Class Wars Ethnomusicology and its American Others

As an American discipline, the field of ethnomusicology is relatively young. Being little more than a century old, it was once called "comparative musicology" and came to be known as "ethnomusicology" only after 1950. The more recent name seems to imply that the discipline is about the study of "ethnic music" from the standpoint of Anglo-American culture and, indeed, this is largely true. Although ethnomusicology is presumably concerned with music in its cultural context, the name carries certain assumptions about the relationship between the subject and object of music scholarship. Students of ethnomusicology are generally taught, as I was taught, to conduct field research on a music - or, rather, a music "tradition" - situated geographically and/or socially removed from the more familiar and comfortable surroundings of White middle-class America.1 For ethnomusicologists today, fieldwork represents a major rite of passage in the process of gaining professional legitimacy and "the field" is still tacitly understood as being a distant Elsewhere peopled by exotic Others.2 In sum, one might say that ethnomusicology hinges on one central theme: the ethnographically based study of musical difference. 미국 학문분야로서 민족음악학이라는 분야는 비교적 젊다. 기껏해야 백 살을 조금 넘은 민족음악학은 과거에는 비교음악학 이라 불리기도 하다가 1950년대 이후에야 비로소 민족음악학으로 알려지게 되었다. 이 나중 이름은 이 학문이 앵글로아메리카 문화의 입장에서 본 [다른] 민족 음악 의 연구라는 뭇을 함축하고 있는 듯한데, 이것은 대부분 진실이다. 민족음악학이 대개 음악을 문화적 맥락 속에서 다룬다고는 해도, 그 명칭은 음악 학문의 주체와 객체 사이의 관계에 대한 어떤 가정을 담고 있다. 일반으로 민족음악학도들은 필자와 마찬가지로 백인·중산층·미국이라는 익숙하고 편안한 환경으로부터 지리적·사회적으로 격리된 곳의 음악-또는 음악 전통-에 대한 현장조사를 수행하도록 배운다. 오늘날의 민족음악학자들에게 현장조사는 직업적 정통성을 얻는 과정에서 중요한 통과의례가 되고 있고, 현장은 아직도 암묵적으로 이국적인 타자들(Others)이 사는 저먼 타지(Elsewhere)로 이해된다. 요컨대 민족음악학은 하나의 중심 주제, 곧 민족지에 바탕한 음악적 차이의 연구로 귀결된다

A Mysterious Island in the Digital Age: Technology and Musical Life in Ulleungdo, South Korea

This paper contributes to the growing body of ethnomusicological research about music-making on small islands, focusing on the remote South Korean island of Ulleungdo (literally, ‘Mysterious Island’). Historically, a number of factors have conspired to present serious obstacles to the Ulleungdo islanders' musical aspirations. However, since the early 1990s, enterprising amateurs have managed to generate and maintain a variety of musical activities in spite of these obstacles: church ensembles, karaoke, saxophone clubs, and more. Paralleling other island music studies, this paper seeks to show how the condition of being an Ulleungdo islander—entailing a complex of varied experiences, values, and relationships—has informed music-making over the years. However, here, the discussion remains firmly focused upon the islanders' use of technology since an acute reliance on technology has come to permeate Ulleungdo's musical life, with certain electronic devices commonly regarded as essential facilitators of musical expression. Drawing from the islanders' own testimonies, studies of Ulleungdo's cultural history, and works addressing technology's applications within and effects upon local communities, the authors explore how and why this condition of musical techno-reliance developed, how it is manifest in the present-day, and its broader implications for the island's music culture and identity

Vaporwave is dead, long live vaporwave!

Popular music subcultures have acknowledged, engaged with, or rejected digital platforms to varying degrees; their relationship to it is often made fraught, ambivalent and ironic by projections of the Internet as inauthentic or impersonal and their inheritance of Romantic-influenced countercultural aesthetics. The genre vaporwave offers a key example of this, especially given that it emerged and exists almost exclusively on digital platforms. Vaporwave addresses its own digital nature and historicity in sound and image, as recent scholarship on it has observed. Its life online represents not an abandonment of traditional formulations of the relationship between culture, technology and authenticity, but a new arena in which to negotiate them

Digital voices: Posthumanism and the generation of empathy

This chapter investigates digital technologies that variously assist, enable or simulate musical praxis. The first section sets up an opposition between the idea of the digital tool that augments human agency, and the machinic automatism predicated on the idea that reality is fundamentally number (dataism) and ticks along without the need for human consciousness. This gives rise to the idea that mechanical automatism is also intrinsic to human agency, a strand of posthuman thought on which the rest of the chapter turns. Accordingly, the second section shows how posing algorithmic composition as an expression of the posthuman is problematic. The final section focuses on the synthetic voices of digital assistants from online service providers that generate empathy at the price of a surrogate ‘conscience’. Accommodating this within a humanistic model is possible, but a closing case study of Tod Machover’s futurist opera, Death and the Powers (2010), raises the prospect of what might be called a ‘dark ontology’ of the digital

Srikandhi Dances Lengger : A Performance of Music and Shadow Theater in Central Java

viii, 571 p. : il.; 23 cm

기계 속의 유령 음악 민족지와 인터넷

For me, the Internet is one gigantic ghost town, a great dreamlike metropolis where we always seem to arrive the moment everybody else has left. In this immense software-driven city, we find traces of life everywhere but no people, no living bodies. Its urban center is made up of hundreds of thousands of elaborate web sites that stand as deserted monuments to organizations, businesses, and public institutions. We can all shop and bank there, but in the solitude of our homes and offices. Its suburbs are countless personal homepages - vast fluid neighborhoods of haunted houses containing the tastes, hobbies, and lifestyles of countless missing people we've never seen, never met. Even synchronous message and chat systems seem like electronic Ouija boards in eerie rituals of cyber-seance. 나에게 인터넷은 하나의 거대한 유령도시, 마치 언제나 다른 모든 사람들이 떠나버린 순간에 막 도착한 것 같은 커다란 꿈같은 대도시이다. 소프트웨어로 움직이는 이 광대한 도시 속 어디에서나 우리는 삶의 혼적을 발견하지만, 거기에는 사람이나 생명체는 없다. 이 도시의 중심부는 기관, 기업, 공공기관들의 황폐화한 유적처럼 서 있는 수십만 개의 복잡한 웹 사이트로 이루어져 있다. 우리는 거기서 쇼핑이든 은행 일이든 다 할 수 있지만, 그러면서도 막상 우리는 집이나 사무실에 혼자 있을 뿐이다. 도시의 교외는 수없이 많은 개인 홈페이지들이다. 우리가 한 번도 본 적도 만난 적도 없는 수없이 많은 이름 없는 사람들의 취향과 취미와 라이프스타일을 담고 있는, 시시각각 변하는 유령의 집들이 다닥다닥 불어 있는 실시간 메시지나 채팅 시스템들도 사이버 집회의 무시무시한 의식 속의 전자 점괘판 같다

Srikandi Dances Lengger: a performance of music and shadow theater in central java - include CD

x,572hal.;23c

Srikandi dances lengger : A performance of music and shadow theater in central java

ix+571hlm.;24c

Srikandhi dances lengger: A performance of music and shadow theater in Banyumas (west central Java). (Volumes I and II).

This study describes a Banyumas understanding of the Javanese shadow puppet theater tradition. By taking one complete performance as an example, the study examines wayang kulit (Javanese shadow-puppet theater) in the region of Banyumas. More important, it shows how a puppeteer in this area transforms the culturally universal traditions of Javanese shadow puppet theater and court gamelan music, drawing from the regionally specific lingual dialect, humor, and performing arts traditions of Banyumas, to express local identity. The dissertation is structured around a translation of one complete performance of wayang kulit, entitled Srikandhi Mbarang Lengger ("Srikandhi dances lengger"), narrated by Ki Sugino Siswocarito, from an eight-hour commercial cassette recording of a story found only in the Banyumas region. The dissertation recontextualizes the performance, both narration and music, to provide an understanding of what the performance means to a knowledgeable Banyumas audience. It is a translation both in a strict textual-linguistic sense and in a more general interpretive sense. The transcription of the narration and musical accompaniment, on which the translation is based, is included with the dissertation in a separate volume.Ph.D.Music: MusicologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103927/1/9034476.pdfDescription of 9034476.pdf : Restricted to UM users only