EthNoise!

Join us this evening at 5:00pm for a workshop presentation by PhD Candidate Hannah Rogers!

Abstract: In retrospect, Mardi Gras 2020 marked the beginning of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in New Orleans. Murmurs about the virus circulated here as elsewhere, but at the time the threat itself seemed still distant, even as thousands of visitors arrived from all parts of the country, and even from beyond its borders. Mardi Gras 2021, then, was a chance to revisit not only the city’s strategy for containing the pandemic, but also to see whether the trope of resilience so prevalent in New Orleans’ image could prevail under such circumstances. A year into the crisis, with great loss of life and wages already behind it, how would New Orleans muster the Mardi Gras spirit? In this excursus, I grapple with the silence of Mardi Gras 2021 and the limitations of the national and international mediation of New Orleans as an exceptional site of resilience.

Join us this evening for a presentation from visiting professor Dr. Sylvia Alajaji!

“Legibility and its Discontents: Reflections on the Cacophonies of the Armenian Diaspora”

This talk continues the project of our research on country duo Karl & Harty’s song “Kentucky” (1941), which over the two or three decades after WWII became a staple, familiar number in the country and bluegrass songbook. We examine versions of the song by the Blue Sky Boys (1947), the Louvin Brothers (1956), Homer & Jethro (1957), and the Everly Brothers (1958); a number of these seem to have spawned distinct cover lineages in the 1960s–1970s and after. We then focus on the Blue Sky Boys, whose four recorded versions of the song (1947, 1949, 1963, 1964) provide fascinating windows into their performance practices, artistic choices, and commercial compromises with the country music industry that they demonstrated and negotiated over the course of their career. As in our initial study, our arguments here focus on the problems of racialization in “Kentucky”: the different lineages illustrate a variety of ways in which racial and ethnic style markers suppress, affirm, or amplify the multiracial/multiethnic dimensions of the original song. In the case of the Blue Sky Boys in particular, their strong aesthetic preferences (seemingly inseparable from their religious and personal values) reimagined the song as a purified expression of rural Appalachian whiteness.

Join us tonight on Zoom!

Join us tonight at 5:00 pm as we workshop PhD candidate David Wilson’s paper, “Diplomatic Dances: The White-Haired Girl’s Journey from Revolutionary Classic to Post-Mao Palimpsest.”

The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) is often regarded as one of modern China’s most isolated periods. Furthermore, it is often regarded as quite separate from the historical periods that precede and follow it. As such, it is easy to forget that the Cultural Revolution was deeply formed by its historical antecedents, and that China was a key player in the rapidly shifting global politics of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper investigates the Shanghai Ballet’s 1977 tour of Canada, and the company’s overseas performances of the iconic revolutionary ballet The White-Haired Girl, as a way of situating China in its global historical and political context in the period immediately following Chairman Mao’s death.

We look forward to seeing you tonight!

Welcome back to Winter Quarter! Join us tonight at 5:00 pm for a panel presentation discussing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the classical music world. We’ll be hearing from:

This evening, EthNoise is excited to welcome Dr. Elliott H. Powell for a presentation on his recent publication, Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music.

Elliott H. Powell is a Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of U.S. popular music, race, sexuality, and politics. His first book brings together critical race, feminist, and queer theories to consider the political implications of African American and South Asian collaborative music-making practices in U.S.-based Black Popular Music since the 1960s. In particular, the project investigates these cross-cultural exchanges in relation to larger global and domestic sociohistorical junctures that linked African American and South Asian diasporic communities, and argues that these Afro-South Asian cultural productions constitute dynamic, complex, and at times contradictory sites of comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and anti-imperial political alliances.

Dr. Powell will be in conversation with Thalea Stokes, a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago.

You can join us tonight at 5:00pm on Zoom (password: miles).

Take a break from refreshing the news and join us tonight at 5:00 pm for a panel presentation on the contemporary challenges and possibilities of ethnographic fieldwork. We’ll be hearing from:

Fiona Boyd: “Negotiating Curatorial and Artistic Relevance through Performance and Space on NPR’s Tiny Desk and Tiny Desk (Home) Concert Series”

Erol Koymen: “Ethnography in Distinctive Virtual Spaces: The 2020 Istanbul Music Festival”

Welcome back to the 2020-21 academic year! This year, EthNoise! is meeting entirely online via Zoom. We kicked off our EthNoise! season early with two summer sessions, where we heard from several of the students who will be presenting at this year’s Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference. This Thursday, join us for the final round of dry-runs, where we’ll be hearing from: