are living on or near ancestral lands in reduced areas (I call them “diasporas in ancestral lands”) has generally not informed diasporas discourse. The diasporas in ancestral lands discussed in this paper live in Papulu Village and belong to Pinuyumayan group, one of Taiwan’s 16 Indigenous Peoples. This village was established on a Pinuyumayan traditional territory occupied by Han settlers since the late 19th century, by a group of villagers moving out from the old Puyuma Village in the 19030s. Male age-set organizations, the men’s house and boys’ house, are a fundamental basis of Pinuyumayan social structure, but Papulu Village has not built a boys’ house since its establishment. “The Legacy,” a Papulu youth performing group established in 1998, has been partly fulfilling functions of a traditional boys’ house, through the group’s year-end door-to-door singing that initiates the village’s annual ritual and demarcates the village’s territory beyond its physical borders. Although the song and dance the Legacy performs are hybrid, incorporating Indigenous and non-Indigenous elements, through their musicking Papulu villagers experience a virtual return to their old Puyuma Village. By taking the Papulu people as an example of diasporas in ancestral lands to question the indigenous/diaspora opposition, I argue that indigenous diaspora studies not only help us better understand contemporary indigenous experiences, but also encourage us to rethink notions of home and spatial-temporal relationships in diaspora discourse.