Columbia Music Scholarship Conference

Sound in Struggle: Audible Resistances
March 30, 2019 at The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Columbia University
Keynote Speaker: Alex E. Chávez

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Kicking off #soundinstruggle2019 on a sunny day! Come join us!

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Tomorrow, March 30th. At the Brown Institute at Columbia University. All day. Come hear nine great papers and Alex E. Chávez's keynote address, "Sonic Bridges and Intersectional Futures"! Hope to see you there!

More info on our website:

https://t.co/hCFsCskKMC

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

You won't want to miss the #soundinstruggle2019 keynote address by Alex E. Chávez, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Chávez will give a paper titled "Sonic Bridges and Intersectional Futures" at 4pm this Saturday at the @BrownInstitute.

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Based on earwitness accounts, memoirs, and British foreign office records from the years of Maoist rule in China, Lovell's paper offers an account both of official uses of amplified sound by the Chinese Communist Party and of the underground subversive sound practices of citizens

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

At #soundinstruggle2019 Joe Lovell will give a paper titled “Sonic Resistance in the Early PRC: Subverting the Soundscape in Mao’s China” and will argue for the importance of attending to sound when studying the politicization of daily life under dictatorial rule.

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Goncalves will address “the entwined developments in Brazilian hip hop culture, urban violence, and national governance under the new militant presidency of Jair Bolsonaro” and will argue for the role of music “as a tool in the assertion of Black autonomy under a despotic state.”

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

#soundandstruggle2019 is so soon! Here are teasers from a few more exciting papers:

In “Lyric and Liberation: Radical Pragmatics in Brazilian Hip Hop,” Alexander Goncalves will critique #Adorno’s essay “On Jazz” by offering a Marxist analysis of Afro-Brazilian music.

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Fedock will examine listening practices on WeChat and argue that attending to Tibetan-language voice messages on the app is “the only means of quotidian sensory engagement with the Tibetan transnation for this community,” thus making it “a defiant and affectively potent act.”

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

In her #soundandstruggle2019 paper, “The Audible Transnation: Listening to WeChat as Resistance,” Miranda Fedock will speak about ways in which members of a Tibetan exile settlement in Nepal engage with the multi-purpose app WeChat in order to communicate with Tibetans worldwide.

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

As Safran puts it, “despite continued claims of its supposed inherent inability to communicate political ideas,” classical music can be “used rhetorically in ways that are far from the ivory tower and deeply embedded with politics and society."

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

#soundandstruggle2019 is happening this Saturday!

In the afternoon panel, Benjamin Safran will deliver a paper called “Classical Music and the Paradox of Repression in Contemporary Social Movements of the United States.”

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Safran will discuss the 2014 Black Lives Matter protest at the St. Louis Symphony, as well as performances of his own compositions in activist contexts in order to show that social movements can use classical music “to draw attention and bolster support for their causes.”

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Klotz (@dr_kklotz) will investigate Brubeck’s engagement with racial politics in the 1960s and ask an important question: “What does it sound like when a white musician attempts to advocate for racial justice, while also benefiting from white privilege within the music industry?”

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

In the afternoon of March 30th, come to @BrownInstitute to hear Kelsey Klotz’s “Choosing to Resist: White Privilege, Civil Rights, and the Music Industry,” a paper about Dave Brubeck’s failed 1960 tour of the American South and its effect on his career in the years that followed.

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

As Velasco puts it, “by connecting the dots and reading between the lines with this exceptional case, we might expand our understanding of how personal compositions and songs were interwoven into the soundscape of public life during this period of upheaval.”
#soundinstruggle2019

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

#soundinstruggle2019 is coming up soon. Come join us on March 30th! In our morning panel, you can hear Mari Jo Velasco speak about Salvat Monho, a Basque priest at the center of a series of religious and political clashes that shook his region during the French Revolution.

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Velasco's paper, “Basque Songs of Revolutionary Turmoil and the Soundscape of Town Conflict,” will connect the trial of Salvat Monho (who was brought before the authorities for holding clandestine Catholic Masses after the Revolution) to a collection of songs that he left behind.

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Floyd interrogates Harry T. Burleigh and Thomas Wiggins’ exclusion from the canon of music theory examples. As he puts it, “the choice as educators to address these stories in undergraduate theory classes comes at no cost to our content requirements."

#soundinstruggle2019

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

More from the talks coming up at #soundinstruggle2019:

David Floyd's paper, “Critical Representation: Incorporating African American Art Music Composers into Theory Pedagogy,” will suggest frameworks for addressing the paucity of music from composers of color in music textbooks.

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

And more from @rsl318: "In the space of the clinic protest, feminized ears exist as gendered and sexualized organs in which masculine vocalizations can penetrate and reverberate.”

#soundinstruggle2019

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Today, more teasers from the papers coming to #soundinstruggle2019:

Our afternoon panel will feature a paper by Rebecca Lentjes (@rsl318). Lentjes will speak about her ethnographic work at U.S. abortion clinics and will play field recordings from protests across the country.

[Columbia Music Scholarship Conference @ColumbiaMSC]

Here are a few powerful quotes from Lentjes’s paper in anticipation of the conference:

"Shouting outside of abortion clinics allows protesters to sonically invade the private space of the clinic while also putting on a public performance."

#soundinstruggle2019