Introduction

Lip-syncing is one of the drag queen’s most valuable skills. She stands on stage, silently moving her lips to the voice of another, embodying that voice and persona in a performance style honed over generations of predecessors. Contrary to Esther Newton’s bold claim in her seminal drag ethnography Mother Camp, lip-syncing is not reserved for those not talented enough to sing (1972:44-46); rather, lip-syncing is a mainstay in the drag repertoire because of its singularly powerful mode of performance. London-based drag performer Rodent Decay (Fig. 1), when asked why she chooses to lip-sync and how such performances feel, told me that she lip-syncs because she feels an affinity with the ‘power in [the] voice’, a power that leads her into an ‘ecstatic […] trance state’ during performance. Intriguingly, Rodent went on to say that lip-syncing felt most powerful when the music was so loud that she could feel the music ‘resonating around [her]’: were this key component of amplitude to be absent, the performance would be significantly lacking. In this post, I will explore Rodent’s articulation of the importance of tactility in lip-syncing. The music must be so loud as to physically touch the performing queen, to bathe her in sound so that she might find a more convincing singularity between her silent body and the voice of the track. I will begin by exploring this relationship through contemporary theories of sound and amplitude, specifically Michael Heller’s theory of ‘listener collapse’; following this, I will draw together the tactility of lip-syncing with Rodent’s feeling of ecstasy, arguing for a cutaneous connection between voice and performing body, and drawing upon Didier Anzieu’s concept of the Skin-ego. Though these thoughts are borne out of conversations with Rodent, it is not my intention here to offer an ethnographic analysis of one example; rather, I am using Rodent’s premise as a way of continuing Anzieu’s metaphorical musings upon sonic interactions with the Skin-ego. What will become apparent is that the close somatosensory connection effected through increased amplification facilitates a stronger bond between performer and the original singer on track, a bond that not only creates a more powerful aesthetic performance, but also one that substantiates ideas of selfhood for the performer.

Fig. 1: Rodent Decay, used with the permission of Benedict Stewardson

Feeling Sound

Rodent Decay is a 23-year-old drag performer in East London, where she has earned much acclaim. In 2016 she won the highly competitive Lip-Sync 1000! competition, which pits the UK’s best drag queens against one another, and she also performs regularly with Sink the Pink, London’s premiere drag troupe. Rodent’s comments above, about feelings of ecstasy and the music resonating around her, arose from a conversation about her performance of Florence Welch’s ‘Spectrum’ in 2015. I asked about the connections she felt between herself and the track, to which she responded:

I think sometimes there’s a disconnect, and I’ve realised it’s to do with the sound quality of the room and the acoustics of the room. So I’ve been in places where I’ve done a lip-sync and it sounds like it’s not coming from me and there is such a disconnect but it’s because, like, the music isn’t resonating around me.

The disconnect about which Rodent speaks surely implies the inverse: that with the appropriate acoustics a connection is achieved. Such a connection is predicated on the sensation of the sound resonating around her, vibrating around her being. Theorists such as Rick Altman take this encompassing quality of sound as a given, arguing that by its very nature sound is not a straight line but rather a series of vibrations that reverberate and reflect around the space, encompassing the listener (1992:21); yet, Rodent’s quotation rightly argues against this. Without the appropriate acoustics, this wrapping of sound does not take place. This does not mean to say that sounds cannot take on Altman’s immersive properties, however. Indeed, Steven Connor suggests that such an immersion is made possible through an increase in volume, in which ‘amplified voices […] cancel or close up space’ (2000:34). To continue with Connor’s claim that amplified voices can close up space, an important space in drag lip-syncing is the space between the speaker system playing the track and the drag queen’s lips; the amplified voice, loud as it is, closes up the space between speaker system and drag queen, suggesting a singularity between the two. This connection is theorised by Michael Heller, who describes this somatosensory shift as ‘listener collapse’, in which ‘loud sound dissolves the ability to distinguish between interior and exterior worlds, especially in regard to sound and self (2015:45). Alongside amplified sound’s ability to fill space, this extreme volume also has the ability to collapse the boundaries of self and other, bringing the externality of the track into the performing drag queen and thereby suggesting a singularity between performing body and the voice of the track. The amplified voice resonates around Rodent to such a degree that she is able to feel the sound, fostering a tactile relationship that forms the basis of the feeling of unity between her silent body and the voice of the track. Without such extreme volume, the performance would remain as two distinct perceptual units.

Touching the Voice

To speak of touching the voice may seem a peculiar sensory shift: we hear the voice, but how can we touch something that is so diaphanous as voice? In reality though, sound is always created through touch: sound is contingent, created through the percussive interactions of one object with another. The voice is no different. Pushing air through the mouth, with the tongue pressed to the teeth, or biting the lips, or stroking the tongue against the inside of the mouth, voice and language are created (Connor 2004:164). Indeed, it is this sensation of touch that is one of the earliest ways we learn to differentiate sounds that come from ourselves and sounds that come from others. As Édith Lecourt notes, ‘it is in fact through the presence or absence of motor and tactile participation that sounds produced are differentiated from sounds external to the self: first fundamental advance on the sonorous plane in the establishment of the boundaries of the self’ (1990:215). So, if it is the tactile experience that differentiates sounds that are our own from sounds that are not, what is happening during lip-sync performance? The drag queen rehearses the movements of speech as she lip-syncs: she places her tongue in the appropriate positions, she stretches her mouth into vowel shapes, or purses her lips, coming into contact with herself at each moment. Yet she makes no sound; rather, it is the voice from the track that she hears. The experience of tactility would suggest that the voice is therefore perceived as one that comes from her own body, but how can this be reconciled with a voice that clearly comes from elsewhere? Firstly, Heller’s argument of ‘listener collapse’ and Rodent’s description go some way in arguing for this singularity: with the volume so great, the space between the sound and the drag queen is collapsed, exemplifying Heller’s dissolution of interior and exterior worlds. But secondly, the basic premise of voice supports, in theory, the drag queen’s claim to the voice of the track. Though voice is considered something that is most intrinsically our own, this is not entirely true; in fact, in any act of speech, the speaker is both speaker and listener, sending out their voice which returns to their own ears, creating a feedback loop between subject and object (Silverman 2008:77). The voice always leaves as subject and returns as object – it is no different in lip-syncing. The drag queen performs the actions of speech, and voice returns to her ears.

Why desire this tactile unity between oneself and the voice of another? What benefits might such a connection hold? Continuing with Lecourt and a psychoanalytical perspective, Didier Anzieu’s theory of the Skin-ego is useful here. Anzieu argues that the Skin-ego, rather than a prescriptive concept, is a broad metaphor for the creation and continuation of the ego throughout life (2016:6). At a basic level, the Skin-ego is ‘a mental image used by the child’s Ego during its early stages of development to represent itself as an Ego containing its psychical contents, based on its experience of the surface of the body’ (ibid:43). This cutaneous covering, however, is not only the literal skin on the surface of the body; it also includes a sonic component. Anzieu argues that one of the ways in which this Skin-ego is formed as a baby is through the gestural and vocal interactions it has with its mother. Alongside suckling and handling the infant, ‘sound wrapping [in the form of humming, speaking, singing etc.] supplements the tactile wrapping’ (ibid:109). Bathed in sound from the mother, this sonic skin that envelops the child offers another sense of containment and protection, a way of holding together the psyche.

Anzieu contends that though the Skin-ego acts as a container, it may be thick or thin, and certainly has open space in which to play (ibid:135). Interestingly, he makes specific mention of certain adult subjects aiming ‘to reinforce this cemented personal Skin-ego from the outside with a symbolic maternal skin, like Zeus’s aegis’ (ibid:135); whether through clothes, or makeup, or, indeed, music, the Skin-ego can be corroborated temporarily through secondary layers. The idea that one can augment the Skin-ego externally is important in the case of the drag queen. If the Skin-ego is constituted not only by the skin but also by sound, and particularly the mother’s voice, then it is certainly possible that the adoption of the voice of another in drag lip-sync performance is an attempt to harden the Skin-ego through a secondary sound wrapping.

Édith Lecourt, following Anzieu, offers continued theorisations of this secondary, specifically sonic, wrapping. Lecourt states that for a sonic wrapping (or sonic ‘envelope’) to function fully, it must ‘find underlying support, on the one hand in tactile and visual experience, and on the other hand in a mental elaboration of sonorous experience based on the ego-skin’ (1990:212). In drag lip-sync performance, these first predicates are fulfilled: the intense amplification of the track supplies the tactile and sonorous supports, wherein the sound takes on a tactile nature, and, though beyond the remit of this article, the physical regalia of the drag queen supplies the visual support. With these foundations achieved, Lecourt speaks of sonic baths, in which the subject is encompassed by sound. She specifically cites the use of Walkmans and listening to rock music as examples of everyday sonic wrappings in the modern world (1990:227). It is my conviction that the encompassing nature of the amplified voice about which Rodent speaks, the track ‘resonating around [her]’, aligns itself with Anzieu and Lecourt’s conceptions of the Skin-ego and sonic bathing: the tactile connection of voice with the singer on the track acts as a sonic wrapping for the drag queen, an augmenting of the Skin-ego, which when coupled with the more obvious and literal skin of the physical makeup and regalia of drag performance, has the potential to lead the performer into such ‘trance state[s]’, as Rodent claims.

Drag Queens and the Voice of the Heroine

The coextension of the Skin-ego through the voice of the other offers a form of protection: Anzieu argues that secondary wrappings de facto thicken the Skin-ego, but also much voice theory points towards the protection that can be afforded by disavowing one’s own voice in place of another’s (Jarman 2011:43). Yet there is perhaps a closer affinity between powerful female vocalists, to whom drag queens often lip-sync, and the gay male psyche, for drag queens are most often gay or queer men. Jack Harwell, a club-goer whom I met in an East London bar, mentioned a supplementary reason why these women are so important to gay men. Jack told me:

Little gay boys often grow up lip-syncing camp pop queens because they envy their glamour and sexuality, and they envy that they are validated by fame, themselves never validated by the heteropatriarchy around them... Queer people are drawn to lip-syncing because it allows you to embody a persona that society forbids you from being.

In a very real way, these voices, voices of ‘power’ as Rodent described them, are powerful in more than just their vocal virtuosity: they are powerful in their political resistance to, as Jack states, a heteropatriarchy that in many ways refuses to validate them. Jack’s statement echoes Richard Dyer’s theorisation of the gay male fascination with Judy Garland. For Dyer, Garland became such an icon for gay men because she expressed the same feelings of battling against a patriarchal institution that endeavoured to impress upon her an acceptable image, one that lay incredible emotional taxes upon her, but one that ultimately she would overcome, constantly searching for an ‘over the rainbow’ (Dyer 2004:146). To feel an affinity with heroines who succeed against the heteropatriarchy offers hope for the gay male. If their heroines are able to overcome these adversities, then there is a chance they can, too. In lip-syncing, this affinity between the singer and the gay male is increased. The performer, whether a drag queen or a ‘little gay boy’ in his bedroom, is able to feel the voice of the heroine within them, to wrap themselves in the protective layers of their voice, extending their Skin-ego through a relationship of sound and touch.

Sasha Velour, “This Woman’s Work”

Concluding Thoughts

Anzieu describes the Skin-ego as a metaphor, rather than a fully formed concept, one that he hoped people would elaborate upon and explore to their own ends. The ideas I have sketched out here seek to use the Skin-ego as a model within which we might better understand lip-syncing as a personal form of performance, and explore lip-syncing as an art form, rather than Newton’s synonymising of the craft with an inability to sing. Literally embodying the voice – that most personal signifier of self (Jarman 2011:2) – can be an incredibly emboldening experience for the performing drag queen, wrapped in a vocal membrane, feeling the voice both outside and in.

References

Altman, Rick. 1992. “General Introduction: Cinema as Event”. In Sound Theory Sound Practice, edited by Rick Altman, 1-14. London: Routledge.

Anzieu, Didier. 2016. The Skin-Ego. London: Karnac Books.

Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Connor, Steven. 2004. “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing”. In Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, edited by Veit Erlmann, 153-172. Oxford: Berg.

Dyer, Richard. 2004. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: Routledge.

Heller, Michael. 2015. “Between Silence and Pain: Loudness and the Affective Encounter.” Sound Studies 1(1):40-58.

Jarman, Freya. 2011. Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lecourt, Édith. 1990. “The Musical Envelope”. In Psychic Envelopes, edited by Didier Anzieu, 211-235. London: Karnac Books.

Newton, Esther. 1972. Mother Camp. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Silverman, Kaja. 2008. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Biography

Jacob Mallinson Bird is a DPhil student in musicology at the University of Oxford. He is particularly interested in voice theory and psychoanalysis. His current research focuses on the deconstruction of the voice in drag lip-sync performance, and the implications of lip-syncing for constructions of the self and queer identity. 

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. [624 pp., illus. ISBN: 978-01-953-8894-7].

Reviewed by Guillaume Heuguet / Université Paris Sorbonne

Note: This review marks the first post in a collaboration between Ethnomusicology Review, Nonfiction.fr, and Ascidiacea (see introduction post).

To tackle a handbook, it is necessary to consider its role in instituting questions and methods.[1] When the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (OHSS) was published in 2012, the press release discussed sound studies as if it was an emerging field of research. In reality, over the same period of time, several collective and synthesis works were also published, demonstrating that this was more a moment of institutional consolidation. That same year saw the publication of TheSound Studies Reader edited by Jonathan Sterne, which included reference texts by Friedrich Kittler, Rick Altman, Roland Barthes, etc. Earlier in 2004, Audio Culture by Cox and Warner basically brought together theorists in aesthetics and avant-garde musicians. In 2013, Michael Bull proposed Sound Studies: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies which was particularly rich in texts already identified on the subject and stretching from Jacques Attali to Paul Théberge.

These works reveal a long tradition of reflection on sound and listening in the humanities which the OHSS is incorporated in while simultaneously proposing an innovative approach. Despite the presence of authors as indispensable as Michael Bull, Tia De Nora, and Jonathan Sterne, this book is less an educational overview than an investigation of the challenges and key issues that interest its editors. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijtersveld specialize in the sociology of science and STS (Sciences and Technology Studies). Trevor Pinch has worked in this field for many years through the “STS Faces the Music” sessions organized in Bielefeld, Germany in 1996, as well as through his book Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer co-authored with Frank Trocco (2002). For her part, Karin Bijtersveld has published Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century with José van Dijck (MIT 2008). The two editors have continued to guide all their contributions toward issues concerning science, technology, and medicine: “How have scientists, engineers and physicians used their ears to give meaning to what they studied? . . . How have these listening practices . . . generated scientific knowledge, technological designs and medical equipment? Why is it that listening has nevertheless remained contentious and lacks the same legitimation given to other means of knowledge?” (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012:11-12). These questions allowed them to build upon the collection Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750 to 1980 published by Alexandra Hui, Julia Kursell and Myles W. Jackson (2013). The latter two authors are included in the table of contents of the present book.

To meet these challenges, the OHSS is broken down into “spaces where noise is perceived” – factories and industrial testing spaces, the “field” (as in the expression “field recordings”), the laboratory, the clinic, the design studio, the consumption space (defined in the book as “the home and beyond”), and the sound archive space. This spatial distribution is based on the Latourian observation of laboratory activity as a way in which to understand science, with an emphasis in this particular case on material culture: “‘Follow the instruments’ is the methodological heuristic heard in this volume” (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012:19). The separation into spaces leads to a large number of echoes and overlaps between chapters. This finally suggests that sound as a scientific object tends to cross through the various “walls” that it encounters – unless this is nothing more than the positive effect of a constructivist approach to sound that is sensitive to its myriad genealogies.

Aware of the changeable nature of the object of their studies, Pinch and Bijsterveld in all cases enhance the reach of the disciplinary backgrounds of their authors. Consequently, they propose envisaging sound studies as being at the crossroads of works resulting from acoustic ecology, theoretical traditions in architecture, town planning and design (sound design, soundscape design, interaction design), studies in art, musicology, and ethnomusicology, the new musicology and radical musicology, as well as sensory studies. Regarding the latter and according to Pinch and Bijsterveld, sound studies reveal an increased interest in the “physical interweaving” of sound and the multisensorial mediation of the sound experience (2012:10).

Without regard for comprehensiveness or representativeness concerning the magnitude of this book, we note three strong ideas. The first of these concerns the way in which sound participates in industrial societies. Mark M. Smith demonstrates the historic relativity of the representations of industrialization personified by The Machine in the Garden (1964), a book written by the historian Leo Marx. In his article, Smith studies testimonies relating to a factory located in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1820s. His sources push him to affirm that far from representing the noisy irruption of industrialization, “the sounds in Lowell are better understood as consonants with the sounds of rural New England” (2012:47). Hans-Joachim Braun is also interested in the relativity of sensitivity to noise. He questions the relations between political regimes and noise management in Germany’s industrial sector. It was necessary to wait until the 1970s to have sufficient R&D funding to develop mechanisms to reduce noise in the workplace. At the other end of the historical spectrum and within an urban context, Michael Bull has found an ambivalent relationship in what he calls the “iPod culture” – the management of public space understood as a sound space lying between “secessionism, creativity and addiction” (2012:540). For certain users, the iPod device is used to recover a certain autonomy with regards to an inflicted urban culture.

The second strong idea concerns the instrumental and rationalized use of sound. The automotive industry and its particular approach to engine noise represents a textbook case (Krebs, Cleophas and Bijsterveld). This dual logic with its clearly different implications are to be found in the chapter titled “Speaking for the Body: The Clinic.” This article by Mara Mills particularly describes the epistemic consequences of the cochlear implant in order to understand how “natural” audition is already a form of biological “programming” (2012:339).

The third strong idea examines the practices and concepts of “sonification.” The article by Alexandra Supper provides an initial approach to this emerging field formed by researchers working to legitimize their method of transforming data sets into sound, echoing the idea of “data visualization.” Supper observes the public communications of researchers who defend the scientific nature of this approach (2012:249). The theme of sonification also pinpoints one of the main motivations for work in sound studies that covers part of the book: to rehabilitate the role sound plays in our ideas of science.

But can this sound rehabilitation avoid a new standard implying a difference between the senses and thus a certain ontology of sensations? This question is conceptualized in the article by Jonathan Sterne and Mitchell Akiyama that examines the original idea developed by the First Sounds group. This group succeeded in “replaying” a sound recording created using the device invented by Scott de Martinville that preceded Edison’s phonograph – the phonautograph, a machine initially intended to provide sounds with a visual recording. Their investigations echo the famous chapter written by Fredrich Kittler on the gramophone, which includes a passage devoted to the invention of the “frequency” as an epistemic object positioned between sight, audition, and scientific rationality.[2] Kittler shows how the graphical notation of sound had a particular role to play within the framework of phono-linguistic experiments, a subject also developed by the OHSS in an article by Julia Kursell which makes reference to this author (2012:176).

Sterne and Akiyama make several theoretical and methodological proposals that fulfill the promise of the “handbook” which merit attention. For them, the phonautograph provides the historic link between sound and visual technologies; it is part of a series of “technologies that have translated natural processes – sound, electricity, biological processes and rhythms – into visual data adhering to structured forms” (2012:545). They propose approaching these various objects in terms of articulation and within a constructivist approach to the senses. For them, the theory of articulation in cultural studies makes it possible to go further than Latour in questioning power relations. In this theory of social reality, the articulations between phenomena as well as their speed and direction are all contingent. Consequently, the authors propose considering “the modularity of sensory technologies, the modularity of relations between the senses, subjects and technologies, and ultimately the modularity of the senses themselves” (2012:546). Basing their work on Piercean semiotics and the index concept, Sterne and Akiyama propose the term audification to designate that which, among sonification practices, is based on a “hypothesis concerning the indexicality in the reproduction or manipulation of a phenomenon . . .  a relationship that is intended to be perceived as a causal relationship” (2012:549).

If one extends the article’s proposal, the audification of visual signs reveals, like all sonification undertakings, the fundamental ambiguity of all types of signs. This relates back to the criticisms of the trace category that is operated in information and communication sciences in France.[3] Consequently, the reference to indexical listening completes the criticism made by Sterne concerning the cybernetic approach to sound and listening modeling that is present in the transduction principle and then in the MP3 format. This paradigm amounts to isolating and “coding” a plan of physical reality by denying its ambivalence and complexity as a semiotic and social phenomenon. The proposals made by Sterne, based on archives linked to engineering players, merit being compared to other social discourses in order to observe to what degree indexicality represents a hegemonic listening regime. For example, Jeremy Wallachs, like Schaffer and Chion, suggest that we can also perceive sound as a form of material presence without seeking to interpret it as the sign of a source or a cause.[4]

Sterne and Akiyama radicalize the constructivist position that has already been expressed elsewhere by Sterne: “There is a conclusion to be made here concerning the plasticity of data in digital schemes and the dissolution of old knowledge about the senses . . . the unity of sound as perceptual category is an illusion of language” (2012:557). By dissolving in this way all a priori knowledge of a distinctive aspect of reality that we could call sound, their proposal questions the theoretical basis for the restoration of a symmetry between the senses, being a determinant for sound studies. As a consequence, they assume that “sound studies . . . must let go of its axiomatic assumptions regarding the givenness of a particular domain called ‘sound,’ a process called hearing, or a ‘listening subject’”(2012:556).

This final article therefore allows us to highlight on the scale of this paper and perhaps beyond, a specific sound studies contribution that amounts to answering the question: “what is the use of sound studies?” The answer would be: escape from cybernetic thinking concerning sensations and processes of signification. This would first be achieved by showing that the practice and contents of sciences and technologies – no matter whether “information” or “data” – are often occulo-centric. Second, by showing that this audition/view distinction is itself the result of a cybernetic design that distinguishes faculties to better prioritize them. From this point of view, there is something paradoxical in what Sterne and Akiyama propose in the same article, to extend the technical “transduction” concept to the human ear, as their intention is to apply a technical metaphor to a human process. This idea is picked up and underlined in the introduction to the OHSS, accompanied by the proposal to similarly enlarge the idea of “conversion.”

This represents a point of reflection that is stimulating for future research: should the human ear be understood to be a machine like any other, with researchers thinking of human interpretation as a “treatment” of separate semiotic materials? On the contrary, if the intention is to pay more attention to sound and its values, couldn’t the hypothesis of a synthetic human perception-knowledge serve to provide better comprehension of the ecological dimensions of technologies? To shed light on these epistemological choices, it might be worthwhile to return to the philosophical tradition based around perception and cognition, ranging from Kant to Merleau-Ponty, and interlink these issues more widely to the social history of experimental, biological, and cognitive sciences.

Furthermore, and despite the addition of an internet site with audio extracts, the objects and corpus mobilized in the OHSS are largely based on the written word and images. For a manual, the methodological perspectives concerning the way in which sound recordings could be used as analytical materials for sound studies are lacking.[5] Admittedly, certain articles in the book more specifically concentrate on music with regards to hip-hop or electronic advertising music, but either the reference to specific texts is missing or audio productions simply exist as examples within an essentially historic approach; their density and ambiguities as sounds have not been worked on.

To take this further, a good way of knowing whether, like Sterne, there is a wish to push sound deconstruction as far as possible, would be to more closely examine what we consider the “sound matter.” In this way, it would be possible to see to what degree the description of a sound phenomenon as such remains useful for understanding particular situations or to dialogue with other theories and social discourses. Taking this approach, sound studies can only gain from dialogue with the works produced in popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and aesthetics. In France, it is the music theorists who contribute to opening listening analysis categories by linking listening to music with wider practices and definitions of hearing and presenting audition as a cultural phenomenon in the wider sense of the term (see of course Pierre Schaeffer, as well as Michel Chion, Peter Szendy, François J. Bonnet, and reviews such as Tacet).[6] Within this context of the hybridization of knowledge, the article by Myles W. Jackson “From Scientific Instruments to Musical instruments: The Tuning Fork, the Metronome, and the Siren” is particularly interesting. His historical and materialist approach is based on the description of “instruments” (both scientific and musical) and the use made of these instruments by music. In this way, he swings in both directions between the question of sound as a “scientifically coded” object and the way it is used as an expressive resource; artistic practices and scientific practices continue to cross over from one domain to another.

It can be seen that there are several ways to continue to be open-minded and ensure the productivity of the scientific dialogism underlying sound studies. It is also interesting to note that where sound studies focus on material, spatial, and discursive listening conditions, visual studies largely concentrate on the significance and interrelations of the images “themselves,” no matter whether these are visual arts or visual productions in the wider sense of the term. Each field appears almost to mirror the limits of the other. So should sound be pragmatic and the visual express a media-centrism? It is a form of splitting that merits discussion. In any case, several years after its publication, this seminal work continues to reveal how sound studies make the theme of sound a particularly stimulating point of departure to question the practice of science as a cultural and social phenomenon, the results and methodologies of other disciplines, and to open innovative fields of investigation.

Image courtesy of casaafrouruguaya.org

In 2005, Jorge Drexler won an Academy Award for best original song, “Al otro lado del río”, the first song in Spanish to do so. There was some controversy surrounding the event, to say the least. He was not allowed to perform his own song at the ceremony, and when he was announced as the winner, he jovially walked onto the stage, showed deference to Prince, the presenter, and then proceeded to sing the chorus of his song a cappella as his acceptance speech, ending it with a “ciao”. 

Due to the initial polemic, this has been appreciated as an eloquent and elegant act of rebellion, although in an interview with Lalo Mir, Drexler jocosely stated that he just didn’t think he was going to win and so didn’t have a speech prepared. Nonetheless, his actions at the Academy Awards form part of a tradition of resistance via music in Uruguay. Jorge Drexler inherited this tradition and carried it over onto a virtual platform. In 2012, Drexler created a tablet/mobile application called N, or as he coined it, an aplicanción. It is a play on words in Spanish between “aplicación” and “canción”. The song-app consists of three songs with a base structure that invites the User to determine the direction he/she will take the song. 

In N¹ and N³, the user chooses the lyrics of the song, and in N² the user orchestrates the music. Due to time and spatial constraints, this post will focus specifically on N², “Madera de deriva” (Driftwood). The aplicanción via GPS locates the user (asks for permission beforehand) and depending on his/her geolocation opens one of the twelve musical sections of the song at random and indicates which direction to walk to and how far to go to open another, up to 500 meters. While the music plays, the User orchestrates the available sections at his/her will until finally opening-up all of the twelve possible.

The act of making music in N is used as a vehicle to connect the User to the world. One must experience the time and space of the location to understand it past the level of merely information. It can be whenever time at whichever latitude and longitude in whatever neighborhood, but that says nothing of the uniqueness of the place nor the User’s circumstances there when they happen to coincide. The relations between the resident of a space and the visitor are broken down and how the User really feels about the people and locations confronted becomes conscious and evident to him/her. N² leaves the User accountable in the real world through the virtual platform provided by the media by taking him/her to the street and making them interact with it.

Spontaneous manifestations of music on the street are a common occurrence in Montevideo, Uruguay. At random hours throughout the day and night, people gather in groups and dance around neighborhoods, playing the drums, and drinking yerba mate. As quaint and folklorizing as that sounds, in Uruguay and especially in Montevideo, there is a long standing tradition of resistance by taking to the street in song. This custom is born out of candombe, and understanding candombe’s significance in Uruguayan culture gives a more informed understanding of Drexler’s acceptance speech and N. 

Candombe is an Afro-Uruguayan musical style and dance, centered around drums, and performed by groups called comparsas. It has its roots with the African slaves forcefully taken to Uruguay during the colonial period and slightly into independence. As a word, candombe is employed as a qualifier to express all that is tied to Afro-Uruguayan culture, often-times pejoratively as an all-encompassing “cosa de negros” (thing of blacks). Despite it being brandished as a racially disparaging qualification, this has never dissuaded non-Afro-Uruguayan interest in candombe, but it does complicate it. At first it was a religious ritual from Africa that was later re-signified and employed during Catholic festivities, which today has translated into Carnaval in Uruguay. That fact is in itself a testament to how the Afro-Uruguayan community has negotiated the survival of their traditions into today’s Uruguayan culture. Candombe then as a practice manages to endure and becomes a stalwart for Afro-Uruguayan community organization and expression. As a marginalized group, that was their way of opening a space for themselves in public places outside of a work environment where they were typically consigned to military service and menial jobs. However, there in the performance they literally take the street, “ganar la calle”, and in song and dance exist in the face of discriminatory circumstances. The lyrics of candombes through the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries have a history of manifesting discontent with those conditions, denouncing the practically forced military service of the Nineteenth century and the limited opportunities for work that seems to be a perpetual state of affairs to this day.

Image in public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia

Candombe also went beyond the holidays. Due to the segregation and grouping of the Afro-Uruguayan population, in the Twentieth century they were put in conventillos, which would more or less translate into housing projects. These conventillos have helped the formation of the candombe’s culture. Impromptu performances by comparsas are initiated by a llamada. That call consists of someone going out into the street and beginning to play the drums. Whosoever answers the llamada recognizes the drumming for what it is and is invited to form part of the comparsa’s performance. The intimacy behind a call, to ask if another is there and have the call recognized and answered is indicative of the solidarity in the improvised community that is created.

Image in public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia

The evolution of candombe begins with the Salas de Naciones, which were comprised of similar African ethnic groups during the years of slavery that would gather together when permitted; later with the Sociedades, which were organizations formed after abolition; and then to the conventillos or barrios where they were relegated to in the beginning of the 20^th century only to be torn down during the years (1973-85) of civic-military dictatorship[i]. During each time period, the communal organization always sought to support other members of the Afro-Uruguayan community and reinforce that history of their past. Suppressing the ethnic African diversity minimizes its visibility within the Uruguayan culture, homogenizing an already discriminated people in an effort to make them less distinctive and eliminate whatever history they might have brought with them to Uruguay. To this day, comparsas identify with a specific barrio where the conventillo was from, the housing projects that are themselves a vestige of the initial resistance and struggle experienced by the naciones. Visually, the colors that form part of the spectacle of the comparsas are one of the indicators of that history, but the greater distinction is found in musical dynamics of the drumming. The rhythm and time developed by each comparsa is a marker for a nación (Ferreira 131). In the drumming of the candombe performances are inscribed the multiethnic Afro-Uruguayan history of Uruguay that has been discriminated against to bolster the official Euro-Uruguayan discourse.

The invisibilization of the Afro-Uruguayan community, despite candombe’s general acceptance in Uruguay, is a result of the Eurocentric historical emphasis the country has been propagating. About a quarter into the 20^th century, El libro del centenario del Uruguay declares that the country is populated by a race of European descendants, the indigenous people have disappeared, and the “Ethiopian race, brought to the country by the Spanish conquerors from the African continent to serve as slaves, has visibly declined, to the point of constituting an insignificant percentage of the total population” (Andrews 3). Andrews finds that the textbooks used in schools from the 1920s to the 1960s had two recurring themes: “the uniquely democratic character of Uruguayan politics and society, and the importance of European immigrants in building that society” (Andrews 3-4). All the Africans were not of one race, but to group them as one homogenizes their culture and history that was brought over with them. This problematizes racial discrimination in Uruguay because the immediate jump into democracy did not dispel the social hierarchies from colonial times. By law the Afro-Uruguayans were on more equal terms in society, but that does not take into account the social practices that are inherited from a society that continually undervalued people from African descent as human beings.

Image in public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia. 

Listening plays a fundamental role in jazz improvisation; but is it necessary for each player to hear all others in a successful improvisation? To better understand the interactions and dynamics of improvisation, a two-part project was started. The project is pursued with hopes for symbiosis between pragmatism (musical experiments) and theory (mathematical models).

Experiments were conducted to provide guidance in developing a mathematical model to describe how jazz musicians listen and process information during an improvisational session. Four musicians participated in a total of nine improvisational sessions. Each piece was created through a different controlled listening network structure that dictated who could hear whom.

The most widespread example of controlled listening in jazz is overdubbing. Overdubbing is a process by which musicians record their parts in layers at different sessions. Perhaps the bassist records their part and then individually the parts of the other musicians are recorded, each hearing only the bass part. Alternatively, subsequent parts could be recorded in succession. In overdubbing the recording is not in real time; the information only flows in one direction. Overdubs also allow the musician to hear the original recording as many times as needed, creating a carefully reactive and not interactive performance. In other words, there is no real-time feedback.

In this paper we focus on the experiments, and an additional paper, which is in progress, will outline the mathematical model.

Related Work

In fields like economics and philosophy of science there is somewhat similar work. Major questions pursued include the formation of information sharing networks [1], the flow of information on networks [2], and achieving consensus on a network [3]. A network in these contexts is a set of vertices and directional edges that represent individuals and the flow of information between them. In our project this is the same; the network is the controlled listening structure. That modeling focuses on collaborations that lead to truth: cases where there is only one “answer.” We hope to generalize this by contributing models that focus on many “right answers.” In terms of jazz a “right answer” is ambiguous and we explore several interpretations of it in the modeling. For example, a “right answer” could be a decision by the “audience,” or it could be the consequence of group consensus at different time-scales of the piece. Our model also involves path dependency; the creation of the piece is part of the piece.

Methodology

The first set of experiments were conducted in the summer of 2015. We brought together four improvisers, M.F.A. students at the University of California, Irvine’s program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT): Anthony Caulkins (guitar), Molly Jones (saxophone), Anna Okunev (violin), and Jordan Watson (guitar). As a graduate cohort, the musicians already had two years’ experience improvising together in various configurations.

Each improviser was isolated in a separate space, with no acoustic or visual communication. Each space was acoustically treated to prevent sound from carrying.  Each improviser was given a set of headphones through which they could always hear themselves and sometimes other players, depending on the network setup.

The improvisers were told that all musicians would be playing in every piece but that they might not hear everybody. They were not told which network structure was being used. The improvisers had no additional information.

Sessions

The sessions below were tested in a random order (with the control first), but they are grouped below to discuss different network structures. Where appropriate we have made preliminary notes below; however, each network requires further analysis, as discussed in future work.

Control

This is a standard improvisational session. Everybody can hear everybody else.

One node removed

Removing one instrument’s input doesn’t appear to create a clear group musical impact. Halfway through the track we can hear an idea played on saxophone carried to the violin and end up back at the acoustic guitar, showing musical information carry through the formation.

Star

The star is a network with a central performer who sends and receives information from the three other musicians, while the other musicians are not connected. This network presented some of the clearest distinctions between experiments. In the version with the electric guitar leading, the performer started first and maintained the same idea throughout the improvisation. They did not alter their performance throughout, possibly as they were unable to isolate any musical ideas to use from the three unrelated streams of musical material. This strongly contrasted with the tenor saxophone version, where the performer instead chose to play very sparsely and attempted to interpret all the unconnected incoming information.

Star with Circle

Preliminary analysis did not show significant differences between this network and the network with one node removed (described earlier).

Single Direction Circle

In this network the information travels in a circle. For both sessions the music is chaotic for a few minutes before noticeable convergence of ideas is clearly heard. We have split the music into three sections: the chaotic beginning, the moment of organization, and the remainder. Each section of the pieces is being analyzed further.

Disconnected Guitar

In this network the guitar receives no input and is essentially playing a solo piece of music. However, their musical information is being leaked into the violin player’s earphones in real time. The purpose of this is to see if the other players realize that there is a stream of musical information coming into the piece that they have no power in altering. They must integrate this musical informational or else succumb to noisy musical disagreement. We observed successful integration of the guitar’s piece in the smaller circle of musicians.

Future Experiments and Directions

The first round of experiments, as described in this paper, has guided the development of a simple mathematical theory. To test results of the theory we will simplify future experiments to include only percussion instruments. The theory keeps track of the flow of musical ideas under different network structures. By limiting the instruments to percussion, we are reducing the complexity of the output of the experiments. We can then apply mathematical tools to analyze the binary sequences that result from the experiments and relate these results to the theory.

Far into the future, once the theory has been fully refined, the goal is to integrate the theory into computer programs to have “intelligent” and “creative” computer improvisers.

References

[1] Bala, Venkatesh and Goyal, Sanjeev. A noncooperative model of network formation. Econometrica, 2000.

[2] Rowe, Robert. Machine musicianship. Massachusetts: MIT press, 2004.

[3] K Zollman. The communication structure of epistemic communities. Philosophy of Science,

74:574–587, 2007.

[4] Zollman, Kevin. Social Network Structure and the Achievement of Consensus. Politics, Philosophy, & Economics, 11:26-44, 2012.

Santiago Guisasola is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research touches on group cooperation, collaboration, and creativity. On the side he plays with music and music technology.

Richard Savery is a music technologist, composer, and improviser performing on saxophone, clarinet, and flute. He completed an M.F.A. in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology at the University of California, Irvine and is continuing graduate studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on artificial improvisers, robot musicianship, and machine learning. www.richardsavery.com

This edition of “Notes from the Field” showcases the incredible number of eclectic musical activities that occurred during the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN, in March of 2017. The ample videos and photos give a sense of the magnitude in quality and quantity of performances.

Rather than trying to smother the audience with a contrived “experience” such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bonnaroo or other major festivals, Big Ears allows the audience to choose their own path in Knoxville’s medium sized downtown. Knoxville is a place with a thriving community arts scene that is no stranger to outside influences. What follows is meant to give a sense of the chronological musical experience from two perspectives as the co-authors Otto Stuparitz and Helga Zambrano did not follow exactly the same path.

Figure 1: Outside the historic Bijou Theatre, built in 1909, where acts like Henry Grimes and Meredith Monk performed during Big Ears.

It’s hard to succinctly describe the artists at Big Ears 2017. Living up to its name, the festival boasts a wide-ranging lineup and demands broad taste from every attendee. While major popular music acts like Wilco, My Brightest Diamond, and the Magnetic Fields grace the top billing and largest theatres at the festival, many of these musicians also perform in unique solo or small group settings with alternative and adventurous musical goals. These smaller sets are sometimes official side projects while others are adhoc blendings of musicians wanting to present open forms of jazz, noise, electronic, minimalism, metal, and fusion.

I (Otto) first attended this festival in 2013, curated by Steve Reich, and which featured Television, John Cale, Julia Holter, Low, and Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Greenwood performed Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” as well as his string based film scores. But the 2017 lineup moved away from this art-rock starting point now including more contemporary classical and non-standard jazz. This year’s occasion also seemed to put the themes of improvisation, listening, and freedom more frontally focused, while leaving the specific interpretation in the hands and ears of each artist.

Figure 2: Outside the Tennessee Theatre where popular acts like Wilco, My Brightest Diamond, and the Magnetic Fields performed.

Figure 3/4: The opening celebration featuring Neif-Norf percussion ensemble performing Pauline Oliveros’ Single Stroke Roll Meditation, commemorating her recent death.

Opening Event: The Spectre of Pauline Oliveros

At the opening event, a succession of speakers promoted the festival’s role in local arts education. This festival has funded many local arts education initiatives and has been an avenue to bring different kinds of music making to the Knoxville area. One speaker, citing the Ford Foundation, said, “without arts there is no empathy, and without empathy there is not justice.” I took this to mean that Big Ears is not just an aural phenomenon, but is also meant to engender some sort of commensurate social meaning. An example of these efforts were demonstrated in the next presentation as a local all female percussion group performed an original composition based upon their experiences at Big Ears in previous years. The piece began with a series of grooves and finished with a meditative rhythmic drone.

This year did not feature one primary curator like previous years such as Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and John Luther Adams. Rather, this year began with an homage to recently departed Pauline Oliveros as her spirit was asked to preside over the festival. As the meditative drone of the local percussion ensemble faded, Nief-Norf began Pauline Oliveros'compositionSingle Stroke Roll Meditation; a piece featuring an intensifying soft mallet roll on a single ride cymbal while three other performers on opposite sides of the giant room with simple percussion setups slowly built their own atmospheres. As the volume grew, the cymbals and percussion blended with the sounds of the industrially converted loft, the crowd murmurs, and the bar sounds. It was a large collective breath as the audience was asked to listen to the room and listen to themselves. We began the festival with an exercise to open our ears.

Neif-Norf reconvened in the center of the room to perform Michael Gordon's Timber, a piece with instructions on how to make sonic waves with mallets on blocks of wood. The punned titled piece explores the timbral shading on different ends of timber blocks, as each performer’s pulses blended polyrhythmically with the other performers. Unlike the Oliveros piece, this piece was more mechanical, emphasizing a technological path to music making that had less to do with the space and people of the performance and more to do with the technical prowess of the composition and performers.

Video 1: Opening ceremony with the wood block composition “Timber” by Michael Gordon at the Mill and Mine.

Taking in this opening event, the musical themes were part of the avant-garde, but a certain kind of avant-garde. There was listening, there was hearing, there was improvisation but all in a certain way. The music seemed to relate to the “Eurological” perspective of improvisation as described by George Lewis (1996), a term intended to historicize the particular characteristics of certain musical systems. The Euro-American “Eurological” can be traced to Henry Cowell’s institutionalization of “ultra modernism” through his founding of the New Music Society in 1925 that later included noted experimentalists such as John Cage and La Monte Young. Musics called “avant-garde,” “experimental,” “jazz,” “contemporary classical,” “minimalism,” and many of other terms are imperfect for complicated works with complicated cultural positions.

Lewis’s contrasting term,“Afrological,” can be traced to LA’s mid-century Central Ave scene, which moved to Watts and Leimert Park in the 1960s. The notable musics of Horace Tapscott’s UGMAA, Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, and the beginnings of free jazz with Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and others all fall under Lewis’s term. Lewis respectively identifies John Cage and Charlie Parker as representatives of the Eurological and Afrological approaches, whose differences turn on their attitude toward the expression of race, ethnicity, class, and political ideology in music.

In this conception, Lewis understands Eurological improvisers as tending to look warily on the admission of personal narrative into improvisatory activity. Following Cage, Eurological  improvisation should not be descriptive of the performer, but is descriptive of what happens (Lewis 1996:118). When this happens, performers identities are muted. In this context, who is the audience listening to? Who is in charge? Is this freedom to openly listen and explore as neutral as this festive event makes it seem? Practically speaking, who are these open spaces open to?

Figure 5: Mural from downtown Knoxville featuring a saxophonist and a banjo player against the backdrop of the nearby Great Smokey Mountains.

The mid-sized city of Knoxville served as an open public space for the festival, facilitating an illusion of neutrality, fluid movement, communication, and self-organization within its city walls. Made up of well-groomed boulevards, a market square, and ample parking, this Tennessee city grid invited festival-goers to take lazy walks through town. When heading between concert venues, festival-goers could wander into their theatres, restaurants, breweries, and mom-and-pop shops all lined up in a row. But as prompted by Otto, is this freedom privileged to concert-goers only, or is it open to all? Descriptive to the festival experience, Knoxville served as the event’s foreground and background narrative, where the city and the festival were harmoniously blended to evoke a community-centered, civically engaged, socially equal, music-sharing experience--as long as the cold beers were still served in abundance.  

Day 1

Figure 6: Matana Roberts performing at the Square Room.

Matana Roberts put on an appealing set of mixed visuals with vocal and saxophone loops. She addressed the audience succinctly as she moved to fill the room with an ambient clash of choked notes, audible breathing, and enigmatic poetry. She was a powerful force early in the weekend, demonstrating how noise and melody could be melded.

Video 2: Matana Roberts performing at the Square Room.

Figure 7:  Matana Roberts performing at Jem Cohen’s Gravity Hill Sound+Image event, a live improvised score of many of the festival’s musicians with the images projected onto an eight-story building.

Her last performance in the festival, at Jem Cohen’s Gravity Hill Sound+Image event, was one of the few events that attempted to bring the many musical worlds together. Roberts listened to her fellow musicians and the echoing space of the parking lot. It was a performance only possible for that moment and in that space. Her solo looped improvisations gave way to Xylouris White’s Greek inspired free-jazz and local bluegrass fiddlers. As the musicians listened and played together, it reminded me of the festival’s opening event and the goals of the festival as a space for empathy and justice. This time the musicians were open not only to the audience and the sounds of the environment, but also to one another.

Video 3: Xylouris White’s Greek inspired free-jazz at Jem Cohen’s Gravity Hill Sound+Image event.

Video 4: Claire Chase playing a bass flute with live electronics.

Claire Chase’s performance on bass flute and concert flute featured what most classical concert flautists are trained to conceal: the unruliness of  breath. As a flautist myself (Helga), I have been trained to control my diaphragm, shape my embouchure just right, and manipulate with care my airstream so as to produce crisp, bright, and pure tones. As a result, this form of praxis creates a sonic illusion of a breathless tone, categorizing the breath as a blemish; the quivering inhale or exhale through the mouth and nose are immediately streamlined into gentle vibratos or a clean airstream.

Chase’s performance contemplated this otherwise discordant sound in order to bring to the surface the intimate correlation between the body, the breath, and the woodwind instrument. More significantly, Chase urged the listener and the flautist to revalue the human body’s most cherished substance for life (the breath) as a source for musical creativity and performance, rather than as a performative hindrance.   

Chase’s fluting cross-pollinated a range of breathy sounds that explicitly engaged with the voice, the nasal cavity, the throat, and the diaphragm. Moreover, her body aggressively swayed on the stage, demonstrating that her flute performance also depended on choreographic gestures to create these sounds. Drawing from her diaphragm Chase created guttural, croaky, growly, scratching, gravelly sounds. She also drew from the mouth to evoke wispy sounds, gusty wind howls, whispers, and susurrations--an effect that displaced the flute tone from the foreground to the background. At another point in her performance, Chase tapped into the vibrations of voice, intermixing a hum, a buzz, and a mumble to the flute’s tone. And in more classical flautist maneuvers, she used her tongue to create trills and clicks.

The flute-sounding process, rather than the performative outcome, served as the driving motive for Chase’s performance. More importantly, it challenged the ontology of classical flute music and reset the expectations of the listener and the hearer. Through Chase’s techniques, the flute was unbound and released from its romantic forecast. As a result, her solo flute work opened up a discursive and creative space to expand the praxis capacities of a woodwind instrument and for the musician and vocalist more broadly.

Day 2

Meredith Monk seemed to be the unofficial curator of the festival as she performed with a variety of ensembles throughout the extended weekend. Her events were well attended and she seemed to strike a balance between venerated classical icon and free moving participatory performer. She mixed sound with music and choreography to create captivating performances featuring some of her “hits” as well as new lesser-known works.

Video 5: Meredith Monk performing a piece written in and inspired by the music of Native American tribes from Central New Mexico.

Video 6: Meredith Monk performing her 1986 piece, Scared Song. She introduced it as important work she remembers in times of political of darkness.

Video 7: Excerpt of Meredith Monk’s mini staged opera, Atlas, with khaen a Lao/Northeast Thai mouth organ.  

Arrington de Dionyso’s surprise set was a breath of fresh air. I met Arrington de Dionyso the summer before in Los Angeles when he was touring a film, which featured experimental music interacting with an Indonesian possession music called reak.(Reak: Trance Music and Possession in West Java-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2WeaWMEqAM). I did not realize it was Arrington until I arrived, since the band was billed as “This Saxophone Kills Fascists,” a cause with a glaring Woodie Guthrie reference. I later found out that Arrington’s tour was an anti-Trump protest, as Arrington was tangentially related with the #Pizzagate incident. He had been targeted by 4chan trolls and #pizzagate conspiracy believers because some of his art hung on the walls of the DC pizza restaurant and music venue, Comet Ping Pong. Rather than fall victim to these threats, Arrington responded with a “This Saxophone Kills Fascist” tour. This article and tour promotion explains more of the details of #pizzgate and Arrington’s response to it. https://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/pizzagate-victim-arrington-de-dionyso-tour-us-spring-saxophone-kills-fascists)

The group was introduced at the end of the show, to reveal to the audience that the performers did not know each other. Rather, it was an adhoc combination of local and touring musicians. It felt like the most raw and openly political event of the festival with the musicians interacting on stage, creating a shared sonic space with a political basis. And just as quickly as it arose, the crowd dispersed to get back to the regularly planned programing.

Video 8: This Saxophone Kills Facists, Arrington de Dionyso with an adhoc group of musicians featuring a local Knoxvillian saxophonist and bassist and Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier.

Day 3

The Big Ears Festival featured poets and filmmakers as well. Kevin Jerome Everson’s short filmswere presented at the Knoxville Museum of Art featuring: Ring (2008), Tygers (2014), Auditioning for Nathaniel (2016), R-15 (2017), Smooth Surface (2015), Production Material Handler (2015), Fe26 (2014), and Ears, Nose and Throat (2016).

I was particularly drawn to Everson’s R-15, Smooth Surface, Production Material Handler, and Fe26, which emphasized the interconnected process between industrial production, the physical exertion (and exhaustion) of the body, race relations, and artistic expression. In these films, Everson challenges the nineteenth-century romantic notion that industrial factory work is detrimental to the human artistic spirit--especially when those currently working as industrial laborers are (anonymous) people of color. As a result, Everson brings forth these racial tensions while also reclaiming their human artistic spirit and agency: blue-collar factory workers could be considered artist, if one were to just look and listen closely. Through cinematographic attention to the laborers’ repetitive and meticulous tasks required in factory work, Everson re-purposes the dullness of industrial labor as the very site from which poetic, cinematographic, and artistic beauty can emerge.

Placing his films in the spaces of industrial factories and low-income black neighborhoods of Cleveland, Everson’s films feature the laborer and their act of labor to not only urge the viewer to interrogate the capitalist values that anonymize and racialize this industrial process, but also to recognize that these dismal conditions also house human lives deserving of beauty, creativity, and most importantly, of recognition.  

The films are aestheticized in documentary form, lending a realist depiction of these people’s daily working life. At the same time, Everson chooses to disregard the traditional linearity and biographical tendencies found in documentaries. His films instead fixate on specific actions enacted by his protagonists, intimately depicted through a diverse range of cinematic angles, light exposure, framing, and sonic manipulation to give pride of place to industrial noise, voice, and silence. Rather than assuming the laborer’s life story as complete, Everson reveals the repetitive nature of the laborer’s exhaustive work; as the short blacks out, the viewer is left with the impression of knowing that the manual laborer will continue working even after the camera stops filming. The short film, as well as the laborer’s tasks, remain infinitely unfinished. At the same time, it is in this very fixation that the viewer is given a glimpse into the laborer’s creative process. Just as a painting, a sculpture, a song, or a poem’s attempt to encapsulate a version of time, space, body, or voice, so too were Everson’s short films paying heed to this artistic effect found through the laborer’s repetitive actions.  

One example was R-15, which is code for asbestos: “The material that keeps southern homes warm in the winter months and cool in the summer.” The film features a laborer whose job is to distribute asbestos in homes. But as we are constantly reminded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Asbestos that is in good condition and left undisturbed is unlikely to present a health risk. The risks from asbestos occur when it is damaged or disturbed where asbestos fibers become airborne and can be inhaled. Managing asbestos in place and maintaining it in good repair is often the best approach.” And as it recommends, a homeowner should hire an accredited “asbestos contractor that is properly trained” to either remove asbestos from the home, or replace it with “better-conditioned” asbestos.  In other words, the homeowner can defer this damaging and dangerous act to a paid laborer, whose take-home pay for conducting this job will not, however, prevent the health risks he is forced to deal with everyday. Despite these national policies, the class and racial divide becomes apparent in Everson’s film, as it reveals who is subjected to this dangerous type of work and who is not. EPA is an agency that serves those privileged enough to avoid these environmental health risks. In this film, the camera follows a handyman quietly climb up a ladder as he pulls himself up a roof hatch and slips into an attic of a Southern home. Once inside the attic, the film viewer and handyman alike experience a cave-like space, enveloped in darkness, silence, and isolation.

The cinematic tempo then follows the handyman’s tedious procedural movements as he pulls up a snake-like tube into the attic, with only his headlight dimly illuminating where he will place the tube. The film viewer follows the handyman’s mundane operations to prepare for his eventual goal: to distribute layers of asbestos on the attic floor. Caught all in one reel, we intimately connect with this isolating and rather mundane process.

But then, the purpose of this documentary soon reveals itself. As the handyman holds the tube at waist height and distributes these toxic particles onto the attic floor, Everson simultaneously captures the beauty of this mechanical process. What may appear as a man distributing asbestos with the humming of the machine outside, Everson captures this moment as a soft snowfall on a winter’s day. As the machine releases the asbestos, the camera spots slivers of sunlight peeking through the roof attic, illuminating these white particles as they layer like rolling snow hills.

But just as soon as the viewer begins to relish in this beautiful cinematography, the camera cuts back to the handyman. His eyes tediously watch the asbestos to ensure its proper distribution. His face is covered by a mask to mitigate the air’s toxicity. His gloved hands hold the tube still, so that the asbestos distributes evenly. The handyman is alone--and even bored--in doing this task, and the film’s use of silence and lack of dialogue reinforces this state of dullness. Everson reminds the viewer of the possibility for short glimpses of artistic beauty to emerge, but at the cost of the laborer’s health, isolation, and boredom.

Everson’s film techniques reclaim the factory laborer’s humanity, however, it does not excuse the film viewer from recognizing the physical, social, and economic cost that comes with this line of work. His films urge the viewer to recognize the irreconcilable tension between labor and artistry, between freedom and confinement, between individual expression and mechanization.   

Figure 8: Hans-Joachim Roedelius performing in a rented church, down the road from the other major theatres.

Musica Elettronica Viva is the collaborative effort of Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum. These laureled classical composers were treated like rock stars, as they sauntered up to the stage with beers in hand with a small paparazzi tracing their every move. Their performance blurred edges as electroacoustic music became listenable and acoustic instruments were pushed into a dull monotonous static. The audience moved to purchase their third beer of the afternoon and the pretensions of “high art” began to fade. Despite their Eurological proclivities, something like their identities began to show.

Figure 9: Musica Elettronica Viva (Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, and Frederic Rzewski) at the Mill & Mine.

As Rzewski whispered his foreboding poetry over Teitelbaum’s distorted avian samples, Curran quietly faded in a buzzy banjo keyboard patch racing faster than any human could dexterously perform. The crowd was more like a rock audience, instead of the polite classical audience one might expect from these eminent classical composers. People would react with a murmur or small clap when something came together nicely or simply walk away when they were bored. The space continually rang with the clicking cash register and the popping of beer bottles.

Poetry Slam: Big Ears 5th Woman Slam Off

This event was particularly refreshing to attend. The Poetry Slam featured talented women poets who brought forth a poetic consciousness toward contemporary social and political issues in the U.S. They lyricized and scatted to issues surrounding the female body, romance, unrequited love, self-love, rape, violence and trauma, and misogyny. As an invited guest judge, I was asked to rank each poet's merit, but in my humble opinion, each poet’s work could not be compared nor ranked. Each one offered her own raw and honest version of what it can mean to be a woman in a big city, in a small town, and everything in between. The variety of voices, age, and racial and ethnic backgrounds colored the evening with performances that inspired the crowds to reflect on the social, gender, racial, and political macrocosms that affect women’s lives in very intimate ways. By exposing their most vulnerable secrets, these women demonstrated an admirable level of courage and tenacity toward the cruel worlds they face everyday. It was such an uplifting experience to be able to witness their rough and beautiful treks through life, while also grow in solidarity with their stories.

Figure 10: Big Ears Poetry Expo Finale at the Jackson Terminal.

Henry Grimes is known as one of the leaders of avant-jazz and improvisation from the 1950s and 1960s but fell into relative obscurity until his return in the early 2000s. His concert featured a collaboration of Nicole Mitchell (flutes), Tomeka Reid (cello), and Warren Smith (drums and percussion). Despite the formal presentational setting, the group was relaxed and focused on listening and performing with each other. It was extremely refreshing to see a group primarily concerned with feeling the relationship of the musicians on stage rather than attempting to amaze the audience with technical or cerebral feats.

Video 9/10:  Henry Grimes featuring Nicole Mitchell (flutes), Tomeka Reid (cello), and Warren Smith (drums and percussion) in the Bijou Theatre.

Conclusion

Open. Freedom. Big Ears. All terms that were touted throughout the festival. The organizers invited a broad range of artists, which asked an audience member to cast a wide aural net to hear it all. Hearing is not the same thing as listening. The festival presented listening and hearing as open and potentially universal. Only a few artists pushed beyond the idea of being in spaces of freedom and openness. These spaces also need politicized intentionality in their makeup to maintain the inclusivity of this open forum. The fact is, the audience throughout the festival was primarily male and white and the largest and most well attended events featured white male artists.

Through Jeffery Juris’s examples of many open forums, an “intentional” organizing strategy helps generate a more inclusive space than other previous kinds of open forums (41:2008). Open forums are limited to the biases of the society that binds them; it is only open for those that can afford to attend. In short, these open spaces with respect to inclusiveness and access, “always already involve significant exclusions, which reproduce prevailing structures of privilege and inequality” (44).

Juris, following Nancy Fraser, describes how even if “marginalized groups are formally admitted to the public sphere, informal protocols of style and interaction may continue to mark status differences, preventing them from participating on an equal footing. At the same time, subordinate groups often lack the material means to access public spheres, making it difficult for them to participate in the first place” (Juris 2008:44 and Fraser 1992:120).

The festival has grown in a positive direction over the past few years, including things that might not have been included in previous iterations of this festival like the Poetry Slam, Kevin Jerome Everson’s films, and Henry Grimes’s loose free jazz ensemble, as it continues on its path of having socially conscious and aurally focused big ears. Nevertheless, the festival’s open forum still seemed to privilege a Eurological approach to the avant-garde, primarily attended by a white, educated, middle class audience. Going forward, this contest of an open space vis-a-vis intentional space needs to be addressed as it will lead the festival towards their stated goals of empathy and justice through music making.

Bibliography

Juris, Jeffery. 2008. Spaces of intentionality: race, class, and horizontality at the United States Social Forum. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 13(4), 353-372.

“Kevin Jerome Everson: The Surface Below.”  http://lineup.bigearsfestival.com/band/the-surface-below

Lewis, George. 2004. "Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives." Black Music Research Journal, vol. 16, No.1, Spring 1996, 91-122.

Miller, Terry E. 1985. Traditional Music of the Lao: Kaen Playing and Mawlum Singing in Northeast Thailand. Contributions in Intercultural and Comparative Studies, no. 13. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

Fraser, Nancy, and Calhoun, C. 1992. Habermas and the public sphere. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.

United States Environment Protection Agency. “Asbestos Frequently Asked Questions.” December 21, 2016.

https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/asbestos-frequently-asked-questions .

Otto Stuparitz is a graduate student in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA focusing on the popular and traditional musics of Indonesia. His dissertation project explores jazz in Indonesia as it relates to local musics such as gong kebyar, musik kontemporer, kecapi suling, kroncong, and many others as well as considers the influences of pop, noise, European classical, and American/European jazz.

Helga Zambrano is a Doctoral Candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research fields include twentieth-century Latin American and U.S. Latino literature, with a regional focus on Central.

The UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive is pleased to announce that more recordings from the Archive's collections are now available online as part of the California Light and Sound Collection on the Internet Archive.  California Light and Sound is a project of the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP).

This round of recordings represents two collections. Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy's fieldwork project, Khmer Dance and Music Project  (you can also see more of Amy's fieldwork on CAVPP, including additional Khmer recordings)...

Khmer Dance and Music Project: Bonn Kathen, Wat Thai Temple, North Hollywood, California, October 29, 1989

Khmer Dance and Music Project: Sophiline Cheam Shapiro teaches Cambodian Dance, December 21, 1991.  Awarded in 2009 with a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, SOPHILINE CHEAM SHAPIRO is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Khmer Arts Academy (Long Beach, CA/Phnom Penh, Cambodia). She is a choreographer, dancer, vocalist and educator whose original works have infused the venerable Cambodian classical form with new ideas and energy. She has set choreography on Cambodia’s finest performing artists, and teaches, lectures and tours internationally, from the Venice Biennale to New York’s Joyce Theater to the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Sophiline has worked with artists including John Zorn, Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Chinary Ung, and was commissioned by director Peter Sellars to premiere her original work Pamina Devi at Vienna’s New Crowned Hope Festival in 2006. As one of the first generation to graduate from Phnom Penh’s Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA) after the fall of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, she became a member of RUFA’s faculty until she immigrated to Southern California in 1991 where she studied dance ethnology at UCLA and established Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach, expanding her organization to Phnom Penh in 2006.

And Sephardic music, especially Turkish, Cuban, and Judeo-Spanish, recorded in California by Emily Sene and including performances by her husband, Isaac Sene, oud. According to Professor Edwin Seroussi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) "the collection reveals the musical life of the Turkish Jews in the Los Angeles area from the 1950s until the 1970s." Professor Seroussi also calls Emily Sene "a major Sephardi female archivist of folksong."

Issac Sene, oud:

Here is the complete list of the current round of UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive recordings on California Light and Sound.  And more are forthcoming, so stay tuned!!

• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian New Year 1988
• Khmer Dance and Music Project:  Chan Moly Sam, 1990
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian dancers at UCLA, July 4, 1988
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian New Year; Thai New Year 1988
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Ramnong song, Water goes through sand, April 9, 1990 ; Khmer New Year, Angkeung, April 1990
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian music and dance, Caltech, May 17, 1989
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian Dance, Alhambra, California, August 1988
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Chinary Ung; UCLA Khmer Nonshop; Cambodian Dance
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Bun ceremony, with Cambodian dancer Sophanary Ouk, October 28, 1988
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Nish and George wedding, April 15, 1989
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Khon wedding, Van Nuys, California, May 27, 1989
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian Dance, UCLA, May 11, 1990
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Los Angeles Festival, September 1990
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Phnom Penh meets L.A., September 11, 1990
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Kbach Khmer
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian Children's Orchestra, May 26, 1993
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Bonn Kathen, Wat Thai Temple, North Hollywood, California, October 29, 1989
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Apsara Restaurant, Long Beach, California, March 5, 1993
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Sophiline Cheam Shapiro teaches Cambodian Dance, December 21, 1991
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, UCLA, July 14, 1993
• Sephardic music: Spesial de Isaac
• Sephardic music: Marco Sara Baccheva Isaac Palti
• Sephardic music
• Sephardic music: Isaac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: De Isaac Lurco
• Sephardic music: De Isaac Arabo
• Sephardic music: Turcas, Isaac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: Spesial de Isaac en Turco
• Sephardic music: Esta Es Isaac Guenos En Turco
• Sephardic music: Mahman Mentesh Julia Jeni la del Doctor Isaac a de Selomo
• Sephardic music: Turco Eryer Caralic, Isaac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: Mañana, Issac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: Andreas Taximes
• Sephardic music: Gregas Judio, Isaac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: Estas Son Placas con Isaac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: Pasatiempo ade Jana, canticas de Isaac Sene
• Sephardic music: Andreas con Isaac
• Sephardic music: Mahman, Isaac, Sarah
• Sephardic music: Mentesh Jeni Isaac Susan
• Sephardic music: Benveniste
• Sephardic music: Sarah Issac, Mentsch Casilica
• Sephardic music: Isaac Sene
• Sephardic music: Isaac Sene, 1973
• Sephardic music: 1972

Introduction

Citizenship, community and national identity have been brought to the fore in public discourse in recent months by the political situations on both sides of the Atlantic. As Islamophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric has intensified throughout Europe and North America, via political ideology and media representation, many communities have experienced a growing sense of mistrust and social marginalisation.  In this article, I want to explore the ways in which the predominantly-Muslim Algerian diaspora community of London, with whom I have been conducting research since 2011, uses music to construct a sense of community and to shape their place within British society in the face of such marginalisation. I am particularly interested in the ways in which people and ideas of “Algerianness” migrate and circulate between the UK, France and North Africa, and the role that music plays in these cultural flows. What is contemporary “British-Algerianness” in London, and what role does music play in mediating and articulating this sense of localised cultural identity?

Algeria and France

Citizenship and national identity have long been complicated issues for Algerians. Between 1830 and 1962 Algeria was part of the French colonial empire, and in 1875 the French government announced that Algeria would become an integral part of the Third Republic, administered as three départments, with the same legal status and political representation as Brittany or Provence (Evans 2012:19). Thus, Algerians forcibly became French, at least legally, which enabled the state to ignore, or repress, local cultural forms. Perhaps inevitably, after independence in 1962 the Algerian government ardently promoted nationalism, but favoured cultural practices that could be advanced as definably Arab, Muslim and Algerian. Martin Stokes writes of efforts during the colonial period to distance al-Andalus, a highly-revered art music performed throughout Algeria, from the disreputable hashish dens and Sufi lodges with which it had become associated, and states that “French orientalists lamented these signs of decline and sought to purify it. Following closely in their footsteps, North African intellectuals appropriated it as national art music” (2011:28). In contrast, raï, a popular music that emerged from the city of Oran, and incorporates non-Algerian instrumentation and musical features, garnered considerable exposure and commercial success in Europe and North America in the 1990s. However, raï retained a disreputable status within Algerian society, and Marc Schade-Poulsen notes that “raï’s syncretism did not fit at all into national politics, and even less did its association with the tradition of the shikha (a low-status female musician)” (1999:20).

Throughout the twentieth century, many Algerians moved to France in search of employment, and large diaspora communities emerged in most major French cities. The members of these communities not only encountered racism and other forms of discrimination, but were forced to engage with the French state’s notions of Republicanism and laïcité (secularism). There is not space here to delve into this complicated issue, but put simply, life for Algerians in France after 1962 did not look that different from their experiences under colonialism. Algerians were expected to integrate into French society, renouncing their national, cultural and religious identities, whilst often being denied social mobility and full political representation. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, debates on immigration in France centred primarily upon Muslim, and particularly Algerian, communities.  Paul Silverstein argues that these debates

Focussed less on border policies than on state security, on immigrants’ access to French nationality, on social integration and exclusion in the (sub)urban cites in which many immigrants and their children live, and on the legitimacy of signs of Muslim difference – particularly group prayer, mosque building, and women’s headscarves – in the French public sphere (Silverstein 2004:5).

Music offered an important way of voicing frustrations and gaining recognition for Algerian culture, and throughout the 1990s, France became home to vibrant Algerian raï and hip-hop scenes. Yet for many Algerians, their citizenship and identity has remained liminal, caught between the nationalism and secular-republicanism of the Algerian and French states. The combination of on-going discrimination and a perceived reticence to socially integrate has been fundamental to, on the one hand, growing Islamic extremism in deprived urban areas, and on the other, a hardening of the anti-immigration, Islamophobic politics currently being advanced by Marine Le Pen’s Front National.

Poster for "Algerian Cultural Festival"

Algerian London

This relationship between Algeria and France continues to play out amongst London’s Algerian diaspora community, and is often framed in musical terms. Much of the city’s Algerian population were born in North Africa before migrating to the UK, for work and education, or to escape their country’s civil war conflict in the 1990s. A much smaller section of the local community was born in France to Algerian parents, and whilst there is a desire for unity amongst Algerians living in the city, certain tensions continue to play out between the groups.1

One of my interlocutors, a female events organiser and artist manager who was born in France and raised by Algerian parents, explains the situation by describing herself as follows:

I am French-Algerian, all the way. Initially when I came to England, it was funny. When people said, “where are you from?” I was saying “Algeria”. I’ve never set foot in Algeria. I’m going to be 36 tomorrow and I’ve never been to Algeria in my life... Loads of people have an identity crisis. For them it’s true and they might think that I have an identity crisis, but I don’t. I was born in France; that makes me French. I went to French school, my education was French, but my parents were Algerian. That makes me French-Algerian. To me I don’t have any identity crisis; this is who I am.

Although she describes growing up in France, she also recounts an experience familiar to many others from North African communities, arguing that “in France, you will never be called French as an Algerian. You can be born there, grow up there, it makes no difference”. She bases her self-identification around two categories: “French-Algerian” for those with backgrounds similar to her own, and “Algerian-Algerian” for those born in North Africa but now living in the UK.2 These two categories can be explicated through musical tastes she claims: those born in Algeria are more likely to listen to traditional forms of Algerian music, whilst “many French-Algerians might listen to raï, but they’re not very likely to listen to maluf or gnawa. Some would, I’m not saying that they wouldn’t, but we are more Westernised in the way that we listen to music. We listen to pop music, we listen to reggae, we listen to R&B”. These claims are supported by many of those who were born in Algeria. A female singer and ‘ud player with an Andalus ensemble in London claims that her musical tastes were shaped by her parents’ conservative attitude, and recalls that they steered her away from listening to non-Algerian popular music and towards performing al-Andalus. Had she been born in France, she suggests, she might have been offered a broader range of musical choices.

Although notions of “Algerianness” might be strongly shaped by the relationship between France and Algeria, there is a clear sense that Algerian culture in the UK is definably different from either of these countries. Algerian musicians in London speak of the cultural capital afforded to their music simply because they reside and perform in Britain. For example, a 2013 article in the Algerian daily newspaper El Watan featured an interview with London-based musician Rachida Lamri in which she discusses the efforts of musicians in the UK to promote al-Andalus, and Algerian culture more broadly (Bsikri 2013). She claims that the interest shown by El Watan and its readers was a result of the fact that this was Algerian music being performed in Britain, rather than France, and was therefore considered novel and intriguing to Algerians in North Africa. Similarly, an Algerian rapper with a group based in London explained to me their problems with attracting interest from Algerian audiences in the UK and recounting that, “we actually tried to push our music more in Algeria, back home, because we figured that they have their Algerian rap out there, chaabi or whatever, and ours is a bit of a different flip on things. It’s European, it’s Western music, but we’re Algerian, there’s Algerian in there”. In constructing an Algerian community in London, musicians are therefore able to clearly differentiate their music and garner interest from listeners in North Africa and France.

Algerian Cultural Festival, Baraki-House Production

Community and Class

Alongside the debates around “French-Algerian” and “Algerian-Algerian” identities, another discourse focuses upon the degree of local community cohesion in London. Issues of social class and residency status in the UK are contentious. A significant proportion of the local Algerian population are described as harraga (without legal paperwork to reside in the UK), and there are considerable barriers to accessing and attending musical performances for these people. However, in the view of a local Algerian radio station owner, national and cultural identity supersedes any differences. During an interview in 2013, he insisted that “in our world, it doesn’t matter what you earn. If you are Algerian, that’s fine. Most of the people I know, we don’t have that differentiation between job titles, or you have papers or you don’t have papers. For us, if you are Algerian, you are Algerian”. This position reflects a frequently articulated desire for a sense of local community in the city.

In contrast, a female singer and prominent member of the local community provides perhaps a more nuanced reading of the situation, suggesting that,

I’ve met a few Algerians here who are completely different from me, that I would rather steer away from. And I’ve always thought “if we were back in Algeria, I would never have to meet you. I would never have had to even talk to you, you’re not even a factor in my life”. But because we’re here abroad, we do become the same, because we’re all Algerians here. That is what defines us. Being Algerian in England. But the class remains there, although we don’t talk about it, because we’re all here and we have something that keeps us all together.

The importance of this shared sense of community and national identity for Algerians in London should not be underestimated. Dispersed across London and throughout surrounding areas, and without a visible public presence or determinable physical space within the city, collective forms of Algerianness are deemed crucial for bringing individuals together and increasing awareness of Algerian culture, whilst challenging negative stereotyping within the local media.3 In many cases these take the form of musical performances. Events with titles such as the “Algerian Cultural Festival” (2012) or “Nostalgically Algerian” (2013) aim to bring together members of the community under the banner of national identity, and provide performance opportunities for local Algerian musicians. Such events typically feature a strikingly diverse range of Algerian performers, from rai singers and chaabi ensembles to rappers and rock bands. The integration of such contrasting musical styles and disparate audiences within a single venue evidences the appetite for a coherent local community. Despite the varying social status of each of these musics within Algerian society, and the diversity of the listeners that they typically attract, the sense of difference is temporarily set aside in order to facilitate social interaction and to construct a communal sense of British-Algerian identity in the city.           

Whilst differences may be overlooked for the sake of community, they do not remain entirely unacknowledged and they continue to play a fundamental role in shaping the types of music and musical events that individuals access. A male percussionist and events organiser expresses the enduring diversity of the local community in the following description:

The community is not solid. You can see that when there is an event, they do turn out. But then again, you have two different communities. You’ve got the mobile community, the younger ones. The non-committed, the non-married, the non-family. They are much more agile, and are moving around. They can go to a gig. And within that you have two categories. The successful ones, the ones who have done studies, have good jobs. Those ones are in a minority. And the majority are the workers. They work hard, many in catering. And the non-papers, the harraga. And those ones are not as mobile. They won’t come into central London for a gig. “Why would I want to go to a gig? I’m looking for some papers, I don’t have time for a gig.” And then you have people who earn minimum wage and work twenty hours a day. They are not going to spend fifteen pounds on a gig! “You’re joking? I would have to work all day for that!” They won’t come. And then you have the families. They would like to come. But with this concept you have the modern family who can go to a gig. And then in Walthamstow and Finsbury Park you have a community where it is very traditional. The wife and the husband. They will go to places where there is no alcohol. They will go to places where people don’t swear.

This description is useful because it unpacks the complexity and intricacies of the local Algerian community, touching upon issues of age, class, legal status and religious observance. It evidences the diversity that exists below the surface of collective musical performances, and the negotiation of communal identities that take place within such contexts.

Poster for "Nostalgically Algerian"

Conclusions

A second generation is gradually emerging within London’s Algerian community, but many of those who self-identify as Algerian in the city were still born in North Africa or France. Strong connections remain with Algeria’s long and complex history around citizenship and nationalism, and the desire for community cohesion and cultural reconnection is therefore unsurprising. Music plays a vital role in these processes, bringing people together and enabling a sense of collective identity, whilst providing a visibility and audibility that stakes a place for Algerians in twenty-first century London. Nevertheless, this community is characterised by diversity (both personal and musical), and negotiations around community identities are shaped by both similarities and differences. By recognising such diversity, we can challenge some of the reductive and bounded processes of othering that are increasingly played out through political and media discourses, and better understand what it means to be Algerian within contemporary London.

References

Burrows, Thomas. 2014. “Algerian migrant can't be kicked out of Britain because of his right to family life - despite threatening to KILL his ex-partner and children.” The Daily Mail, 30/11/2014.

Bsikri, Medhi. 2013. “Faire connaître la musique andalouse au Royaume-Uni est notre objectif.” El Watan, 14/7/2013.

Department for Communities and Local Government (Change Initiative). 2009. The Algerian Muslim Community in England: Understanding Muslim Ethnic Communities. London: Department for Communities and Local Government.

Evans, Martin. 2012. Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

International Organisation for Migration. 2007. Algeria: Mapping Exercise. London: IOM UK.

Laville, Sandra. 2003. “100 known Algerian terrorists came to this country as asylum seekers.” The Daily Telegraph, 17/1/2003.

Schade-Poulsen, Marc. 1999. Men and Popular Music in Algeria: The Social Significance of Raï. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Silverstein, Paul A. 2004. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Stokes, Martin. 2011. “Migrant/Migrating Music and the Mediterranean.” In Migrating Music, editedby Jason Toynbee and Byron Dueck, 28-37. Abingdon: Routledge.

Biography

Stephen Wilford is an ethnomusicologist based at City, University of London. His work focuses upon North African musics, particularly those of Algeria, and spans a range of traditional and contemporary styles. His AHRC-funded PhD focussed upon music-making amongst the Algerian diaspora community of London. He is currently working on the research project “Music and Digital Culture in the Middle East and North Africa”. He is an Early Career Research Fellow of the Institute of Musical Research, and a member of both the national committee of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and the ethnomusicology committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Notes

• 1. Given the fluid and dispersed nature of London’s Algerian community, and the relatively high proportion of individuals without legal residency status, official statistics are limited. Reports commissioned by the International Organisation for Migration (2007) and UK government (2009) suggest that the UK’s Algerian population was around 35,000 at the time, with most of these people living in London, and that perhaps 90% of individuals were born in the capital city of Algiers.
• 2. These labels (“French-Algerian” and “Algerian-Algerian”) are used quite widely by members of the city’s Algerian community, and I encountered them in numerous conversations and interviews during my fieldwork.
• 3. Negative reports about Algerians in the UK have been circulated by the media for over a decade. A 2003 article in The Daily Telegraph used the headline “100 known Algerian terrorists came to this country as asylum seekers”, whilst more recently a 2014 Daily Mail article stated “Algerian migrant can't be kicked out of Britain because of his right to family life - despite threatening to KILL his ex-partner and children” (Laville, 2003; Burrows, 2014).

In 1992 and 1993, Professor Steven Loza taught the course Musical Aesthetics in Los Angeles.  A number of these classes were recorded and the recordings became part of the Ethnomusicology Archive's Department of Ethnomusicology collection.  Twenty-four of these recordings are now available online on the Ethnomusicology Archive channel as part of California Light and Sound.  I thought that I would highlight several of them.

In this Introductory lecture, Loza discusses how the class will examine on a cross-cultural basis the diverse musical contexts within the city of Los Angeles. Includes observations about gangster rap, Korean American culture in Los Angeles, and the LA Riots which occurred the previous year. (1993)

Professor Loza invited an amazing array of guest lecturers.

The legendary film composer James Horner (1953-2015) and Scott Lipscomb, then graduate student in Systematic Musicology, now Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Director of Graduate Studies at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati.  (1992)

Rudy Salas, lead guitarist and songwriter for Tierra, and David Reyes, author of Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock 'n' Roll from Southern California. (1992)

Ernest Fleischmann (1924-2010), Executive Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (1992)

Conversation between jazz trumpeter Charles Moore (1941-2014) and awarding-winning author, educator, journalist, and activist Herb Boyd about African-American music in Los Angeles and how it relates to the African-American experience; then Grammy-nominated jazz bandleader, trumpeter, composer, arranger and educator, Gerald Wilson (1918-2014) speaks of his life and experiences in the music world. (1993)

Johnny Mori, seminal member of the taiko group Kinnara Taiko (Senshin Buddhist Temple, Los Angeles) and the original taiko drummer for the Grammy nominated jazz-fusion band Hiroshima, speaks about growing up in Los Angeles and how it affected his development as a musician. (1993)

The class also inspired volume 10 of Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology: Musical Aesthetics and Multiculturalism in Los Angeles(UCLA Ethnomusicology Publications, 1994).  "Volume X investigates musical aesthetics from both theoretical and ethnographic orientations. Its scope includes many of the ethnic communities of Los Angeles presented in detail and covers the issue of multiculturalism on a city-wide basis." 

The contributors include:

Musical aesthetics and multiculturalism in Los Angeles: an introduction / Steven Loza
L.A.: one society, one culture, many options / Jacques Maquet
Music and the cultural imagination / Roger W.H. Savage
Interpreting metaphors: cross-cultural aesthetics as hermeneutic project / Angeles Sancho-Velázquez
Identity, nationalism, and aesthetics among Chicano/Mexicano musicians in Los Angeles / Steven Loza
The evolution of banda music and the current banda movement in Los Angeles / Carlos Manuel Haro and Steven Loza
Music at the 1993 Los Angeles Marathon: an experiment in team fieldwork and urban ethnomusicology / Timothy Rice
Music in the Chinese community of Los Angeles: an overview / Guangming Li
Eleanor Hague (1875-1954): pioneering Latin Americanist / Robert Stevenson
The bands of tomorrow are here today: the proud, progressive, and postmodern sounds of Las Tres and Goddess 13 / George Lipsitz
Los Angeles gangsta rap and the aesthetics of violence / Steven Loza ... [et al.]
Social aspects of Persian music in Los Angeles / Behzad Allahyar
Context-dependent aesthetics: mariachi music in Los Angeles / Steven Pearlman
"Popular prices will prevail": setting the social role of European-based concert music / Catherine Parsons Smith
Outside-in: lost in L.A. with Bobby Bradford / Grace M.

Remember, you can watch all twenty-four of these recordings online on the Ethnomusicology Archive channel!

“Detroit techno” is a musical category and a paradigm my research deals with. As a matter of fact, I was acquainted with Detroit techno mostly while living in Paris (France), where I study. Fans of this electronic music genre, clubbers and partygoers, may mention their taste through this common category called techno music. At the same time, they mention city names like Berlin or Detroit. Some of them discuss specific links techno music has with Detroit. They use artist name-dropping, historical facts about the origins of this music as well as values and aesthetic concepts in order to express what Detroit techno is and sounds like. However, by focusing on Detroit (MI) nowadays, it appears that fans lack in artistic and musical knowledge. This is what have specifically made me wonder what techno is and how it works in Detroit. Instead of staying in Paris doing research on techno, this identity/alterity anthropological perspective made me choose another focal point. So, I went to Detroit.

I lived in Detroit for a whole period of seven months split between the summers of 2014 and 2015. This ethnography took place during what Detroit city officials call “Detroit techno week”. The climax of this week was a three-day electronic music festival called MOVEMENT (Paxahau Production, producers since 2005), which took place in Downtown Detroit from May 23^rd to May 25^th 2015. It was located on Hart Plaza, a large public place where monuments are located. The site of the festival was circled by barriers and by the city’s main administrative, financial and industrial buildings. This was the second time I went to this festival, which has been taking place once a year since 2000.

“Welcome to Detroit. Birthplace of techno”

As any research scholar who studies a nightly phenomenon, I wake up around eleven in the morning after coming in late from an "after party" from the very first day of MOVEMENT festival on Saturday 23^rd May. My room is located in an apartment near Wayne State University campus in Midtown. I ride a bike to travel and move through Detroit. According to my parents and Detroit friends, it may not seem the safest way to cross the city – especially by night – but it enables me to take time to stop and look at what happens everywhere. Today, I have about 3 miles to ride to go to Hart Plaza, where MOVEMENT festival is located: this takes fifteen minutes by bike. This is a short way, almost a straight line across Detroit's rectilinear urban pattern and road mapping.

Today is Sunday and streets are calm, at least calmer than usual. I don't say this because of my observer point of view, but because Midtown is really active. It’s because Midtown is a quite dynamic area where museums, libraries, universities and hospitals are located, but there is actually nobody outside. Indeed, based on the way the city is often depicted in the media, we may think of Detroit as a “silent”, or “empty” city, or as a criminal city full of police siren sounds. However, while I’m riding my bike down through Second Avenue, a parade of different environments, landscapes and other kinds of areas appear. Far away, I see General Motors towers incarnating what Motor City is and was. I see a sign to indicate where I have to go. To the left, there is a grocery store, a parking lot and the Bronx bar. To the right, small houses, a laundromat and a Pakistani restaurant. I cross Canfield Street, one of the oldest cobbled streets in Detroit with Queen Anne and Victorian style residences. Canfield Street is also an area with brand-new looking infrastructures, a Shinola luxury store, and fancy shops with some gadgets and high-trended local products. A little bit further, you can find a big community garden with urban agricultural activities for the needy, making this area attractive, as it is qualified as being gentrified. A few yards away the scene changes abruptly. I now enter another zone, which depicts the hard urban and social-economic side of Detroit: a few buildings are still standing but the majority of them are in ruins. The road that goes through is also in a pretty bad shape and there are not so many cars passing by.

I am now close to the city center. Downtown entrance is full of construction sites in a quite dense urban fabric. There are usually many empty parking lots, which greatens the impression that nothing goes on. And yet those parking lots are full today, as if a baseball game from the hometown Detroit Tigers was happening. Thanks to my bicycle I can simply go around the traffic jam. I also notice that some people are walking to the city center. Traffic jams are pretty uncommon here, but today they result from the large amount of cars and taxis that try to park right next to the festival site. In addition to this, many people walk out of their hotels and cross the street on their way to the event. Hotels are between 50 and a 100 yards from the Hart Plaza, and now is the only time of the year they are fully booked. Most partygoers will not see those places I have just described before because of their proximity to the plaza. They will not see the New Center or Midtown districts, the abandoned homes or the ruined buildings. They will only see the tall towers like that of General Motors. 

About 5.30pm at Main Stage during 2015 MOVEMENT festival

As I arrive to the site it is already 2pm and to enter I must pass through the press and journalist reserved entry gate (1) and make my way to the VIP area just behind the scenes. Those who have access to the VIP area can be considered "privileged" since the VIP three-day ticket price is more expensive (around $300) and includes “VIP benefits” such as discounted drinks and an exclusive Red Bull bar – the main and most visible sponsor of MOVEMENT. The regular three-day ticket is $135, which is not inexpensive considering the average wage and poverty rate in Detroit. In this VIP area some tents give shelter to some of the participants while providing courtesy services like massage and other resting areas supplied with carpets and pillows. This area overlooks the festival's site. Projection screens and speakers rise vertically in front of me like the Great Wall. 

The Main Stage is in front of me. It has been set in a low-rise area in order to provide the public with generous free space for dancing in this amphitheater surrounded by semi-circular bleachers. I approach the stage where Gabi, a 26 years old DJ and producer, has been performing her set for the last 10 minutes. It is the first time that she is performing at MOVEMENT. To know more about her and to listen to her story I contacted her back in 2014 right after seeing her perform a set in a club called The Works (2).

I take notes about the fact that I am quite “astonished” to see her in this environment equipped with “glittery, lightening effects and a huge sound system” because I used to see her in “underground places and clubs”, catering to small audiences – around 50 to a 100 people – consisting of acquaintances and members of the techno and house scene. At MOVEMENT, the audience is almost completely foreign to me, to her and even to Detroit. 

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Audience + Art Department on stage - Movement 2015 Sunday 24th May (7.30pm)

To understand the experience of entering through the main entrance, I leave the site. On a sign at the main public entrance, a clear message gives a symbolic, catchy and physical vision about what Detroit represents and wants to be identified as today, according to MOVEMENT festival promoters: “Welcome to Detroit. Birthplace of techno.”

Over 30 years of Detroit’s techno music

Milan Ariel is singing on stage with two dancers during Metroplex showcase. Her father, Juan Atkins plays tracks

After hours of strolling between the six stages, some techno music fans are gathered around the Red Bull Music Academy’s stage for today's main scheduled event. The stage is perhaps slightly smaller and off center than the Main Stage. I set up not far from a few planted trees where the soil seems to have been plowed. Around 9pm the event's program announces a special "showcase" to celebrate Metroplex label's thirtieth anniversary. For most of us in the public it is the first time that we see a live performance of Model 500, the artist name of techno music pioneer and Metroplex founder Juan Atkins.

The project has seen a redevelopment since 2008 with the contribution of members from the Underground Resistance such as Mike Banks, DJ Skurge and Mark Taylor. A few minutes before the show starts, Juan Atkins comes over the stage to present his 24 year-old daughter and singer Milan Ariel. She sings two hip hop songs while performing a choreographed dance with two female artists. The dancers are dressed up in very sexy fashion with high heels. The atmosphere suddenly changes. The party ambience that settled a couple minutes ago just seems to disappear. The crowd is now dispersing. Everyone seems to quietly whisper his/her opinions and stops dancing. We all look at each other and it seems like we ask ourselves: “what's going on here?”

The reason for this seizure is related to the fact that two seemingly opposite worlds from two closely related individuals are sharing the techno music stage. On the one side is the father, the incarnation of Detroit's techno music and a figure that promotes the futuristic aesthetics and independent aspects of this music. On the other side is his daughter, who seems to be a Rihanna or Beyoncé lookalike, performing American Hip Hop/ R&B.

Thus I am wondering: “How come Juan Atkins' daughter responds to mainstream music codes while her father has always supported more independent music?” While I should understand that Atkins’ daughter has her own style and path, I feel like my subject taste as a techno fan are taking over my critical judgment. 

Finally Model 500 goes onstage right after. We are back into the "techno reality" and our enthusiasm comes alive again. The particular sounds of the 1980’s synths and the first techno music top hits such as “Alleys of Your Mind” and “Techno City”, set the public on fire. Juan Atkins' vocoder voice highlights the synth’s notes. Excitement is in the air. Suddenly someone next to me screams out loud: “Wow, this is Techno history!”

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Model 500 on stage - Movement 2015 Sunday 24th May (11.15pm)

Selected discography:

. Gabi, Pangaea (EP), Clear Cut Records, 2013

. Model 500 (Juan Atkins), No UFO’s, Metroplex, 1985

. Milan Ariel, Love Dreams (EP), Metroplex, 2014

¹ In 2015, I managed to get a media and photo pass for me and two members of a documentary project. In 2014 the use of the journalist status or researcher was quite ambivalent. For some of the DJs and local techno producers in Detroit, journalists have “distorted message of techno and techno musicians” (Cornelius Harris, June 20th 2014, Underground Resistance manager).

² MOVEMENT festival is an "out of ordinary" space and time in musical life in Detroit. Ordinary times are shared between clubs out of the city center or in the city center (e.g. TV Lounge, Whiskey Disco, the Works), areas where techno has an interstice (e.g. Motor City Wine, Majestic Theater (Populux), Adult Contemporary), house parties and, more rarely, fallow places (e.g. Fisher Building).

Frederic Trottier (EHESS, Centre Georg Simmel) is an anthropology of music Ph.D. student. His researches focus on electronic music practices in Detroit, global/local DJ paths, music learning and heritage, crossing urban anthropology and social network analysis.

Introduction

Lip-syncing is one of the drag queen’s most valuable skills. She stands on stage, silently moving her lips to the voice of another, embodying that voice and persona in a performance style honed over generations of predecessors. Contrary to Esther Newton’s bold claim in her seminal drag ethnography Mother Camp, lip-syncing is not reserved for those not talented enough to sing (1972:44-46); rather, lip-syncing is a mainstay in the drag repertoire because of its singularly powerful mode of performance. London-based drag performer Rodent Decay (Fig. 1), when asked why she chooses to lip-sync and how such performances feel, told me that she lip-syncs because she feels an affinity with the ‘power in [the] voice’, a power that leads her into an ‘ecstatic […] trance state’ during performance. Intriguingly, Rodent went on to say that lip-syncing felt most powerful when the music was so loud that she could feel the music ‘resonating around [her]’: were this key component of amplitude to be absent, the performance would be significantly lacking. In this post, I will explore Rodent’s articulation of the importance of tactility in lip-syncing. The music must be so loud as to physically touch the performing queen, to bathe her in sound so that she might find a more convincing singularity between her silent body and the voice of the track. I will begin by exploring this relationship through contemporary theories of sound and amplitude, specifically Michael Heller’s theory of ‘listener collapse’; following this, I will draw together the tactility of lip-syncing with Rodent’s feeling of ecstasy, arguing for a cutaneous connection between voice and performing body, and drawing upon Didier Anzieu’s concept of the Skin-ego. Though these thoughts are borne out of conversations with Rodent, it is not my intention here to offer an ethnographic analysis of one example; rather, I am using Rodent’s premise as a way of continuing Anzieu’s metaphorical musings upon sonic interactions with the Skin-ego. What will become apparent is that the close somatosensory connection effected through increased amplification facilitates a stronger bond between performer and the original singer on track, a bond that not only creates a more powerful aesthetic performance, but also one that substantiates ideas of selfhood for the performer.

Fig. 1: Rodent Decay, used with the permission of Benedict Stewardson

Feeling Sound

Rodent Decay is a 23-year-old drag performer in East London, where she has earned much acclaim. In 2016 she won the highly competitive Lip-Sync 1000! competition, which pits the UK’s best drag queens against one another, and she also performs regularly with Sink the Pink, London’s premiere drag troupe. Rodent’s comments above, about feelings of ecstasy and the music resonating around her, arose from a conversation about her performance of Florence Welch’s ‘Spectrum’ in 2015. I asked about the connections she felt between herself and the track, to which she responded:

I think sometimes there’s a disconnect, and I’ve realised it’s to do with the sound quality of the room and the acoustics of the room. So I’ve been in places where I’ve done a lip-sync and it sounds like it’s not coming from me and there is such a disconnect but it’s because, like, the music isn’t resonating around me.

The disconnect about which Rodent speaks surely implies the inverse: that with the appropriate acoustics a connection is achieved. Such a connection is predicated on the sensation of the sound resonating around her, vibrating around her being. Theorists such as Rick Altman take this encompassing quality of sound as a given, arguing that by its very nature sound is not a straight line but rather a series of vibrations that reverberate and reflect around the space, encompassing the listener (1992:21); yet, Rodent’s quotation rightly argues against this. Without the appropriate acoustics, this wrapping of sound does not take place. This does not mean to say that sounds cannot take on Altman’s immersive properties, however. Indeed, Steven Connor suggests that such an immersion is made possible through an increase in volume, in which ‘amplified voices […] cancel or close up space’ (2000:34). To continue with Connor’s claim that amplified voices can close up space, an important space in drag lip-syncing is the space between the speaker system playing the track and the drag queen’s lips; the amplified voice, loud as it is, closes up the space between speaker system and drag queen, suggesting a singularity between the two. This connection is theorised by Michael Heller, who describes this somatosensory shift as ‘listener collapse’, in which ‘loud sound dissolves the ability to distinguish between interior and exterior worlds, especially in regard to sound and self (2015:45). Alongside amplified sound’s ability to fill space, this extreme volume also has the ability to collapse the boundaries of self and other, bringing the externality of the track into the performing drag queen and thereby suggesting a singularity between performing body and the voice of the track. The amplified voice resonates around Rodent to such a degree that she is able to feel the sound, fostering a tactile relationship that forms the basis of the feeling of unity between her silent body and the voice of the track. Without such extreme volume, the performance would remain as two distinct perceptual units.

Touching the Voice

To speak of touching the voice may seem a peculiar sensory shift: we hear the voice, but how can we touch something that is so diaphanous as voice? In reality though, sound is always created through touch: sound is contingent, created through the percussive interactions of one object with another. The voice is no different. Pushing air through the mouth, with the tongue pressed to the teeth, or biting the lips, or stroking the tongue against the inside of the mouth, voice and language are created (Connor 2004:164). Indeed, it is this sensation of touch that is one of the earliest ways we learn to differentiate sounds that come from ourselves and sounds that come from others. As Édith Lecourt notes, ‘it is in fact through the presence or absence of motor and tactile participation that sounds produced are differentiated from sounds external to the self: first fundamental advance on the sonorous plane in the establishment of the boundaries of the self’ (1990:215). So, if it is the tactile experience that differentiates sounds that are our own from sounds that are not, what is happening during lip-sync performance? The drag queen rehearses the movements of speech as she lip-syncs: she places her tongue in the appropriate positions, she stretches her mouth into vowel shapes, or purses her lips, coming into contact with herself at each moment. Yet she makes no sound; rather, it is the voice from the track that she hears. The experience of tactility would suggest that the voice is therefore perceived as one that comes from her own body, but how can this be reconciled with a voice that clearly comes from elsewhere? Firstly, Heller’s argument of ‘listener collapse’ and Rodent’s description go some way in arguing for this singularity: with the volume so great, the space between the sound and the drag queen is collapsed, exemplifying Heller’s dissolution of interior and exterior worlds. But secondly, the basic premise of voice supports, in theory, the drag queen’s claim to the voice of the track. Though voice is considered something that is most intrinsically our own, this is not entirely true; in fact, in any act of speech, the speaker is both speaker and listener, sending out their voice which returns to their own ears, creating a feedback loop between subject and object (Silverman 2008:77). The voice always leaves as subject and returns as object – it is no different in lip-syncing. The drag queen performs the actions of speech, and voice returns to her ears.

Why desire this tactile unity between oneself and the voice of another? What benefits might such a connection hold? Continuing with Lecourt and a psychoanalytical perspective, Didier Anzieu’s theory of the Skin-ego is useful here. Anzieu argues that the Skin-ego, rather than a prescriptive concept, is a broad metaphor for the creation and continuation of the ego throughout life (2016:6). At a basic level, the Skin-ego is ‘a mental image used by the child’s Ego during its early stages of development to represent itself as an Ego containing its psychical contents, based on its experience of the surface of the body’ (ibid:43). This cutaneous covering, however, is not only the literal skin on the surface of the body; it also includes a sonic component. Anzieu argues that one of the ways in which this Skin-ego is formed as a baby is through the gestural and vocal interactions it has with its mother. Alongside suckling and handling the infant, ‘sound wrapping [in the form of humming, speaking, singing etc.] supplements the tactile wrapping’ (ibid:109). Bathed in sound from the mother, this sonic skin that envelops the child offers another sense of containment and protection, a way of holding together the psyche.

Anzieu contends that though the Skin-ego acts as a container, it may be thick or thin, and certainly has open space in which to play (ibid:135). Interestingly, he makes specific mention of certain adult subjects aiming ‘to reinforce this cemented personal Skin-ego from the outside with a symbolic maternal skin, like Zeus’s aegis’ (ibid:135); whether through clothes, or makeup, or, indeed, music, the Skin-ego can be corroborated temporarily through secondary layers. The idea that one can augment the Skin-ego externally is important in the case of the drag queen. If the Skin-ego is constituted not only by the skin but also by sound, and particularly the mother’s voice, then it is certainly possible that the adoption of the voice of another in drag lip-sync performance is an attempt to harden the Skin-ego through a secondary sound wrapping.

Édith Lecourt, following Anzieu, offers continued theorisations of this secondary, specifically sonic, wrapping. Lecourt states that for a sonic wrapping (or sonic ‘envelope’) to function fully, it must ‘find underlying support, on the one hand in tactile and visual experience, and on the other hand in a mental elaboration of sonorous experience based on the ego-skin’ (1990:212). In drag lip-sync performance, these first predicates are fulfilled: the intense amplification of the track supplies the tactile and sonorous supports, wherein the sound takes on a tactile nature, and, though beyond the remit of this article, the physical regalia of the drag queen supplies the visual support. With these foundations achieved, Lecourt speaks of sonic baths, in which the subject is encompassed by sound. She specifically cites the use of Walkmans and listening to rock music as examples of everyday sonic wrappings in the modern world (1990:227). It is my conviction that the encompassing nature of the amplified voice about which Rodent speaks, the track ‘resonating around [her]’, aligns itself with Anzieu and Lecourt’s conceptions of the Skin-ego and sonic bathing: the tactile connection of voice with the singer on the track acts as a sonic wrapping for the drag queen, an augmenting of the Skin-ego, which when coupled with the more obvious and literal skin of the physical makeup and regalia of drag performance, has the potential to lead the performer into such ‘trance state[s]’, as Rodent claims.

Drag Queens and the Voice of the Heroine

The coextension of the Skin-ego through the voice of the other offers a form of protection: Anzieu argues that secondary wrappings de facto thicken the Skin-ego, but also much voice theory points towards the protection that can be afforded by disavowing one’s own voice in place of another’s (Jarman 2011:43). Yet there is perhaps a closer affinity between powerful female vocalists, to whom drag queens often lip-sync, and the gay male psyche, for drag queens are most often gay or queer men. Jack Harwell, a club-goer whom I met in an East London bar, mentioned a supplementary reason why these women are so important to gay men. Jack told me:

Little gay boys often grow up lip-syncing camp pop queens because they envy their glamour and sexuality, and they envy that they are validated by fame, themselves never validated by the heteropatriarchy around them... Queer people are drawn to lip-syncing because it allows you to embody a persona that society forbids you from being.

In a very real way, these voices, voices of ‘power’ as Rodent described them, are powerful in more than just their vocal virtuosity: they are powerful in their political resistance to, as Jack states, a heteropatriarchy that in many ways refuses to validate them. Jack’s statement echoes Richard Dyer’s theorisation of the gay male fascination with Judy Garland. For Dyer, Garland became such an icon for gay men because she expressed the same feelings of battling against a patriarchal institution that endeavoured to impress upon her an acceptable image, one that lay incredible emotional taxes upon her, but one that ultimately she would overcome, constantly searching for an ‘over the rainbow’ (Dyer 2004:146). To feel an affinity with heroines who succeed against the heteropatriarchy offers hope for the gay male. If their heroines are able to overcome these adversities, then there is a chance they can, too. In lip-syncing, this affinity between the singer and the gay male is increased. The performer, whether a drag queen or a ‘little gay boy’ in his bedroom, is able to feel the voice of the heroine within them, to wrap themselves in the protective layers of their voice, extending their Skin-ego through a relationship of sound and touch.

Sasha Velour, “This Woman’s Work”

Concluding Thoughts

Anzieu describes the Skin-ego as a metaphor, rather than a fully formed concept, one that he hoped people would elaborate upon and explore to their own ends. The ideas I have sketched out here seek to use the Skin-ego as a model within which we might better understand lip-syncing as a personal form of performance, and explore lip-syncing as an art form, rather than Newton’s synonymising of the craft with an inability to sing. Literally embodying the voice – that most personal signifier of self (Jarman 2011:2) – can be an incredibly emboldening experience for the performing drag queen, wrapped in a vocal membrane, feeling the voice both outside and in.

References

Altman, Rick. 1992. “General Introduction: Cinema as Event”. In Sound Theory Sound Practice, edited by Rick Altman, 1-14. London: Routledge.

Anzieu, Didier. 2016. The Skin-Ego. London: Karnac Books.

Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Connor, Steven. 2004. “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing”. In Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, edited by Veit Erlmann, 153-172. Oxford: Berg.

Dyer, Richard. 2004. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: Routledge.

Heller, Michael. 2015. “Between Silence and Pain: Loudness and the Affective Encounter.” Sound Studies 1(1):40-58.

Jarman, Freya. 2011. Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lecourt, Édith. 1990. “The Musical Envelope”. In Psychic Envelopes, edited by Didier Anzieu, 211-235. London: Karnac Books.

Newton, Esther. 1972. Mother Camp. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Silverman, Kaja. 2008. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Biography

Jacob Mallinson Bird is a DPhil student in musicology at the University of Oxford. He is particularly interested in voice theory and psychoanalysis. His current research focuses on the deconstruction of the voice in drag lip-sync performance, and the implications of lip-syncing for constructions of the self and queer identity. 

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. [624 pp., illus. ISBN: 978-01-953-8894-7].

Reviewed by Guillaume Heuguet / Université Paris Sorbonne

Note: This review marks the first post in a collaboration between Ethnomusicology Review, Nonfiction.fr, and Ascidiacea (see introduction post).

To tackle a handbook, it is necessary to consider its role in instituting questions and methods.[1] When the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (OHSS) was published in 2012, the press release discussed sound studies as if it was an emerging field of research. In reality, over the same period of time, several collective and synthesis works were also published, demonstrating that this was more a moment of institutional consolidation. That same year saw the publication of TheSound Studies Reader edited by Jonathan Sterne, which included reference texts by Friedrich Kittler, Rick Altman, Roland Barthes, etc. Earlier in 2004, Audio Culture by Cox and Warner basically brought together theorists in aesthetics and avant-garde musicians. In 2013, Michael Bull proposed Sound Studies: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies which was particularly rich in texts already identified on the subject and stretching from Jacques Attali to Paul Théberge.

These works reveal a long tradition of reflection on sound and listening in the humanities which the OHSS is incorporated in while simultaneously proposing an innovative approach. Despite the presence of authors as indispensable as Michael Bull, Tia De Nora, and Jonathan Sterne, this book is less an educational overview than an investigation of the challenges and key issues that interest its editors. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijtersveld specialize in the sociology of science and STS (Sciences and Technology Studies). Trevor Pinch has worked in this field for many years through the “STS Faces the Music” sessions organized in Bielefeld, Germany in 1996, as well as through his book Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer co-authored with Frank Trocco (2002). For her part, Karin Bijtersveld has published Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century with José van Dijck (MIT 2008). The two editors have continued to guide all their contributions toward issues concerning science, technology, and medicine: “How have scientists, engineers and physicians used their ears to give meaning to what they studied? . . . How have these listening practices . . . generated scientific knowledge, technological designs and medical equipment? Why is it that listening has nevertheless remained contentious and lacks the same legitimation given to other means of knowledge?” (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012:11-12). These questions allowed them to build upon the collection Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750 to 1980 published by Alexandra Hui, Julia Kursell and Myles W. Jackson (2013). The latter two authors are included in the table of contents of the present book.

To meet these challenges, the OHSS is broken down into “spaces where noise is perceived” – factories and industrial testing spaces, the “field” (as in the expression “field recordings”), the laboratory, the clinic, the design studio, the consumption space (defined in the book as “the home and beyond”), and the sound archive space. This spatial distribution is based on the Latourian observation of laboratory activity as a way in which to understand science, with an emphasis in this particular case on material culture: “‘Follow the instruments’ is the methodological heuristic heard in this volume” (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012:19). The separation into spaces leads to a large number of echoes and overlaps between chapters. This finally suggests that sound as a scientific object tends to cross through the various “walls” that it encounters – unless this is nothing more than the positive effect of a constructivist approach to sound that is sensitive to its myriad genealogies.

Aware of the changeable nature of the object of their studies, Pinch and Bijsterveld in all cases enhance the reach of the disciplinary backgrounds of their authors. Consequently, they propose envisaging sound studies as being at the crossroads of works resulting from acoustic ecology, theoretical traditions in architecture, town planning and design (sound design, soundscape design, interaction design), studies in art, musicology, and ethnomusicology, the new musicology and radical musicology, as well as sensory studies. Regarding the latter and according to Pinch and Bijsterveld, sound studies reveal an increased interest in the “physical interweaving” of sound and the multisensorial mediation of the sound experience (2012:10).

Without regard for comprehensiveness or representativeness concerning the magnitude of this book, we note three strong ideas. The first of these concerns the way in which sound participates in industrial societies. Mark M. Smith demonstrates the historic relativity of the representations of industrialization personified by The Machine in the Garden (1964), a book written by the historian Leo Marx. In his article, Smith studies testimonies relating to a factory located in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1820s. His sources push him to affirm that far from representing the noisy irruption of industrialization, “the sounds in Lowell are better understood as consonants with the sounds of rural New England” (2012:47). Hans-Joachim Braun is also interested in the relativity of sensitivity to noise. He questions the relations between political regimes and noise management in Germany’s industrial sector. It was necessary to wait until the 1970s to have sufficient R&D funding to develop mechanisms to reduce noise in the workplace. At the other end of the historical spectrum and within an urban context, Michael Bull has found an ambivalent relationship in what he calls the “iPod culture” – the management of public space understood as a sound space lying between “secessionism, creativity and addiction” (2012:540). For certain users, the iPod device is used to recover a certain autonomy with regards to an inflicted urban culture.

The second strong idea concerns the instrumental and rationalized use of sound. The automotive industry and its particular approach to engine noise represents a textbook case (Krebs, Cleophas and Bijsterveld). This dual logic with its clearly different implications are to be found in the chapter titled “Speaking for the Body: The Clinic.” This article by Mara Mills particularly describes the epistemic consequences of the cochlear implant in order to understand how “natural” audition is already a form of biological “programming” (2012:339).

The third strong idea examines the practices and concepts of “sonification.” The article by Alexandra Supper provides an initial approach to this emerging field formed by researchers working to legitimize their method of transforming data sets into sound, echoing the idea of “data visualization.” Supper observes the public communications of researchers who defend the scientific nature of this approach (2012:249). The theme of sonification also pinpoints one of the main motivations for work in sound studies that covers part of the book: to rehabilitate the role sound plays in our ideas of science.

But can this sound rehabilitation avoid a new standard implying a difference between the senses and thus a certain ontology of sensations? This question is conceptualized in the article by Jonathan Sterne and Mitchell Akiyama that examines the original idea developed by the First Sounds group. This group succeeded in “replaying” a sound recording created using the device invented by Scott de Martinville that preceded Edison’s phonograph – the phonautograph, a machine initially intended to provide sounds with a visual recording. Their investigations echo the famous chapter written by Fredrich Kittler on the gramophone, which includes a passage devoted to the invention of the “frequency” as an epistemic object positioned between sight, audition, and scientific rationality.[2] Kittler shows how the graphical notation of sound had a particular role to play within the framework of phono-linguistic experiments, a subject also developed by the OHSS in an article by Julia Kursell which makes reference to this author (2012:176).

Sterne and Akiyama make several theoretical and methodological proposals that fulfill the promise of the “handbook” which merit attention. For them, the phonautograph provides the historic link between sound and visual technologies; it is part of a series of “technologies that have translated natural processes – sound, electricity, biological processes and rhythms – into visual data adhering to structured forms” (2012:545). They propose approaching these various objects in terms of articulation and within a constructivist approach to the senses. For them, the theory of articulation in cultural studies makes it possible to go further than Latour in questioning power relations. In this theory of social reality, the articulations between phenomena as well as their speed and direction are all contingent. Consequently, the authors propose considering “the modularity of sensory technologies, the modularity of relations between the senses, subjects and technologies, and ultimately the modularity of the senses themselves” (2012:546). Basing their work on Piercean semiotics and the index concept, Sterne and Akiyama propose the term audification to designate that which, among sonification practices, is based on a “hypothesis concerning the indexicality in the reproduction or manipulation of a phenomenon . . .  a relationship that is intended to be perceived as a causal relationship” (2012:549).

If one extends the article’s proposal, the audification of visual signs reveals, like all sonification undertakings, the fundamental ambiguity of all types of signs. This relates back to the criticisms of the trace category that is operated in information and communication sciences in France.[3] Consequently, the reference to indexical listening completes the criticism made by Sterne concerning the cybernetic approach to sound and listening modeling that is present in the transduction principle and then in the MP3 format. This paradigm amounts to isolating and “coding” a plan of physical reality by denying its ambivalence and complexity as a semiotic and social phenomenon. The proposals made by Sterne, based on archives linked to engineering players, merit being compared to other social discourses in order to observe to what degree indexicality represents a hegemonic listening regime. For example, Jeremy Wallachs, like Schaffer and Chion, suggest that we can also perceive sound as a form of material presence without seeking to interpret it as the sign of a source or a cause.[4]

Sterne and Akiyama radicalize the constructivist position that has already been expressed elsewhere by Sterne: “There is a conclusion to be made here concerning the plasticity of data in digital schemes and the dissolution of old knowledge about the senses . . . the unity of sound as perceptual category is an illusion of language” (2012:557). By dissolving in this way all a priori knowledge of a distinctive aspect of reality that we could call sound, their proposal questions the theoretical basis for the restoration of a symmetry between the senses, being a determinant for sound studies. As a consequence, they assume that “sound studies . . . must let go of its axiomatic assumptions regarding the givenness of a particular domain called ‘sound,’ a process called hearing, or a ‘listening subject’”(2012:556).

This final article therefore allows us to highlight on the scale of this paper and perhaps beyond, a specific sound studies contribution that amounts to answering the question: “what is the use of sound studies?” The answer would be: escape from cybernetic thinking concerning sensations and processes of signification. This would first be achieved by showing that the practice and contents of sciences and technologies – no matter whether “information” or “data” – are often occulo-centric. Second, by showing that this audition/view distinction is itself the result of a cybernetic design that distinguishes faculties to better prioritize them. From this point of view, there is something paradoxical in what Sterne and Akiyama propose in the same article, to extend the technical “transduction” concept to the human ear, as their intention is to apply a technical metaphor to a human process. This idea is picked up and underlined in the introduction to the OHSS, accompanied by the proposal to similarly enlarge the idea of “conversion.”

This represents a point of reflection that is stimulating for future research: should the human ear be understood to be a machine like any other, with researchers thinking of human interpretation as a “treatment” of separate semiotic materials? On the contrary, if the intention is to pay more attention to sound and its values, couldn’t the hypothesis of a synthetic human perception-knowledge serve to provide better comprehension of the ecological dimensions of technologies? To shed light on these epistemological choices, it might be worthwhile to return to the philosophical tradition based around perception and cognition, ranging from Kant to Merleau-Ponty, and interlink these issues more widely to the social history of experimental, biological, and cognitive sciences.

Furthermore, and despite the addition of an internet site with audio extracts, the objects and corpus mobilized in the OHSS are largely based on the written word and images. For a manual, the methodological perspectives concerning the way in which sound recordings could be used as analytical materials for sound studies are lacking.[5] Admittedly, certain articles in the book more specifically concentrate on music with regards to hip-hop or electronic advertising music, but either the reference to specific texts is missing or audio productions simply exist as examples within an essentially historic approach; their density and ambiguities as sounds have not been worked on.

To take this further, a good way of knowing whether, like Sterne, there is a wish to push sound deconstruction as far as possible, would be to more closely examine what we consider the “sound matter.” In this way, it would be possible to see to what degree the description of a sound phenomenon as such remains useful for understanding particular situations or to dialogue with other theories and social discourses. Taking this approach, sound studies can only gain from dialogue with the works produced in popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and aesthetics. In France, it is the music theorists who contribute to opening listening analysis categories by linking listening to music with wider practices and definitions of hearing and presenting audition as a cultural phenomenon in the wider sense of the term (see of course Pierre Schaeffer, as well as Michel Chion, Peter Szendy, François J. Bonnet, and reviews such as Tacet).[6] Within this context of the hybridization of knowledge, the article by Myles W. Jackson “From Scientific Instruments to Musical instruments: The Tuning Fork, the Metronome, and the Siren” is particularly interesting. His historical and materialist approach is based on the description of “instruments” (both scientific and musical) and the use made of these instruments by music. In this way, he swings in both directions between the question of sound as a “scientifically coded” object and the way it is used as an expressive resource; artistic practices and scientific practices continue to cross over from one domain to another.

It can be seen that there are several ways to continue to be open-minded and ensure the productivity of the scientific dialogism underlying sound studies. It is also interesting to note that where sound studies focus on material, spatial, and discursive listening conditions, visual studies largely concentrate on the significance and interrelations of the images “themselves,” no matter whether these are visual arts or visual productions in the wider sense of the term. Each field appears almost to mirror the limits of the other. So should sound be pragmatic and the visual express a media-centrism? It is a form of splitting that merits discussion. In any case, several years after its publication, this seminal work continues to reveal how sound studies make the theme of sound a particularly stimulating point of departure to question the practice of science as a cultural and social phenomenon, the results and methodologies of other disciplines, and to open innovative fields of investigation.

Image courtesy of casaafrouruguaya.org

In 2005, Jorge Drexler won an Academy Award for best original song, “Al otro lado del río”, the first song in Spanish to do so. There was some controversy surrounding the event, to say the least. He was not allowed to perform his own song at the ceremony, and when he was announced as the winner, he jovially walked onto the stage, showed deference to Prince, the presenter, and then proceeded to sing the chorus of his song a cappella as his acceptance speech, ending it with a “ciao”. 

Due to the initial polemic, this has been appreciated as an eloquent and elegant act of rebellion, although in an interview with Lalo Mir, Drexler jocosely stated that he just didn’t think he was going to win and so didn’t have a speech prepared. Nonetheless, his actions at the Academy Awards form part of a tradition of resistance via music in Uruguay. Jorge Drexler inherited this tradition and carried it over onto a virtual platform. In 2012, Drexler created a tablet/mobile application called N, or as he coined it, an aplicanción. It is a play on words in Spanish between “aplicación” and “canción”. The song-app consists of three songs with a base structure that invites the User to determine the direction he/she will take the song. 

In N¹ and N³, the user chooses the lyrics of the song, and in N² the user orchestrates the music. Due to time and spatial constraints, this post will focus specifically on N², “Madera de deriva” (Driftwood). The aplicanción via GPS locates the user (asks for permission beforehand) and depending on his/her geolocation opens one of the twelve musical sections of the song at random and indicates which direction to walk to and how far to go to open another, up to 500 meters. While the music plays, the User orchestrates the available sections at his/her will until finally opening-up all of the twelve possible.

The act of making music in N is used as a vehicle to connect the User to the world. One must experience the time and space of the location to understand it past the level of merely information. It can be whenever time at whichever latitude and longitude in whatever neighborhood, but that says nothing of the uniqueness of the place nor the User’s circumstances there when they happen to coincide. The relations between the resident of a space and the visitor are broken down and how the User really feels about the people and locations confronted becomes conscious and evident to him/her. N² leaves the User accountable in the real world through the virtual platform provided by the media by taking him/her to the street and making them interact with it.

Spontaneous manifestations of music on the street are a common occurrence in Montevideo, Uruguay. At random hours throughout the day and night, people gather in groups and dance around neighborhoods, playing the drums, and drinking yerba mate. As quaint and folklorizing as that sounds, in Uruguay and especially in Montevideo, there is a long standing tradition of resistance by taking to the street in song. This custom is born out of candombe, and understanding candombe’s significance in Uruguayan culture gives a more informed understanding of Drexler’s acceptance speech and N. 

Candombe is an Afro-Uruguayan musical style and dance, centered around drums, and performed by groups called comparsas. It has its roots with the African slaves forcefully taken to Uruguay during the colonial period and slightly into independence. As a word, candombe is employed as a qualifier to express all that is tied to Afro-Uruguayan culture, often-times pejoratively as an all-encompassing “cosa de negros” (thing of blacks). Despite it being brandished as a racially disparaging qualification, this has never dissuaded non-Afro-Uruguayan interest in candombe, but it does complicate it. At first it was a religious ritual from Africa that was later re-signified and employed during Catholic festivities, which today has translated into Carnaval in Uruguay. That fact is in itself a testament to how the Afro-Uruguayan community has negotiated the survival of their traditions into today’s Uruguayan culture. Candombe then as a practice manages to endure and becomes a stalwart for Afro-Uruguayan community organization and expression. As a marginalized group, that was their way of opening a space for themselves in public places outside of a work environment where they were typically consigned to military service and menial jobs. However, there in the performance they literally take the street, “ganar la calle”, and in song and dance exist in the face of discriminatory circumstances. The lyrics of candombes through the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries have a history of manifesting discontent with those conditions, denouncing the practically forced military service of the Nineteenth century and the limited opportunities for work that seems to be a perpetual state of affairs to this day.

Image in public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia

Candombe also went beyond the holidays. Due to the segregation and grouping of the Afro-Uruguayan population, in the Twentieth century they were put in conventillos, which would more or less translate into housing projects. These conventillos have helped the formation of the candombe’s culture. Impromptu performances by comparsas are initiated by a llamada. That call consists of someone going out into the street and beginning to play the drums. Whosoever answers the llamada recognizes the drumming for what it is and is invited to form part of the comparsa’s performance. The intimacy behind a call, to ask if another is there and have the call recognized and answered is indicative of the solidarity in the improvised community that is created.

Image in public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia

The evolution of candombe begins with the Salas de Naciones, which were comprised of similar African ethnic groups during the years of slavery that would gather together when permitted; later with the Sociedades, which were organizations formed after abolition; and then to the conventillos or barrios where they were relegated to in the beginning of the 20^th century only to be torn down during the years (1973-85) of civic-military dictatorship[i]. During each time period, the communal organization always sought to support other members of the Afro-Uruguayan community and reinforce that history of their past. Suppressing the ethnic African diversity minimizes its visibility within the Uruguayan culture, homogenizing an already discriminated people in an effort to make them less distinctive and eliminate whatever history they might have brought with them to Uruguay. To this day, comparsas identify with a specific barrio where the conventillo was from, the housing projects that are themselves a vestige of the initial resistance and struggle experienced by the naciones. Visually, the colors that form part of the spectacle of the comparsas are one of the indicators of that history, but the greater distinction is found in musical dynamics of the drumming. The rhythm and time developed by each comparsa is a marker for a nación (Ferreira 131). In the drumming of the candombe performances are inscribed the multiethnic Afro-Uruguayan history of Uruguay that has been discriminated against to bolster the official Euro-Uruguayan discourse.

The invisibilization of the Afro-Uruguayan community, despite candombe’s general acceptance in Uruguay, is a result of the Eurocentric historical emphasis the country has been propagating. About a quarter into the 20^th century, El libro del centenario del Uruguay declares that the country is populated by a race of European descendants, the indigenous people have disappeared, and the “Ethiopian race, brought to the country by the Spanish conquerors from the African continent to serve as slaves, has visibly declined, to the point of constituting an insignificant percentage of the total population” (Andrews 3). Andrews finds that the textbooks used in schools from the 1920s to the 1960s had two recurring themes: “the uniquely democratic character of Uruguayan politics and society, and the importance of European immigrants in building that society” (Andrews 3-4). All the Africans were not of one race, but to group them as one homogenizes their culture and history that was brought over with them. This problematizes racial discrimination in Uruguay because the immediate jump into democracy did not dispel the social hierarchies from colonial times. By law the Afro-Uruguayans were on more equal terms in society, but that does not take into account the social practices that are inherited from a society that continually undervalued people from African descent as human beings.

Image in public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia. 

Listening plays a fundamental role in jazz improvisation; but is it necessary for each player to hear all others in a successful improvisation? To better understand the interactions and dynamics of improvisation, a two-part project was started. The project is pursued with hopes for symbiosis between pragmatism (musical experiments) and theory (mathematical models).

Experiments were conducted to provide guidance in developing a mathematical model to describe how jazz musicians listen and process information during an improvisational session. Four musicians participated in a total of nine improvisational sessions. Each piece was created through a different controlled listening network structure that dictated who could hear whom.

The most widespread example of controlled listening in jazz is overdubbing. Overdubbing is a process by which musicians record their parts in layers at different sessions. Perhaps the bassist records their part and then individually the parts of the other musicians are recorded, each hearing only the bass part. Alternatively, subsequent parts could be recorded in succession. In overdubbing the recording is not in real time; the information only flows in one direction. Overdubs also allow the musician to hear the original recording as many times as needed, creating a carefully reactive and not interactive performance. In other words, there is no real-time feedback.

In this paper we focus on the experiments, and an additional paper, which is in progress, will outline the mathematical model.

Related Work

In fields like economics and philosophy of science there is somewhat similar work. Major questions pursued include the formation of information sharing networks [1], the flow of information on networks [2], and achieving consensus on a network [3]. A network in these contexts is a set of vertices and directional edges that represent individuals and the flow of information between them. In our project this is the same; the network is the controlled listening structure. That modeling focuses on collaborations that lead to truth: cases where there is only one “answer.” We hope to generalize this by contributing models that focus on many “right answers.” In terms of jazz a “right answer” is ambiguous and we explore several interpretations of it in the modeling. For example, a “right answer” could be a decision by the “audience,” or it could be the consequence of group consensus at different time-scales of the piece. Our model also involves path dependency; the creation of the piece is part of the piece.

Methodology

The first set of experiments were conducted in the summer of 2015. We brought together four improvisers, M.F.A. students at the University of California, Irvine’s program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT): Anthony Caulkins (guitar), Molly Jones (saxophone), Anna Okunev (violin), and Jordan Watson (guitar). As a graduate cohort, the musicians already had two years’ experience improvising together in various configurations.

Each improviser was isolated in a separate space, with no acoustic or visual communication. Each space was acoustically treated to prevent sound from carrying.  Each improviser was given a set of headphones through which they could always hear themselves and sometimes other players, depending on the network setup.

The improvisers were told that all musicians would be playing in every piece but that they might not hear everybody. They were not told which network structure was being used. The improvisers had no additional information.

Sessions

The sessions below were tested in a random order (with the control first), but they are grouped below to discuss different network structures. Where appropriate we have made preliminary notes below; however, each network requires further analysis, as discussed in future work.

Control

This is a standard improvisational session. Everybody can hear everybody else.

One node removed

Removing one instrument’s input doesn’t appear to create a clear group musical impact. Halfway through the track we can hear an idea played on saxophone carried to the violin and end up back at the acoustic guitar, showing musical information carry through the formation.

Star

The star is a network with a central performer who sends and receives information from the three other musicians, while the other musicians are not connected. This network presented some of the clearest distinctions between experiments. In the version with the electric guitar leading, the performer started first and maintained the same idea throughout the improvisation. They did not alter their performance throughout, possibly as they were unable to isolate any musical ideas to use from the three unrelated streams of musical material. This strongly contrasted with the tenor saxophone version, where the performer instead chose to play very sparsely and attempted to interpret all the unconnected incoming information.

Star with Circle

Preliminary analysis did not show significant differences between this network and the network with one node removed (described earlier).

Single Direction Circle

In this network the information travels in a circle. For both sessions the music is chaotic for a few minutes before noticeable convergence of ideas is clearly heard. We have split the music into three sections: the chaotic beginning, the moment of organization, and the remainder. Each section of the pieces is being analyzed further.

Disconnected Guitar

In this network the guitar receives no input and is essentially playing a solo piece of music. However, their musical information is being leaked into the violin player’s earphones in real time. The purpose of this is to see if the other players realize that there is a stream of musical information coming into the piece that they have no power in altering. They must integrate this musical informational or else succumb to noisy musical disagreement. We observed successful integration of the guitar’s piece in the smaller circle of musicians.

Future Experiments and Directions

The first round of experiments, as described in this paper, has guided the development of a simple mathematical theory. To test results of the theory we will simplify future experiments to include only percussion instruments. The theory keeps track of the flow of musical ideas under different network structures. By limiting the instruments to percussion, we are reducing the complexity of the output of the experiments. We can then apply mathematical tools to analyze the binary sequences that result from the experiments and relate these results to the theory.

Far into the future, once the theory has been fully refined, the goal is to integrate the theory into computer programs to have “intelligent” and “creative” computer improvisers.

References

[1] Bala, Venkatesh and Goyal, Sanjeev. A noncooperative model of network formation. Econometrica, 2000.

[2] Rowe, Robert. Machine musicianship. Massachusetts: MIT press, 2004.

[3] K Zollman. The communication structure of epistemic communities. Philosophy of Science,

74:574–587, 2007.

[4] Zollman, Kevin. Social Network Structure and the Achievement of Consensus. Politics, Philosophy, & Economics, 11:26-44, 2012.

Santiago Guisasola is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research touches on group cooperation, collaboration, and creativity. On the side he plays with music and music technology.

Richard Savery is a music technologist, composer, and improviser performing on saxophone, clarinet, and flute. He completed an M.F.A. in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology at the University of California, Irvine and is continuing graduate studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on artificial improvisers, robot musicianship, and machine learning. www.richardsavery.com

This edition of “Notes from the Field” showcases the incredible number of eclectic musical activities that occurred during the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN, in March of 2017. The ample videos and photos give a sense of the magnitude in quality and quantity of performances.

Rather than trying to smother the audience with a contrived “experience” such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bonnaroo or other major festivals, Big Ears allows the audience to choose their own path in Knoxville’s medium sized downtown. Knoxville is a place with a thriving community arts scene that is no stranger to outside influences. What follows is meant to give a sense of the chronological musical experience from two perspectives as the co-authors Otto Stuparitz and Helga Zambrano did not follow exactly the same path.

Figure 1: Outside the historic Bijou Theatre, built in 1909, where acts like Henry Grimes and Meredith Monk performed during Big Ears.

It’s hard to succinctly describe the artists at Big Ears 2017. Living up to its name, the festival boasts a wide-ranging lineup and demands broad taste from every attendee. While major popular music acts like Wilco, My Brightest Diamond, and the Magnetic Fields grace the top billing and largest theatres at the festival, many of these musicians also perform in unique solo or small group settings with alternative and adventurous musical goals. These smaller sets are sometimes official side projects while others are adhoc blendings of musicians wanting to present open forms of jazz, noise, electronic, minimalism, metal, and fusion.

I (Otto) first attended this festival in 2013, curated by Steve Reich, and which featured Television, John Cale, Julia Holter, Low, and Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Greenwood performed Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” as well as his string based film scores. But the 2017 lineup moved away from this art-rock starting point now including more contemporary classical and non-standard jazz. This year’s occasion also seemed to put the themes of improvisation, listening, and freedom more frontally focused, while leaving the specific interpretation in the hands and ears of each artist.

Figure 2: Outside the Tennessee Theatre where popular acts like Wilco, My Brightest Diamond, and the Magnetic Fields performed.

Figure 3/4: The opening celebration featuring Neif-Norf percussion ensemble performing Pauline Oliveros’ Single Stroke Roll Meditation, commemorating her recent death.

Opening Event: The Spectre of Pauline Oliveros

At the opening event, a succession of speakers promoted the festival’s role in local arts education. This festival has funded many local arts education initiatives and has been an avenue to bring different kinds of music making to the Knoxville area. One speaker, citing the Ford Foundation, said, “without arts there is no empathy, and without empathy there is not justice.” I took this to mean that Big Ears is not just an aural phenomenon, but is also meant to engender some sort of commensurate social meaning. An example of these efforts were demonstrated in the next presentation as a local all female percussion group performed an original composition based upon their experiences at Big Ears in previous years. The piece began with a series of grooves and finished with a meditative rhythmic drone.

This year did not feature one primary curator like previous years such as Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and John Luther Adams. Rather, this year began with an homage to recently departed Pauline Oliveros as her spirit was asked to preside over the festival. As the meditative drone of the local percussion ensemble faded, Nief-Norf began Pauline Oliveros'compositionSingle Stroke Roll Meditation; a piece featuring an intensifying soft mallet roll on a single ride cymbal while three other performers on opposite sides of the giant room with simple percussion setups slowly built their own atmospheres. As the volume grew, the cymbals and percussion blended with the sounds of the industrially converted loft, the crowd murmurs, and the bar sounds. It was a large collective breath as the audience was asked to listen to the room and listen to themselves. We began the festival with an exercise to open our ears.

Neif-Norf reconvened in the center of the room to perform Michael Gordon's Timber, a piece with instructions on how to make sonic waves with mallets on blocks of wood. The punned titled piece explores the timbral shading on different ends of timber blocks, as each performer’s pulses blended polyrhythmically with the other performers. Unlike the Oliveros piece, this piece was more mechanical, emphasizing a technological path to music making that had less to do with the space and people of the performance and more to do with the technical prowess of the composition and performers.

Video 1: Opening ceremony with the wood block composition “Timber” by Michael Gordon at the Mill and Mine.

Taking in this opening event, the musical themes were part of the avant-garde, but a certain kind of avant-garde. There was listening, there was hearing, there was improvisation but all in a certain way. The music seemed to relate to the “Eurological” perspective of improvisation as described by George Lewis (1996), a term intended to historicize the particular characteristics of certain musical systems. The Euro-American “Eurological” can be traced to Henry Cowell’s institutionalization of “ultra modernism” through his founding of the New Music Society in 1925 that later included noted experimentalists such as John Cage and La Monte Young. Musics called “avant-garde,” “experimental,” “jazz,” “contemporary classical,” “minimalism,” and many of other terms are imperfect for complicated works with complicated cultural positions.

Lewis’s contrasting term,“Afrological,” can be traced to LA’s mid-century Central Ave scene, which moved to Watts and Leimert Park in the 1960s. The notable musics of Horace Tapscott’s UGMAA, Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, and the beginnings of free jazz with Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and others all fall under Lewis’s term. Lewis respectively identifies John Cage and Charlie Parker as representatives of the Eurological and Afrological approaches, whose differences turn on their attitude toward the expression of race, ethnicity, class, and political ideology in music.

In this conception, Lewis understands Eurological improvisers as tending to look warily on the admission of personal narrative into improvisatory activity. Following Cage, Eurological  improvisation should not be descriptive of the performer, but is descriptive of what happens (Lewis 1996:118). When this happens, performers identities are muted. In this context, who is the audience listening to? Who is in charge? Is this freedom to openly listen and explore as neutral as this festive event makes it seem? Practically speaking, who are these open spaces open to?

Figure 5: Mural from downtown Knoxville featuring a saxophonist and a banjo player against the backdrop of the nearby Great Smokey Mountains.

The mid-sized city of Knoxville served as an open public space for the festival, facilitating an illusion of neutrality, fluid movement, communication, and self-organization within its city walls. Made up of well-groomed boulevards, a market square, and ample parking, this Tennessee city grid invited festival-goers to take lazy walks through town. When heading between concert venues, festival-goers could wander into their theatres, restaurants, breweries, and mom-and-pop shops all lined up in a row. But as prompted by Otto, is this freedom privileged to concert-goers only, or is it open to all? Descriptive to the festival experience, Knoxville served as the event’s foreground and background narrative, where the city and the festival were harmoniously blended to evoke a community-centered, civically engaged, socially equal, music-sharing experience--as long as the cold beers were still served in abundance.  

Day 1

Figure 6: Matana Roberts performing at the Square Room.

Matana Roberts put on an appealing set of mixed visuals with vocal and saxophone loops. She addressed the audience succinctly as she moved to fill the room with an ambient clash of choked notes, audible breathing, and enigmatic poetry. She was a powerful force early in the weekend, demonstrating how noise and melody could be melded.

Video 2: Matana Roberts performing at the Square Room.

Figure 7:  Matana Roberts performing at Jem Cohen’s Gravity Hill Sound+Image event, a live improvised score of many of the festival’s musicians with the images projected onto an eight-story building.

Her last performance in the festival, at Jem Cohen’s Gravity Hill Sound+Image event, was one of the few events that attempted to bring the many musical worlds together. Roberts listened to her fellow musicians and the echoing space of the parking lot. It was a performance only possible for that moment and in that space. Her solo looped improvisations gave way to Xylouris White’s Greek inspired free-jazz and local bluegrass fiddlers. As the musicians listened and played together, it reminded me of the festival’s opening event and the goals of the festival as a space for empathy and justice. This time the musicians were open not only to the audience and the sounds of the environment, but also to one another.

Video 3: Xylouris White’s Greek inspired free-jazz at Jem Cohen’s Gravity Hill Sound+Image event.

Video 4: Claire Chase playing a bass flute with live electronics.

Claire Chase’s performance on bass flute and concert flute featured what most classical concert flautists are trained to conceal: the unruliness of  breath. As a flautist myself (Helga), I have been trained to control my diaphragm, shape my embouchure just right, and manipulate with care my airstream so as to produce crisp, bright, and pure tones. As a result, this form of praxis creates a sonic illusion of a breathless tone, categorizing the breath as a blemish; the quivering inhale or exhale through the mouth and nose are immediately streamlined into gentle vibratos or a clean airstream.

Chase’s performance contemplated this otherwise discordant sound in order to bring to the surface the intimate correlation between the body, the breath, and the woodwind instrument. More significantly, Chase urged the listener and the flautist to revalue the human body’s most cherished substance for life (the breath) as a source for musical creativity and performance, rather than as a performative hindrance.   

Chase’s fluting cross-pollinated a range of breathy sounds that explicitly engaged with the voice, the nasal cavity, the throat, and the diaphragm. Moreover, her body aggressively swayed on the stage, demonstrating that her flute performance also depended on choreographic gestures to create these sounds. Drawing from her diaphragm Chase created guttural, croaky, growly, scratching, gravelly sounds. She also drew from the mouth to evoke wispy sounds, gusty wind howls, whispers, and susurrations--an effect that displaced the flute tone from the foreground to the background. At another point in her performance, Chase tapped into the vibrations of voice, intermixing a hum, a buzz, and a mumble to the flute’s tone. And in more classical flautist maneuvers, she used her tongue to create trills and clicks.

The flute-sounding process, rather than the performative outcome, served as the driving motive for Chase’s performance. More importantly, it challenged the ontology of classical flute music and reset the expectations of the listener and the hearer. Through Chase’s techniques, the flute was unbound and released from its romantic forecast. As a result, her solo flute work opened up a discursive and creative space to expand the praxis capacities of a woodwind instrument and for the musician and vocalist more broadly.

Day 2

Meredith Monk seemed to be the unofficial curator of the festival as she performed with a variety of ensembles throughout the extended weekend. Her events were well attended and she seemed to strike a balance between venerated classical icon and free moving participatory performer. She mixed sound with music and choreography to create captivating performances featuring some of her “hits” as well as new lesser-known works.

Video 5: Meredith Monk performing a piece written in and inspired by the music of Native American tribes from Central New Mexico.

Video 6: Meredith Monk performing her 1986 piece, Scared Song. She introduced it as important work she remembers in times of political of darkness.

Video 7: Excerpt of Meredith Monk’s mini staged opera, Atlas, with khaen a Lao/Northeast Thai mouth organ.  

Arrington de Dionyso’s surprise set was a breath of fresh air. I met Arrington de Dionyso the summer before in Los Angeles when he was touring a film, which featured experimental music interacting with an Indonesian possession music called reak.(Reak: Trance Music and Possession in West Java-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2WeaWMEqAM). I did not realize it was Arrington until I arrived, since the band was billed as “This Saxophone Kills Fascists,” a cause with a glaring Woodie Guthrie reference. I later found out that Arrington’s tour was an anti-Trump protest, as Arrington was tangentially related with the #Pizzagate incident. He had been targeted by 4chan trolls and #pizzagate conspiracy believers because some of his art hung on the walls of the DC pizza restaurant and music venue, Comet Ping Pong. Rather than fall victim to these threats, Arrington responded with a “This Saxophone Kills Fascist” tour. This article and tour promotion explains more of the details of #pizzgate and Arrington’s response to it. https://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/pizzagate-victim-arrington-de-dionyso-tour-us-spring-saxophone-kills-fascists)

The group was introduced at the end of the show, to reveal to the audience that the performers did not know each other. Rather, it was an adhoc combination of local and touring musicians. It felt like the most raw and openly political event of the festival with the musicians interacting on stage, creating a shared sonic space with a political basis. And just as quickly as it arose, the crowd dispersed to get back to the regularly planned programing.

Video 8: This Saxophone Kills Facists, Arrington de Dionyso with an adhoc group of musicians featuring a local Knoxvillian saxophonist and bassist and Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier.

Day 3

The Big Ears Festival featured poets and filmmakers as well. Kevin Jerome Everson’s short filmswere presented at the Knoxville Museum of Art featuring: Ring (2008), Tygers (2014), Auditioning for Nathaniel (2016), R-15 (2017), Smooth Surface (2015), Production Material Handler (2015), Fe26 (2014), and Ears, Nose and Throat (2016).

I was particularly drawn to Everson’s R-15, Smooth Surface, Production Material Handler, and Fe26, which emphasized the interconnected process between industrial production, the physical exertion (and exhaustion) of the body, race relations, and artistic expression. In these films, Everson challenges the nineteenth-century romantic notion that industrial factory work is detrimental to the human artistic spirit--especially when those currently working as industrial laborers are (anonymous) people of color. As a result, Everson brings forth these racial tensions while also reclaiming their human artistic spirit and agency: blue-collar factory workers could be considered artist, if one were to just look and listen closely. Through cinematographic attention to the laborers’ repetitive and meticulous tasks required in factory work, Everson re-purposes the dullness of industrial labor as the very site from which poetic, cinematographic, and artistic beauty can emerge.

Placing his films in the spaces of industrial factories and low-income black neighborhoods of Cleveland, Everson’s films feature the laborer and their act of labor to not only urge the viewer to interrogate the capitalist values that anonymize and racialize this industrial process, but also to recognize that these dismal conditions also house human lives deserving of beauty, creativity, and most importantly, of recognition.  

The films are aestheticized in documentary form, lending a realist depiction of these people’s daily working life. At the same time, Everson chooses to disregard the traditional linearity and biographical tendencies found in documentaries. His films instead fixate on specific actions enacted by his protagonists, intimately depicted through a diverse range of cinematic angles, light exposure, framing, and sonic manipulation to give pride of place to industrial noise, voice, and silence. Rather than assuming the laborer’s life story as complete, Everson reveals the repetitive nature of the laborer’s exhaustive work; as the short blacks out, the viewer is left with the impression of knowing that the manual laborer will continue working even after the camera stops filming. The short film, as well as the laborer’s tasks, remain infinitely unfinished. At the same time, it is in this very fixation that the viewer is given a glimpse into the laborer’s creative process. Just as a painting, a sculpture, a song, or a poem’s attempt to encapsulate a version of time, space, body, or voice, so too were Everson’s short films paying heed to this artistic effect found through the laborer’s repetitive actions.  

One example was R-15, which is code for asbestos: “The material that keeps southern homes warm in the winter months and cool in the summer.” The film features a laborer whose job is to distribute asbestos in homes. But as we are constantly reminded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Asbestos that is in good condition and left undisturbed is unlikely to present a health risk. The risks from asbestos occur when it is damaged or disturbed where asbestos fibers become airborne and can be inhaled. Managing asbestos in place and maintaining it in good repair is often the best approach.” And as it recommends, a homeowner should hire an accredited “asbestos contractor that is properly trained” to either remove asbestos from the home, or replace it with “better-conditioned” asbestos.  In other words, the homeowner can defer this damaging and dangerous act to a paid laborer, whose take-home pay for conducting this job will not, however, prevent the health risks he is forced to deal with everyday. Despite these national policies, the class and racial divide becomes apparent in Everson’s film, as it reveals who is subjected to this dangerous type of work and who is not. EPA is an agency that serves those privileged enough to avoid these environmental health risks. In this film, the camera follows a handyman quietly climb up a ladder as he pulls himself up a roof hatch and slips into an attic of a Southern home. Once inside the attic, the film viewer and handyman alike experience a cave-like space, enveloped in darkness, silence, and isolation.

The cinematic tempo then follows the handyman’s tedious procedural movements as he pulls up a snake-like tube into the attic, with only his headlight dimly illuminating where he will place the tube. The film viewer follows the handyman’s mundane operations to prepare for his eventual goal: to distribute layers of asbestos on the attic floor. Caught all in one reel, we intimately connect with this isolating and rather mundane process.

But then, the purpose of this documentary soon reveals itself. As the handyman holds the tube at waist height and distributes these toxic particles onto the attic floor, Everson simultaneously captures the beauty of this mechanical process. What may appear as a man distributing asbestos with the humming of the machine outside, Everson captures this moment as a soft snowfall on a winter’s day. As the machine releases the asbestos, the camera spots slivers of sunlight peeking through the roof attic, illuminating these white particles as they layer like rolling snow hills.

But just as soon as the viewer begins to relish in this beautiful cinematography, the camera cuts back to the handyman. His eyes tediously watch the asbestos to ensure its proper distribution. His face is covered by a mask to mitigate the air’s toxicity. His gloved hands hold the tube still, so that the asbestos distributes evenly. The handyman is alone--and even bored--in doing this task, and the film’s use of silence and lack of dialogue reinforces this state of dullness. Everson reminds the viewer of the possibility for short glimpses of artistic beauty to emerge, but at the cost of the laborer’s health, isolation, and boredom.

Everson’s film techniques reclaim the factory laborer’s humanity, however, it does not excuse the film viewer from recognizing the physical, social, and economic cost that comes with this line of work. His films urge the viewer to recognize the irreconcilable tension between labor and artistry, between freedom and confinement, between individual expression and mechanization.   

Figure 8: Hans-Joachim Roedelius performing in a rented church, down the road from the other major theatres.

Musica Elettronica Viva is the collaborative effort of Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum. These laureled classical composers were treated like rock stars, as they sauntered up to the stage with beers in hand with a small paparazzi tracing their every move. Their performance blurred edges as electroacoustic music became listenable and acoustic instruments were pushed into a dull monotonous static. The audience moved to purchase their third beer of the afternoon and the pretensions of “high art” began to fade. Despite their Eurological proclivities, something like their identities began to show.

Figure 9: Musica Elettronica Viva (Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, and Frederic Rzewski) at the Mill & Mine.

As Rzewski whispered his foreboding poetry over Teitelbaum’s distorted avian samples, Curran quietly faded in a buzzy banjo keyboard patch racing faster than any human could dexterously perform. The crowd was more like a rock audience, instead of the polite classical audience one might expect from these eminent classical composers. People would react with a murmur or small clap when something came together nicely or simply walk away when they were bored. The space continually rang with the clicking cash register and the popping of beer bottles.

Poetry Slam: Big Ears 5th Woman Slam Off

This event was particularly refreshing to attend. The Poetry Slam featured talented women poets who brought forth a poetic consciousness toward contemporary social and political issues in the U.S. They lyricized and scatted to issues surrounding the female body, romance, unrequited love, self-love, rape, violence and trauma, and misogyny. As an invited guest judge, I was asked to rank each poet's merit, but in my humble opinion, each poet’s work could not be compared nor ranked. Each one offered her own raw and honest version of what it can mean to be a woman in a big city, in a small town, and everything in between. The variety of voices, age, and racial and ethnic backgrounds colored the evening with performances that inspired the crowds to reflect on the social, gender, racial, and political macrocosms that affect women’s lives in very intimate ways. By exposing their most vulnerable secrets, these women demonstrated an admirable level of courage and tenacity toward the cruel worlds they face everyday. It was such an uplifting experience to be able to witness their rough and beautiful treks through life, while also grow in solidarity with their stories.

Figure 10: Big Ears Poetry Expo Finale at the Jackson Terminal.

Henry Grimes is known as one of the leaders of avant-jazz and improvisation from the 1950s and 1960s but fell into relative obscurity until his return in the early 2000s. His concert featured a collaboration of Nicole Mitchell (flutes), Tomeka Reid (cello), and Warren Smith (drums and percussion). Despite the formal presentational setting, the group was relaxed and focused on listening and performing with each other. It was extremely refreshing to see a group primarily concerned with feeling the relationship of the musicians on stage rather than attempting to amaze the audience with technical or cerebral feats.

Video 9/10:  Henry Grimes featuring Nicole Mitchell (flutes), Tomeka Reid (cello), and Warren Smith (drums and percussion) in the Bijou Theatre.

Conclusion

Open. Freedom. Big Ears. All terms that were touted throughout the festival. The organizers invited a broad range of artists, which asked an audience member to cast a wide aural net to hear it all. Hearing is not the same thing as listening. The festival presented listening and hearing as open and potentially universal. Only a few artists pushed beyond the idea of being in spaces of freedom and openness. These spaces also need politicized intentionality in their makeup to maintain the inclusivity of this open forum. The fact is, the audience throughout the festival was primarily male and white and the largest and most well attended events featured white male artists.

Through Jeffery Juris’s examples of many open forums, an “intentional” organizing strategy helps generate a more inclusive space than other previous kinds of open forums (41:2008). Open forums are limited to the biases of the society that binds them; it is only open for those that can afford to attend. In short, these open spaces with respect to inclusiveness and access, “always already involve significant exclusions, which reproduce prevailing structures of privilege and inequality” (44).

Juris, following Nancy Fraser, describes how even if “marginalized groups are formally admitted to the public sphere, informal protocols of style and interaction may continue to mark status differences, preventing them from participating on an equal footing. At the same time, subordinate groups often lack the material means to access public spheres, making it difficult for them to participate in the first place” (Juris 2008:44 and Fraser 1992:120).

The festival has grown in a positive direction over the past few years, including things that might not have been included in previous iterations of this festival like the Poetry Slam, Kevin Jerome Everson’s films, and Henry Grimes’s loose free jazz ensemble, as it continues on its path of having socially conscious and aurally focused big ears. Nevertheless, the festival’s open forum still seemed to privilege a Eurological approach to the avant-garde, primarily attended by a white, educated, middle class audience. Going forward, this contest of an open space vis-a-vis intentional space needs to be addressed as it will lead the festival towards their stated goals of empathy and justice through music making.

Bibliography

Juris, Jeffery. 2008. Spaces of intentionality: race, class, and horizontality at the United States Social Forum. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 13(4), 353-372.

“Kevin Jerome Everson: The Surface Below.”  http://lineup.bigearsfestival.com/band/the-surface-below

Lewis, George. 2004. "Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives." Black Music Research Journal, vol. 16, No.1, Spring 1996, 91-122.

Miller, Terry E. 1985. Traditional Music of the Lao: Kaen Playing and Mawlum Singing in Northeast Thailand. Contributions in Intercultural and Comparative Studies, no. 13. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

Fraser, Nancy, and Calhoun, C. 1992. Habermas and the public sphere. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.

United States Environment Protection Agency. “Asbestos Frequently Asked Questions.” December 21, 2016.

https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/asbestos-frequently-asked-questions .

Otto Stuparitz is a graduate student in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA focusing on the popular and traditional musics of Indonesia. His dissertation project explores jazz in Indonesia as it relates to local musics such as gong kebyar, musik kontemporer, kecapi suling, kroncong, and many others as well as considers the influences of pop, noise, European classical, and American/European jazz.

Helga Zambrano is a Doctoral Candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research fields include twentieth-century Latin American and U.S. Latino literature, with a regional focus on Central.

The UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive is pleased to announce that more recordings from the Archive's collections are now available online as part of the California Light and Sound Collection on the Internet Archive.  California Light and Sound is a project of the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP).

This round of recordings represents two collections. Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy's fieldwork project, Khmer Dance and Music Project  (you can also see more of Amy's fieldwork on CAVPP, including additional Khmer recordings)...

Khmer Dance and Music Project: Bonn Kathen, Wat Thai Temple, North Hollywood, California, October 29, 1989

Khmer Dance and Music Project: Sophiline Cheam Shapiro teaches Cambodian Dance, December 21, 1991.  Awarded in 2009 with a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, SOPHILINE CHEAM SHAPIRO is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Khmer Arts Academy (Long Beach, CA/Phnom Penh, Cambodia). She is a choreographer, dancer, vocalist and educator whose original works have infused the venerable Cambodian classical form with new ideas and energy. She has set choreography on Cambodia’s finest performing artists, and teaches, lectures and tours internationally, from the Venice Biennale to New York’s Joyce Theater to the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Sophiline has worked with artists including John Zorn, Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Chinary Ung, and was commissioned by director Peter Sellars to premiere her original work Pamina Devi at Vienna’s New Crowned Hope Festival in 2006. As one of the first generation to graduate from Phnom Penh’s Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA) after the fall of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, she became a member of RUFA’s faculty until she immigrated to Southern California in 1991 where she studied dance ethnology at UCLA and established Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach, expanding her organization to Phnom Penh in 2006.

And Sephardic music, especially Turkish, Greek, Cuban, and Judeo-Spanish, recorded in California by Emily Sene and including performances by her husband, Isaac Sene, oud. According to Professor Edwin Seroussi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) "the collection reveals the musical life of the Turkish Jews in the Los Angeles area from the 1950s until the 1970s." Professor Seroussi also calls Emily Sene "a major Sephardi female archivist of folksong."

Issac Sene, oud:

Here is the complete list of the current round of UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive recordings on California Light and Sound.  And more are forthcoming, so stay tuned!!

• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian New Year 1988
• Khmer Dance and Music Project:  Chan Moly Sam, 1990
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian dancers at UCLA, July 4, 1988
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian New Year; Thai New Year 1988
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Ramnong song, Water goes through sand, April 9, 1990 ; Khmer New Year, Angkeung, April 1990
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian music and dance, Caltech, May 17, 1989
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian Dance, Alhambra, California, August 1988
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Chinary Ung; UCLA Khmer Nonshop; Cambodian Dance
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Bun ceremony, with Cambodian dancer Sophanary Ouk, October 28, 1988
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Nish and George wedding, April 15, 1989
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Khon wedding, Van Nuys, California, May 27, 1989
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian Dance, UCLA, May 11, 1990
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Los Angeles Festival, September 1990
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Phnom Penh meets L.A., September 11, 1990
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Kbach Khmer
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Cambodian Children's Orchestra, May 26, 1993
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Bonn Kathen, Wat Thai Temple, North Hollywood, California, October 29, 1989
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Apsara Restaurant, Long Beach, California, March 5, 1993
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Sophiline Cheam Shapiro teaches Cambodian Dance, December 21, 1991
• Khmer Dance and Music Project: Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, UCLA, July 14, 1993
• Sephardic music: Spesial de Isaac
• Sephardic music: Marco Sara Baccheva Isaac Palti
• Sephardic music
• Sephardic music: Isaac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: De Isaac Turco
• Sephardic music: De Isaac Arabo
• Sephardic music: Turcas, Isaac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: Spesial de Isaac en Turco
• Sephardic music: Esta Es Isaac Guenos En Turco
• Sephardic music: Mahman Mentesh Julia Jeni la del Doctor Isaac a de Selomo
• Sephardic music: Turco Eryer Caralic, Isaac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: Mañana, Issac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: Andreas Taximes
• Sephardic music: Gregas Judio, Isaac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: Estas Son Placas con Isaac Sene, oud
• Sephardic music: Pasatiempo ade Jana, canticas de Isaac Sene
• Sephardic music: Andreas con Isaac
• Sephardic music: Mahman, Isaac, Sarah
• Sephardic music: Mentesh Jeni Isaac Susan
• Sephardic music: Benveniste
• Sephardic music: Sarah Issac, Mentsch Casilica
• Sephardic music: Isaac Sene
• Sephardic music: Isaac Sene, 1973
• Sephardic music: 1972

Introduction

The Folklore Festival, or Boi-Bumbá Festival, is an annual celebration that takes place in Parintins, a city located on the Tupinambarana island in the state of Amazonas, Brazil. Every June, 50,000 – 80,000 tourists and vendors from various social classes flock to the festival, adding substantially to the municipality’s population of 112,000, and bringing with them a vast array of objects, including loudspeakers.[1] As such, the city becomes a major site of social and cultural exchange. Here, I will share some initial observations from my research into the circulation of loudspeakers in this festival. In dialogue with Steven Feld’s ‘acoustemology’ and his preoccupation with ‘what is knowable, and how it becomes known, through sounding and listening’ (2015:12), I propose that multiple listening histories coexist in this festival in the North of Brazil. In the last two decades, there appears to have been a change in the music genres that sound in the streets of Parintins in June. By building on different accounts by visitors and locals of how the festival sounded in 2016, I will argue that in listening to the festival, different notions of what is past and what is present are at stake.

Sonic amplification and the festival

The Folklore Festival is one of many forms that the ‘Brincadeira do boi’ (‘the merrymaking of the ox’) has taken in Brazil. In all its variations, the merrymaking always addresses a traditional form of popular theater: an artefact-ox, animated by people inside it, dances, dies, resurrects, and is surrounded by a group of players (who in Portuguese are called brincantes). The revelry always involves music, dance and drama and is built around rivalry (Cavalcanti 2006). In the case of Parintins, this popular tradition has turned into three nights of spectacular competition between two groups: Boi Caprichoso, represented by a black artefact-ox and the color blue, and Boi Garantido, represented by a white artefact-ox and the color red. The Festival was created in 1965, as a way of institutionalizing merriments that had been taking place in the streets of the city since the early twentieth century. Though it began in 1965 as a feast for the community, by the end of the twentieth century it had reached massive proportions and attracted private sponsors, becoming, in the words of Cavalvanti, ‘a major expression of popular culture in North Brazil, drawing thousands of people not only from the state capital of Manaus and nearby cities but also from all over the country’ (2000:1019).

I first attended the festival in June 2016, travelling from Manaus, the capital of the state, in a boat with around 400 passengers. Throughout this 20-hour journey, I was surprised by multiple tunes sounding loudly and simultaneously. After a brief walk around the boat I realized that there where at least three powerful sonic amplifying sources travelling with me: a loudspeaker tied to the top of the boat, another one carried by a group of travelers in the resting area, and two tall loudspeakers near the bar on the third floor. These speakers all played different toadas: tunes specially created every year for the competing groups of the festival. Toadas draw on Amazonian legends, indigenous rituals and aspects of Amazonian daily life (Batalha and Oliveira Montardo 2015) and are an important component of the festival’s local cultural identity.

Fig. 1: Loudspeaker on top of the boat

When I arrived in Parintins, the boat trip turned out to be but a preparation for the festival to come in land. Parintins had its bohemian streets occupied by people drinking and celebrating night and day. Part of the festival’s festive vibe is conveyed by sonic excess, as noted also by Brazilian anthropologist Maria Laura Cavalcanti:

There is no silence, not even the gentle sound of the river: everything is immersed in a musical environment that is omnipresent as it is confusing, because all the small bars (…) and family houses play incessantly the toadas of their preference (2000:1035).

Fig. 2: Paredão (wall of loudspeakers) inside a bar, in the old port area

Loudness and the coexistence of multiple tunes have thus been a defining characteristic of the festival since at least the 2000s, and one that extended from water to land.[2] However, contrary to Cavalcanti’s experience of the festival in 2000, in 2016 sonic simultaneity was not only about toadas. I noticed that people partied and gathered around a variety of popular genres not thematically related to the festival: pagode, sertanejo, tecnobrega, forró and others.

Loudspeakers in the center of Paintins (video by author)

The contrast between my perception of the festival in 2016 and Cavalcanti’s account in 2000 leads to some questions: has the festival changed sonically throughout time? When did such diversity of music genres become part of it? During both of my visits to Parintins, in 2016 and 2017, I got in touch with local inhabitants of the city, street vendors, and visitors who provided me different accounts on the festival. There were heated debates over the extent to which toadas should or should not coexist with other popular music genres. Perceptions of how the city used to sound in previous years also varied.  

The tunes that one listened to while walking in Parintins were simultaneously amplified, but they came from loudspeakers with different capabilities. Those objects distributed loudness and repertoire in ways that allowed for different listening experiences depending on one’s situated positionality. I will now share some ethnographic vignettes from my visit to Parintins in 2016 that show how a local inhabitant of the city and a visitor dealt with the festival’s sonic transformation in different ways. It makes no sense to wonder about the sonic transformations of the festival without acknowledging that coexistent listening bodies may listen to different festivals.

Some ethnography of listening

During the second day of the festival I watched the spectacle from TVs in bars next to the Bumbódromo, a stadium that has hosted the official competition since 1988. There, I could hear two categories of loudspeaker at work: 1) loudspeakers facing the streets, that worked independently of each other and that amplified a variety of music genres coming from bars and TVs around me; 2) loudspeakers that were inside the Bumbódromo, and worked in cooperation to amplify the live toadas played inside this official venue. During my stay in town, I was kindly hosted by a woman who lived at an eight-minute walk from the venue. From her house, I was able to tell when the spectacle had started. Though we were a few blocks away from the stadium, the house was in a residential street with no bars around. There, I was close enough to the Bumbódromo for the music amplified by its loudspeakers to reach me, and far enough from the bars in front of the stadium for their less powerful loudspeakers and their multiple genres to interfere.

Fig. 3: Bumbódromo, during presentation of Boi Caprichoso in 2016

One afternoon I engaged in a conversation with Dirley, the son of the lady who was hosting me. I asked this young man, born and raised in Parintins, if people played toadas throughout the year. He told me that toadas started to be played around a month before the festival, but people mostly listened to pagode from Rio de Janeiro the rest of the year. Dirley was then 21 years old. For years, he actively participated in the festival. At this point, however, he was tired of listening to it every year. While I was in town, Dirley stayed home most of the time and, though his friends would gather to go out, he would prefer to stay in and watch a loud action movie instead. Dirley stayed in because he liked pagode, not toadas. However, I walked around town and was surprised by a group of men, in the sidewalk of Amazonas Avenue, playing a famous pagode tune amplified by a set of loudspeakers. The contrast between my experience and that of Dirley shows that the sounding of the festival is differentially distributed and listened to, and that those who stay in listen to the Festival differently from those who go to the streets.

Those who come to the city only during the Festival also listen to the Festival differently from those who inhabit the city year-round. One day I watched the festival inside the Bumbódromo, as part of the cheering crowd of Boi Caprichoso. There, I became acquainted with a woman named Carla. She was from Belém, the capital of the state of Pará, and this was her third time attending the festival. When the spectacle ended, we sat to eat in the peripheries of the stadium. It was 4AM and we could still hear loud music coming from bars around us. Carla complained: ‘This is absurd. Before, you would only hear toadas during the festival. People would come to the festival and only listen to the festival’s music. Nowadays, people play whatever, forrós, bregas, anything’. Thus, while for Carla the festival sounded differently than what she assumed to be a given of its past (that it was only about toadas), for Dirley, the young man born and raised in Parintins, the festival was the same every year. In fact, now, since he barely left home, where the only loudspeakers powerful enough to reach him were the ones that played toadas, the festival for him was only about toadas.[3]

Fig. 4: Men playing pagode in the sidewalk of Amazonas Avenue

Conclusion

Cavalcanti stated that the Folklore Festival of Parintins is based on a ‘tense relationship between permanence and change’ (2000:1020). In the last decades this relationship has been affected by the gradual projection of the festival from a local festivity to a spectacular mass-mediated tourist attraction. Maybe due to an intense cultural exchange, over time there was a noticeable transformation in the distribution of repertoire in the streets of Parintins. However, there cannot be one single version of this history.

The Folklore festival of Parintins has changed throughout time, but as a popular tradition that happens every year, it has, in many senses, repeated itself.  As Ochoa Gautier states, ‘the acoustic lies in the different understandings of the given and the made’ (2014:75). As Carla and Dirley’s accounts show, asking about the different understandings of the given and the made in a decades-old festival is also asking what different bodies listen as the given of a past that repeats and as the novelty of a present that moves and changes. Different listening histories and different temporalities of listening coexist in Parintins. Attending to the ways bodies relate with loudspeakers may help us investigate the limits of such coexistence. As Sara Ahmed proposes in Queer Phenomenology (2006), an object is whatever is stable enough to acquire a visible and reachable form in a way that it can be part of a horizon. Far from a neutral process, listening to the Boi-Bumbá Festival is also about how differentially classified bodies move (or not) in relation to different loudspeakers: where they turn and why. In this sense, age, gender, ethnicity, race and class always play a part.

Many questions remain: when did such notable presence of loudspeakers start to take place in the festival? Perhaps this question would also have to account for how, before loudspeakers, sonic amplification has been differentially materialized as a communication tool in the region. How have the boat trips, which carry a multitude of passengers and sounds in the Amazon River, participated in this archive? How have noise and loudness been conceived in boat trips to and from Parintins in the past decades? Sounds are shaped by unequal (and also violent) material relations between bodies and a diversity of entities. Thus, while pointing to multiple histories of listening that coexist, my future research must also attend to how some histories persist over others, and how certain ‘loud’ and ‘noisy’ sounds are indexed as close to certain bodies and places (and far from others). A bearable sonic present, a noisy excess, a nostalgic sonic past, and a desired sonic future are all simultaneously material and temporal dimensions of listening.

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.

Batalha, Socorro and Deise Oliveira Montardo. 2015. “Criando toada, ensaiando dança: a festividade do boi-bumbá de Parintins”. XI Reunión de Antropología del Mercosur, Montevideo, Uruguay.

Cavalcanti, Maria Laura Viveiros de Castro. 2006. “Myth and variants on the death and resurrection of the ox in Brazil”. Mana 2(1):69-104. Translated by David Allan Rodgers.

Cavalcanti, Maria Laura Viveiros de Castro. 2000. “O Boi-Bumbá de Parintins, Amazonas: breve história e etnografia da festa”. História, Ciências Saúde-Manguinhos 6(0):1019-1046.

Feld, Steven. 2015. “Acoustemology”. In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 12-21. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Ochoa Gautier, Ana Maria. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Columbia Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) for the financial assistance that allowed me to travel to Parintins in June of 2016 and 2017.

Biography

Maria Fantinato is a PhD student in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. She received her MA in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, with a thesis on the relationship between music, communication and aesthetics among experimental musicians in Rio de Janeiro. She continued her work at Columbia University, with a thesis focusing on listening and mediating practices in a local choro scene in New York City. She is currently studying the relationship between music, sonic amplification and sonic coexistence attending to boat routes and the circulation of religious, regional and massive popular music genres in the North of Brazil. 

In 1990 Congress passed Public Law 101-343 which authorized and requested the President to issue a proclamation designating the month of November 1990 as "National American Indian Heritage Month."  Since 1995 the President has issued annual proclamations which designate November as National American Indian Heritage Month, or since 2009 as National Native American Heritage Month. These proclamations celebrate the contributions of Native Americans and urge the peoples of the United States to learn more about Native American cultures.  For more information, check out this page from the Law Library at the Library of Congress.

In honor of National Native American Heritage Month, I thought I would highlight some of the Ethnomusicology Archive's Native Californian recordings.

Traditional music of native Northwest California: brush dance, feather dance, and gambling songs. Discussion and performances by Loren Bommelyn (Tolowa), Aileen Figueroa (Yurok), Joy Sundberg (Yurok) and Charlotte Heth (Cherokee). Recorded at the UCLA Media Engineering Center on April 12, 1976, during the class session of UCLA Music 153C, Sociology of American Indian music.

Traditional music of native Northwest California: brush dance, feather dance, and gambling songs. Discussion and performances by Loren Bommelyn (Tolowa), Aileen Figueroa (Yurok), Joy Sundberg (Yurok) and Charlotte Heth (Cherokee). Recorded at the UCLA Media Engineering Center on May 23, 1977, during the class session of UCLA Music 153C, Sociology of American Indian music.

Cahuilla Birdsongs (1987). The Cahuilla people are the first known inhabitants of California's Coachella Valley. Cahuilla bird songs tell the stories of the origin of the Cahuilla. Fieldwork done by Edith Johnson, Brenda Romero, and Gail Schwartz. Professor Romero tells me that she uses this recording in her classes to this day.

Ethnomusicology M115, Musical Aesthetics in Los Angeles, Professor Steve Loza.  UCLA Ethnomusicology graduate student Johanna Hofmann speaks about Native American music as expressed through powwow events and culture in Los Angeles.  Hoffman's master thesis (1992) was "Spirituality in the Inter-tribal Native American Pow-wow."

Making Connections

Before this past August, I hadn’t seen the extended Radford and Te`arama family for almost five years, when I’d driven my family up the Al-Can Highway to Homer, Alaska. Now, seventeen members of the group were coming north, to Homer and four nearby Alaska Native communities.[i] Among my duties at the Pratt Museum is the role of “cultural liaison” with numerous groups—not always an easy task considering the local geography.

Kachemak Bay, which bisects the southwestern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, has been a crossroads of culture for thousands of years. The area North and encircling Cook Inlet is predominantly Dena’ina, a sedentary Athabaskan people closely related to the Native Americans of the Lower 48. The southern shore of Kachemak Bay, wrapping around to the Outer Coast on the Gulf of Alaska, is Alutiiq or Sugpiaq. These people formerly traveled by qayaq to various seasonal camps, but their travel, language, and customs were restricted by first Russian and then American colonization. The Russian influence remains particularly strong in Ninilchik, a mixing bowl with its own codified Russian dialect.

Nanwalek elder Nick Tanape, Sr. and my museum predecessor Gale Parsons developed a biennial Gathering event, Tamamta Katurlluta, bringing together regional Native communities with a guest cultural group in Homer. Representatives from each village land qayaqs on the Homer Spit, which are blessed by a Russian Orthodox priest, and all participate in a potluck, Native Youth Olympics games, storytelling, and a performance event showcasing each community.

Unfortunately, it’s not feasible to transport an entire village—much less five. For those on the South Shore of Kachemak Bay, roundtrip airfare to Homer is $160 (private boats are cheaper, but you can never count on the weather), another $250 to get to Anchorage. While those that have been able to participate in the Gathering events and spend time with a guest ensemble have raved about the experience, the opportunities for such exchange are extremely limited. Perhaps we should work to bring a cultural group into each village? I suggested such a tour to my contacts in each community, who were excited to work towards making it happen. Perhaps touring a performance group with whom I already had a relationship would make a good trial project?

I had known Te`arama for about ten years. When I had first made contact with Manu Radford in 2007, and asked if I might be able to play tō`ere with the group, he was more than welcoming. “There’s not too many Tahitians around Seattle. It’s too cold!” I ended up playing tō`ere and Tahitian banjo on-and-off with the group for about five years, until I migrated north. Now, I was looking forward to the reunion. Starting with their arrival in Anchorage on an overcast Sunday morning, I shepherded Te`arama on a whirlwind tour. Halfway on our drive to Homer, the sun finally peeked through clouds, reflecting on the rushing emerald waters of the Kenai River. “We’re gonna need another week,” reported Daniel from the backseat.

On the Road System

We stopped in Cooper Landing for a visit and tour of the Kenaitze Indian Tribe’s K’Beq Heritage Site. On Monday, the group offered ‘Ori Tahiti and tō`ere drumming workshops in Homer. Tuesday, a performance and workshops with the Kenaitze Jabila’ina dancers, as well as a program at the Ninilchik Traditional Council, after which the group was invited to work the Council’s set net. Nine fat silver salmon for the group, a gift that didn’t come without effort. The daytime temperature of around 60°F kept most of the group tightly bundled, particularly Nanave, who had only recently returned from weeks dancing in Tahiti.

The cultural exchange was an excellent opportunity for two cultures that are from very different parts of the world to get together to learn and discover not only their differences, but also their similarities.  I heard comments like “that’s a lot like how we do it”. 

-Michael Bernard, Kenaitze Youth Programs Director

There is nothing more gratifying than the sharing of traditions and practices with other native people who exercise similar cultural customs, and who can relate in every aspect to the indigenous way of life.

-Ivan Encelewski, NTC Executive Director

Across the Bay

Thursday morning, two small planes and one water taxi arrived in Nanwalek, at the western tip of Kachemak Bay’s southern shore. Off the road system and out of cell range, this village of about 250 people was a world away.

I was anxious at not knowing a lot of details of this visit. Although Gwen, the Village Council’s administrator, sounded excited in our planning conversations, my attempts to iron out an itinerary were met with vagaries. I was optimistic that with a positive outlook and faith, it would all work out.

Perusing glass cases in the small museum attached to the Council building, the visitors pored over stone net sinkers, stone lamps, Russian insignia, artifacts from the previous Orthodox church structure, and photographs of Maskalataq, a Sugpiaq/Russian Orthodox Christmas tradition. Sperry, Nancy, and Rhoda came to the door. This trio leads the local component of a Sugt’stun language program, through the regional Native organization, Chugachmiut. They spoke of their concern with language and culture, the nature of a “lost generation,” whose parents did not teach the language, and their work to educate the young ones. Community and identity. What matters most.

As introductions continued around the circle, the Te`arama dancers and musicians laid out their own stories. Over half of this traveling contingent are part of the extended Radford family, with direct Tahitian ancestry. The remainder bring diverse backgrounds to Te Fare O Tamatoa: Filipino, Guamanian, African American, and mixed ancestry. All have invested themselves into this practice of staying connected to, learning about, and perpetuating Tahitian culture. Many of the non-ethnically Tahitian performers have visited Tahiti with the group, and feel blessed to have the opportunity to be a part of this tradition. This eclectic and inclusive ensemble makeup can be seen throughout the Tahitian performance groups of Hawai`i and the Lower 48. The trio of Sugt’stun teachers listened, more than anything, and it was clear that the respective challenges of language and cultural preservation are one and the same. These two communities, urban Tahitian-Washingtonians, and autonomous Sugpiaq villagers, had more in common than they had in contrast.

Worldwide colonialization tried to eradicate native languages. In Tahiti, the language was preserved in Tahitian language Bibles and within English and Mormon protestant churches. In Nanwalek, there is a general pervasive sentiment, 'The hurt is still here'.  Rhoda and I feel that same hurt.

-Manio Radford, Tahitian elder

By the close of a potluck lunch, any barriers or anxiety between the host community and their new guests were complexly gone. Isaiah, Ryan and Reyna toyed on skate- and caster boards with a small gaggle of youth. The Te`arama directors and elders were making fast friends with their counterparts in the village. Solana sat at a picnic bench, entrusted with an 8-month old in camouflaged fleece bunting. “I’m not quite sure how I got this…”

The Council hall began to fill with, seemingly, the entire community. With Te`arama packed in one tight section of the bleacher-style seating, more than twenty local dancers filled the covered porch outside, ready to make their entrance. Sperry Ash, in bright aloha shirt, introduced the group and drummed them into the hall. The Nanwalek Seal Dancers relish individuality. Even in the group presentation of traditional drum dances, the assortment of costume, headdress, and facial decorations pale in comparison to every individual’s outgoing joy and enthusiasm. We noticed one dancer, Jacob, sporting board shorts with the unmistakable “Hinano Tahiti” logo.

After several pieces, Sperry returns to the microphone. “Now it’s time for a little rock and roll.” Joined by a backup band, the dancers launch into a series of pieces in the distinctly Nanwalek tradition developed by Joe Tanape. The bouncy, undistorted guitar melody drives the dancers as they imitate a series of local animals. The Seal Dance in particular showcases each individual in turn, impersonating a seal with puckered lips, lounging on the rocks, washing its face, and diving exuberantly into the sea.

The lengthy and energetic performance by the Seal Dancers inspired Te`arama to extend their set list. The audience was transfixed. Young children mimicked the motions of the aparima from their seats. The following workshops were packed. The enthusiasm and joy of the Seal Dancers carried through to their first attempts at ‘Ori Tahiti. The local villagers jumped in with carefree gusto, thrilled to join their new friends.

The community was in total bliss making us forget some of the daily disgruntles we may have with one another. There was an Elderly man I was watching as the group performed, he would not look directly as they danced, though his face showed happiness without smiling. Such beauty that touched my heart so deeply, I did not want it to end.

-Nancy Yeaton, Nanwalek

With more free time before the scheduled dinner and back in comfortable clothes, the suggestion was made to visit the lakes above the village. Isaiah and Ryan stayed in the village for a pickup basketball game with new friends, while the remainder of visitors rode on four-wheelers up the valley. The trail meanders, bounces, and splashes uphill, along the creek before crossing it at a shallow ford. “No wake, salmon spawning,” reads the sign. First stop: short walk through various berry bushes (ready for the tasting, but it’s a bum year for berries) to a scenic waterfall. Then on to First Lake, complete with rope swing (currently in use). At Second Lake lies “Wally’s World,” a group of cabins perfect for small or large groups to get away. Perhaps this would be a better stay? The guests were already planning their next visit.

We made it back to the village and council building as the potluck was being laid out. It was hard not to peruse the offerings as they arrived. After an Orthodox blessing, guests were invited to dig in. Seafood rice with periwinkles we’d seen women plucking from their shells earlier in the day. Seal heart and gravy over rice (delicious). Salmon five or more ways. A woman set a large bowl of mashed potatoes near the end of the food line. “You don’t want this! Fermented fish!” Then, “just try a little, tiny bit.” Teina smelled it, plopped a generous scoop on his plate. I sat across from him, with other Te`arama dancers. Sperry, at the next table, greedily scoops the fishy potatoes with smoked salmon strips. Teina doesn’t finish it, nor do I.

A young resident shyly walks around the table, giving origami flowers to the dancers, then returns to his collection of papers to craft more. There had already been formal gifts between the village council and the group, and gift bags for each performer. Another young dancer, who was front and center during the ‘ori Tahiti workshop, walks up behind Teina, gets his attention. “I want you to have this.” Teina was speechless. A hand-carved Alutiiq qayaq paddle. A symbol of his people. It’s a little rough around the edges, perhaps the product of a workshop. Nonetheless, the time, attention, and generations that went into this tool, and his willingness to give it, are staggering. In awe, Teina stands to hug this new friend. Once he goes, Teina clutches it, stares at it. Takes a while to digest the gift. This small village could simply not stop giving, thanking, welcoming.

A bevy of helpers transformed the room. John Kvasnikoff, First Chief, sat at the front of the hall, noodling on his electric guitar. Wally appears on bass, plus a drums, rhythm guitar and singer. The English Bay Band had been together, with some changes, since the mid-70s, occasionally gigging in Homer. As they played and the sun dropped deeper, dance party lights went up, and the floor was filled with all ages.

I cut out early from the music, which seemed likely to go all night long. It had to be midnight already. Out the back door of the council building, Daniel and I met Jacob and a few friends. Now cleaned up for the after party, he sported a smart Tahitian aloha shirt. “I don’t know where I picked this up, but it seemed appropriate!” He tried to lure us to the after-after party bonfire on the beach. I figured that, having introduced these distant communities, it was a good time for me to get out of the way. With many thanks, I was off to the school gymnasium and my sleeping bag.

Friday morning, it was clear that nobody wanted to say goodbye. Hugs lingered. Walking down the road among the visiting musicians, a four-wheeler came up behind us. One knee on the seat, Sperry slowed alongside. “Port Graham’s excited. Can’t wait to see you. It was all over Facebook.” His tone, bordering on stoic, always hinted at more. “But some of them here talkin’ about a kidnapping. Come an’ get you in the middle of the night, bring you back to Nanwalek.” Now he smiled, and sped off down the road.

Final Stops

In Port Graham, we learned that Te`arama’s visit prompted the dormant Paluwik Alutiiq Dancers to revive the ensemble, upgrading regalia and learning new songs. Pat Norman, First Chief, was thrilled to receive a written recipe for poisson cru, national dish of Tahiti, which Manio and Esther had made with locally caught halibut. Back in Homer on Saturday, Te`arama’s evening performance followed a program of contemporary solo and ensemble dances, and seemed to catch some of the audience off guard.

All of the kids in the community were thrilled to see something new and had a blast learning about their culture by being able to participate in the dance and play the instruments.

-Danielle Malchoff, Port Graham

Looking Back and Moving Forward

The members of Te`arama longed for more time, everywhere. How to balance such a tour with its expense, the need for downtime, and the availability of performers with day jobs? One dancer expressed regret from not having more prior knowledge and research about each of the communities they would be visiting. Another confessed to struggling with depression, but was amazed that walking alone on the Nanwalek beach, away from the village, was the most comfortably reassuring open-air experience in a long time. Good energy. And what happened around that bonfire in Nanwalek? Villagers and urbanite visitors talked about colonialism, gentrification, language and cultural preservation. Real conversation about real issues. There were more close conversations throughout the week than I could have captured—on shared experiences, traditional foodways, new challenges in the digital age, and more. Each community, wholly distinct, shared and co-created something very different with their guests. While some immediate impacts—personal and professional friendships, and the resurgence of the Paluwik Alutiiq Dancers—are obvious, others will only come out in the long-term. A subsequent cultural exchange tour, revised Tamamta Katurlluta Gathering, or as yet unknown collaborative projects may grow from these new relationships. This project has also allowed me, as cultural liaison, to further grow relationships with the nearby Native communities.

As for my own role as “culture broker” in this project, I had initial concerns about my bias in bringing a guest group with whom I had a personal connection. Was I pressing my own agenda upon these communities? My executive director and my wife had each assured me that wasn’t the case, but then a granting agency had asked about the community input and selection process…. At the end of the tour, however, I can say for certain that the benefits far outweigh potential conflicts, which never materialized. As the first such project for myself, connecting new friends with old friends was exciting and positive. Every community was thrilled about the impacts and results, yearning only for more time to share, meet, and learn from one another. When given a little extra time (say, 24 hours in a small village), the connections made initially through the sharing of music and dance run far, far deeper.

Pacific Islanders and Alaskan Natives definitely do share many similar values, practices and ways of life and it was awesome seeing those lifelong relationships being created and sustained.
--Solana Rollolazo, Te`arama dancer

On the drive to Anchorage, Gwen was headed the same way and met us all for lunch. There was already talk of another exchange, sending Nanwalek youth to Bellevue, or even Tahiti. Now, after the dust has settled, most all of the Te`arama performers remain connected to their new Alaska friends on Facebook. One Nanwalek dancer recently visitied the Radfords in Washington, and several Te`arama dancers have been invited and plan to visit Nanwalek for Orthodox Christmas and Maskalataq in January. As the overnight low at the end of November drops to 9°F, and it’s not yet winter, I hope they pack well. Regardless of the weather, it’s one outcome I never saw coming. The distant families will reunite once again.

Scott Bartlett has been Curator of Exhibits at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska since 2012. He received an MA in Ethnomusicology and Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 2011.

Introduction

‘Huayin Laoqiang is the earliest Chinese rock music.’ This is the first phrase that Chinese pop singer Tan Weiwei (b.1981) said when she introduced this traditional opera form in the Chinese music reality show China Star on 5th December 2015.China Star is a large-scale pop music TV show produced by a provincial satellite TV station Shanghai Dragon Television. In this show, well-known Chinese pop singers perform for a selected audience, competing with each other to win the Recording Academy’s President's Merit Award. China Star featured Tan Weiwei performing with five senior artists of Huayin Laoqiang—an opera form that originated from shadow puppet theater and narrative singing prevalent in Shuangquan Village of Huayin City, Shanxi, China. A few months later, a modified version of this performance took place on the stage of the 2016 CCTV Spring Festival Gala (hereafter SFG), one of the world’s most watched television events. Tan Weiwei’s performance of Hauyin Laoqiang led to considerable controversy regarding the three-way negotiation among Chinese rock music, the ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’ represented by traditional Hauyin Laoqiang, and the political ideology of Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP).

Tan Weiwei and musicians of Huayin Laoqiang performing on China Star

This post takes the comments, interviews, and official online news about these two performances as primary sources.[i] By analyzing their reception amongst various groups of viewers—general audience members, rock music fans, musicians, and government officials—I explore how different interpretations reflect audience members’ differing social ideologies. I argue that the process of combining rock music and traditional culture is given different meanings based on the identity and stance of different audiences.

Comments from General Audience Members and Fans of Tan Weiwei

A Chinese pop singer who is best known for her excellent singing skill and broad vocal range, Tan Weiwei has a huge fan base on Chinese social media. She has around six million followers on social media platform Sina Weibo alone and more than seven thousand fans on her Baidu fan base. Her and China Star’s popularity made the performance of Huayin Laoqiang one of the hottest topics online, prompting 1,650,000 searches on the internet within one week of the show’s broadcast (Agencies 2015). The revised performance at the SFG won the ‘My Favourite New Year’s Gala Act’ award as well. According to comments on various social media platforms, the majority of viewers held a positive view toward the combination of traditional music and rock music.

In addition to complimenting Tan’s stage presence, a large number of the online comments from audience members expressed that the combination of rock music and Huayin Laoqiang blew them away and there should be more of this kind of fusion work. Many commenters, especially listeners in their twenties, praised the performance for promoting China’s cultural heritage, and enabling a broad audience to get to know this precious music tradition and rethink the importance of preserving traditional culture. Zhihu user Stub001 is from Shanxi, which is also the hometown of Huayin Laoqiang.[ii] He conveys the feeling of watching this performance as a young person from Shanxi:

This performance made me so proud of being the younger generation of Shanxi people, but, at the same time, I feel more ashamed, that I know too little about the traditional art of my hometown. No matter in the north or south of China, no matter speaking of mandarin or any dialect, it is truth that traditional culture is disappearing in our generation.

However, there are a small number of dissenting voices against this new attempt to combine rock music and traditional music. Some argue, for example, that the electronic instruments used in rock music overwhelm the sound of traditional acoustic instruments of Huayin Laoqiang, destroying its musical essence. A few audience members are under the impression that Tan Weiwei is using Huayin Laoqiang merely as a tool to stand out. Zhihu user Honghong mentions that: ‘It may be difficult for Huayin Laoqiang to go on the SPG’s stage without Tan, but Huayin Laoqiang would definitely sound better without her.’  Some comments state that the two performances are totally overrated, and that this new composition is an awkward integration. This anonymous user on Zhihu, for example, is critical:

Not all screaming could be called rock. Rock music originated from Western culture and is closely related to the spirit of the rebel. Huayin Laoqiang, on the other side, should be categorized as folk music, which means its nature is out of touch with the modern society, not to mention its relation to rock music. Adding some elements of traditional music and some folk tunes into rock style music is not something new anymore.

The majority of online commenters appear to prefer the performance on China Star to the performance at SFG. As for the revised performance, most comments express that Tan and Huayin Laoqiang became the mouthpiece of the nation’s ideology and empty patriotism. At the 1942 Forum on Literature and Art in the communist capital Yan'an, founding father of the People’s Republic of China Mao Zedong stated that ‘the arts must serve proletarian politics’ (McDougall 1980:55-86). Indeed, the arts have proved extremely useful weapons for CCP’s political propaganda. The SFG, as a national celebratory event produced by and broadcast through the party-state controlled television company CCTV, has always been a significant channel for CCP to promote its official propaganda and to reflect its current policies and ideology. In the revised performance of Huayin Laoqiang at the SFG, the melody was newly arranged, and the theme of environmental protection in the original lyrics was revised into the praise of the great motherland and people’s joyful life. As rock music has long been marginalized by the state, elements of rock music were greatly reduced. The volume of the electronic guitar and drum was reduced. The heavy sound and strong beat of rock music were lightened to form merely a rhythmic background for Huayin Laoqiang and Tan’s singing, which made the whole performance sound much less heavy, more rootsy, and was perceived as more appropriate for audiences of all ages and social classes. Moreover, to coordinate with the requirement of the production team and the physical environment of the venue, Tan and her accompanying senior artists had to lip sync for the whole song, which generated some discontent from the audience. In a critique about the performance in the SFG, one critic comments:

Actually, I think what the Spring Festival Gala wants is just Huayin Laoqiang. Tan Weiwei was just a tool on the stage. There was no soul in her singing anymore. Maybe the Gala doesn’t need anyone, it just needs to construct a fake picture of people praising the greatness of our country and the beauty of people’s life. The reason why the original performance on China Star became so popular is because Tan was sincere about promoting overlooked traditional music and expressing her worry about current environmental issues. However, when Tan and Huayin Laoqiang become the tool of propagating the “political correctness”, there is not any sincerity left. The best art will still lose its brilliance (Shisan Mei 2016).

Tan Weiwei and musicians of Huayin Laoqiang performing at the SFG

Comments from Musicians and Government Officials

In contrast to audience members’ mixed reception of Tan Weiwei’s Hauyin Laoqiang performances, the attitudes of traditional musicians in the band and local government officials are uniformly positive. In this section, I will use interviews with musicians and official news on the Internet related to two performances to show that they believe this whole event is an opportunity to promote traditional culture and provincial cultural heritage.

According to an article on the local government’s website, the award of ‘My Favourite New Year’s Gala Act’ at the SFG is considered a great way to publicize Huayin City. After the two performances, the Huayin municipal government decided to reward musicians who participated in the performance with a certificate of honor and three hundred thousand yuan (about $45,300) in total. In another interview with the vice director of Xi’an Intangible Cultural Heritage Center, Wang Zhi proudly mentioned that, actually, Huayin Laoqiang has already appeared on the stage of different art forms such as film and theatre arts, and toured in the US and Germany a few years ago. When talking about Huayin Laoqiang and Tan Weiwei, Wang further connected these two performances with the national spirit and cultural self-confidence:

This performance presented a strong sense of national spirit. The incredible integration of popular music and the ancient, wild sound of Laoqiang is a perfect interpretation of Chinese national spirit which could successfully promote our traditional arts and cultural self-confidence (Chen 2015).

As for the musicians, Zhang Ximin, one of the most important icons of Laoqiang music, and the leader of the band that performed with Tan Weiwei, expressed his happiness in several interviews. When he was asked about working with Tan Weiwei in the SFG, he said:

We didn’t feel exhausted at all. On the contrary, we are very happy about it. I remember telling Tan Weiwei:‘Huayin Laoqiang is a very small form of opera. I am truly happy that the whole country knows about it now. If no one knows you, it is useless no matter how good you are.’

Conclusion

As reception from the different groups of viewers shows, this musical fusion has been given different meanings based on different audiences’ identity, stance, and background. General audience members and fans express the most direct response to the performance itself; they interpret the creative process without any hidden messages or implications. For musicians and government officials, whether popular music and Huayin Laoqiang were using each other or not is not the center of concern. For them, Huayin Laoqiang represents the cultural image of not only local people but of the whole nation. The huge success of the two performances has brought Huayin Laoqiang to a bigger arena, increasing national pride and making the government aware of the need to preserve and promote this endangered music tradition. On the other hand, when the two versions of the performance are presented on different stages, the three-way negotiation between Chinese rock music, ICH, and the political ideology of the CCP become evident. On a trendy music reality show, traditional music relied on the popularity of rock music to be accepted by a wider audience, while on a state-controlled stage like the SFG, traditional music, as a representation of national spirit and local culture, took the lead serving the political directives of the Party, whilst the rock element was deemphasized. Under the influence of different stakeholders (state vs. provincial satellite TV station) and ideologies (political vs. entertainment), it is hard for Chinese rock music and traditional music to meet in a middle ground where two distinct music cultures could communicate and be presented on an equal level.

Flautist and composer Nicole Mitchell, internationally lauded artist and former president of the AACM, discusses her prolific work and what's to come in 2018.

Molly Jones: Where have you been playing recently?

Nicole Mitchell: I haven’t gone to Europe in a little while, so I’ve mostly been playing in New York and Chicago.  But I’m going to Vancouver, and I’m doing a big thing in New York, the Winter Jazz Fest, like four concerts.  Then my group [the Black Earth Ensemble] is going to play in Sweden coming up, so that’ll be the next few months.

MJ: Mandorla Awakening II came out a while ago now, but the ensemble includes some people from Black Earth as well as others.  I’m curious how you met all those folks and put them together.

NM: Actually, I’m not sure if people know, but Black Earth is kind of a community of musicians, probably over 30 musicians, and every project has different instrumentation and different personnel.  The guests in that one were Ko Umezaki, who teaches here at ICIT [the University of California, Irvine’s program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology], and Tatsu Aoki, who I’ve been performing with the last few years on his projects.  He has a taiko legacy project and reduction that he’s been doing every year at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.  He’s super experimental in how he approaches taiko.  He definitely learned the tradition in Japan before he moved to Chicago years ago, and he’s also an experimental filmmaker.  

I'm not an expert, but it seems that taiko drumming in the United States and on college campuses has focused mainly on tradition. It's also been useful for protests and asserting Asian American identity. But the way Tatsu approaches it, he’s created a whole other generation of taiko drummers who are looking at it as a flexible and experimental artform. I’m really inspired by what he’s doing, so it was exciting to have him in the project for Mandorla Awakening.  

Mandorla Awakening is really about cultural collision and having traditional Japanese music as another language that’s colliding, this whole idea of colliding duality, urban vs country, folk vs electric, traditional vs experimental.  It’s bringing these things together in one platform.  It was a lot of fun and challenging to figure that out, to be able to have everyone’s voice authentically coexist with each other without overcomposing to the point where people aren’t expressing their organic sound and what they do.

MJ: How did you wind up striking that balance between composing and letting people express?

NM: I think graphic scores were really helpful for that one.  Hybrid notation, where I don’t have everything totally written out measure for measure.  It’s a mixture of notation and gestural images and verbal communication and gestural communication in the concert and all of that.  Making sure there was enough space for the improvisation.

MJ: I read in The Wire article about a piece of prose that you’d written, and I can’t find that anywhere.

NM: It’s not out there!  I haven’t released that yet.  Now I’ve piqued a little interest in it, so when I release it hopefully people will be interested in reading it.  I have been doing some other writing though.  I just had an article in Arcana that came out in August, which expresses the approach of writing that I’ve been working on, which I don’t have a name for, but it’s definitely not academic writing.

MJ: Is this writing process you’re developing integrated with writing music or is it a separate thing?

NM: I think there’s a relationship.  I have a project that was just on the Stone commission series at National Sawdust in New York earlier this year called Maroon Cloud, and that music was actually written in connection with the piece I’m talking about that came out on Arcana.  I’ve been working with narrative for a long time; you know I did it with the Xenogenesis Octavia Butler works, but it’s something that’s continuing to be really core to my process.  Now I’m also starting to share the work more than I was before.

MJ: Do you see it as yourself creating multimedia work?  Would you say that?

NM: Yeah!  Actually I’ve been doing some video, and on Mandorla Awakening I collaborated with Ulysses Jenkins.  I gave him lots of descriptions to work off of to create clips.  He created most of the clips, and then I edited them to create this visual, I don’t want to call it a storyline because it’s not directly related to my narrative, but it is directly related to some of the pieces and to be performed with the music.  

But it’s something I’m working on.  What I see with video and imagery, and even with choreography, when you put it with music, usually the music ends up being the support and the background; but how can you use video in a way that it supports the music without dominating it?  That’s what I’m trying to work on, where visuals enhance the music but don’t dominate the experience.  I think that happens a lot.  We’re visually oriented.  I’m still working on that.  Also, when I did that Voices Heard Festival: Black Women in Creative Music in Chicago last December, I made three video documentaries.  They’re very short, and they’re still works in progress.

MJ: Since you play in so many different locations, do you feel like you have one artistic home at this point?

NM: I still feel my practice is rooted in Chicago.  My ensemble is still based in Chicago, and we’re going to be celebrating our twentieth anniversary in 2018.  I’m going to be doing something on April 27 at Constellation.  Now I have to get it together. [laughs]

Yeah, I still see Chicago as the center, because that was where I did most of my artistic development and all the work that I did with the AACM, and I continue to premier most of my work in Chicago.  Some of it’s been happening in New York, and a little bit here.  I do have a new group here with Billy Childs, Mark Dresser, and Dwight Trible, and I’m hoping I can record that soon. Then this new group that I’m excited about in New York.  Well, there’s a few cropping up in New York, actually.  One is called Pterodactyl with Sara Serpa and guitarist Liberty Ellman, and that’s a collective.  Then another group with Taylor Ho Bynum on trumpet, Fay Victor on vocals, Rufus Reid on bass, Shirazette Tinnin on drums, which is the most unlikely combination ever and it totally worked.

MJ: Do you think teaching at Irvine and your colleagues and students there have had any influence on what you’re doing?

NM: I feel it’s definitely had an influence.  A few years ago we did an ICIT concert where I did my first piece using Max, and I worked with Richard Savery to help me with it, but it was for a Disklavier. It was triggering the Disklavier at certain points of the composition.  It was a piano solo piece with me pre-recorded, and then I made a video.  I was really interested, and this is probably from doing telematics with Michael Dessen and Mark Dresser, in this idea of merging realities.  I feel like when you’re doing telematics, you’ve got these different locations that are collaborating in one space, but it’s literally two or three spaces, and each location has a concept of being with the other people even though they’re physically not there.  I don’t really think there’s been a lot done in terms of thinking about that philosophically, what that means and how we cognitively negotiate that.  

When I did the first Mandorla Awakening, it was actually a work in progress that I did at UC Irvine which is completely different from the project that I put out, and in that project there was  interaction between video, the dancers, and the musicians.  So there was this idea of communication from other realms or between realms.  With my Interdimensional Interplay video, I was interested in if the audience perceived that concert as a duo or a solo.  Because you would hear me play, but I wasn’t physically there, but I was on the video, and my flute was interacting with piano in a way.  I’m interested in exploring that more, and that’s a direct influence from ICIT.  I’ve collaborated with a lot of my faculty colleagues, like with Ko on shakuhachi on Mandorla Awakening, and that’s been exciting.  With Michael Dessen doing telematic stuff with Mark Dresser.  All the stuff I just talked about is coming from the experience of working with them.  It’s about community.

Then the students, it’s really great to be in touch with the younger generation and how people perceive music now.  When I was coming up playing music, people were very much categorizing themselves, like, I play this style of music or this kind of music or this genre of music.  And now that’s just gone.  That doesn’t even exist anymore.  More and more, I’m finding students coming in who are super interested in graphic notation, in conducted improvisation, and not so interested in composing dots on lines on paper.  That is becoming less and less of interest as we move forward through time.  It’s fascinating for me to philosophically negotiate all these ideas with the work that they’re doing. I guess I feel it’s important that my role be to help people to deepen and further develop their own voice. Whereas the old school composition teacher, especially in a jazz tradition, that’s jazz in academia not jazz in the world, a lot of times it’s about, you gotta do it this way, this is the language, you have to learn this and then you can take these tools and do your thing with it.  A lot of times there’s not an opportunity for people to say, Look, I have a vision of what I’m trying to do, and I need help deepening what that is and clarifying it and making it stronger.  Each individual does have something special to offer, and a lot of times an education program will turn out people factory-style, everybody trying to do the same thing.  That’s what I like about the ICIT program; it promotes individuality and there’s an openness and community for people to support each other being different.  That’s what makes it unique and that’s what I like about being part of it.

MJ: I also wanted to ask you about the Hyde Park Jazz Festival in September where you put together that collaboration with Ballake Sissoko and musicians from Mali.  How did you meet them and how did you put that together?  Were you pleased with how it all came out?

NM: What’s crazy about that is, when I think about those few days in Chicago, from when they landed until when I took them back to the airport, the music ended up being such a small part of the whole experience.  I was very involved in the whole preparation, which took almost two years.  It’s very complicated, and I think it’s also very important for our country to continue to invite and be supportive of people from other cultures coming here, especially now.  

I met Ballake in 2013, and our first meeting was when I had a concert in Milano.  I knew that we were going to have an opportunity to do a residency, so I used that opportunity to create music that just featured him improvising.  That was our first meeting.  Then in 2014, we did a residency in France at the Royaumont.  We had the opportunity to do an improvisational collaboration with these musicians from Mali and musicians from my Black Earth ensemble in Chicago.  That was our second meeting, and it was really successful, and we got along really well.  There were some institutional challenges that we experienced, I guess because we were in this third geography and culture.  You have this attempt to communicate between American culture and Malian culture, and then an even smaller version of that, African American culture and griot culture of Mali. But then the space that you’re trying to do it in is actually the colonial space of Mali, and the institution is bringing the attitudes and the residue of that colonial mentality into the whole experience.  So it was very educational. [laughs]  I’m still trying to unwrap it, and I’m probably going to try to write something about the experience.  Overall I’m very thankful that I’ve had the opportunity and the support from the foundation.  In the big picture, they helped it to happen, and it’s a lot of work to do that.  We did several performances throughout France between 2014 and 2015.  Then it took almost two years to be able to take the project to Chicago, and the Hyde Park Jazz Fest was a total heroic effort on their part.

Ballake and I both composed for both the previous project and for this project, and we also went into the studio after the performance.  And the thing I was really excited about is I was able to coordinate workshops where the Malian musicians performed at several Chicago public schools that don’t even have arts programs, like on the south and west sides of Chicago.  These children are seeing people that look like them but talk like they’ve never heard and play this music with these instruments they’ve never seen before in their life.  That was extremely exciting to see these little kids totally in shock.  I hope there was some kind of impact from that experience for them, which was something that was really important for me.  It was a really positive experience.  Now the goal is that we go to Bamako.  We don’t really have a timeline, but we have to start over with trying to write grants.

MJ: What all are you looking forward to in 2018?

NM: I’m hoping to put out another solo flute record.  This time, I want to publish sheet music to go with it.  I’m also super excited to play the Moog Festival in North Carolina.  They are inviting me to choose what instruments I want to use, and then I can borrow them and use them to prepare for the concert, so I’m super excited about that, and it’s a solo concert so it’s going to be crazy.  I told you about Mandorla Awakening in Sweden and the Winter Jazz Festival.  Then the Tiger Trio with myself, Myra Melford, and Joëlle Léandre are doing a tour in 2018. And I’m hoping to also finish the project JBM: Images Beyond that I worked on for my mother, who was a visual artist and a poet. I premiered it in Chicago in 2013; it's basically a solo theater piece with live music and an exhibition of her paintings.  I want to be able to put that out again, to perform it and also to record and finish it.  Those are just a few of the things I’m working on.

MJ: I’m still unsure how you do all those things while teaching and traveling.

NM: I really don’t know! [laughs]