Abstracts - American Musicological Society

12 Thursday Morning: Session 1- 10
AMS/SEM/SMT New Orleans 2012
Session 1-10 (SEM), 8:30–10:30
Studies of Musics in World History
Barbara Hampton (Hunter College, City University of New York), Chair
Flowers, Butterflies, Music, Death: The Extended Meanings of Floral Imagery in Nahua Songs
Kristina Nielsen (University of California, Los Angeles)
Pre-Columbian Nahua musical texts are rich in their use of deeply spiritual representations employing worldly imagery
and metonymy, such as that of flowers and butterflies, to embody both music and the dead. While the metonymy of flowers
and music is well documented (Tomilson), other appearances of flowers in Nahua literature are worthy of further exploration.
Pre-Columbian Nahua poetry, such as Nezhualcoyotl’s, implies additional meanings in its use of floral imagery. These poems
include lines such as, “like a painting we will be erased-like a flower we will dry up” that demonstrate significance beyond the
well-established metonymy (trans. Leon-Portilla). Since these poems were often performed to music, I argue that they serve as
a further extension of the meaning attributed to flowers in their metonymical relationship with music. Additionally, I explore
the use of floral imagery in Nahua music and its representation of life and death in songs and poetry. This complex symbolic
representation related life, song, flowers, and the dead, as music called the deceased residing in Tonatiuhican back to earth as
butterflies and hummingbirds. The relationship between flowers and songs extended beyond metonymy into other facets of
Nahua beliefs, as flowers are employed in representations of both the fleeting nature of life as well as the eminency of death.
Through investigation of floral imagery and music, elements of the pre-Columbian Nahua understanding of life and the afterlife
become apparent and provide new insight into the construction of the Nahua’s cosmos.
The Death of Captain Cook: Native Hawaiians and their Simulacra
in a Late-Eighteenth Century Pantomime
James Revell Carr (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
The expeditions of Captain James Cook (1768–79) sparked the imagination of the European and American publics. Audiences
voraciously consumed books, broadsides, prints, and plays that glorified Cook’s exploits in the Pacific and his dramatic
death in Hawai‘i. Popular theatrical spectacles of the time capitalized on the public’s interest in maritime exploration, resulting
in a new form of pantomime called ballet d’action, which purported to present “authentic” rituals, modes of warfare, music
and dances of non-Western cultures. La Mort du Capitaine Cook (The Death of Captain Cook) was among the most popular of
these pantomimes, featuring a score that called for the use of log drums and nose flutes, and costumes based in ethnographic
drawings from the Cook expeditions, all intended to present audiences with new heights of realism and verisimilitude. Shortly
after its 1788 premiere at Theatre de L’Ambigu-Comique in Paris, The Death of Captain Cook became an overnight sensation
at Covent-Garden in London, and was soon exported to theaters throughout the young United States, marking the first representations
of Hawaiian music and dance on American popular stages. This burlesque of Hawaiian culture was simultaneously
legitimized and challenged when actual native Hawaiians, who worked aboard American merchant ships, were featured
in performances in Boston and New York. I examine how Hawaiians, surrounded by the stagecraft of fake palm trees and
volcanoes, embodied Western fantasies of the exotic while also exposing the artifice of staged mimesis through their own
performance of authenticity.
Dances with Samurai: Mimesis, Alterity, and the Tokugawa
Roots of Blackface in Japanese Popular Culture
Richard Miller (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
When Commodore Mathew Calbraith Perry arrived off the coast of Shimonoseki, Japan in 1853 with the self-imposed
mission to “open up” Japan to trade with the United States, he brought along gifts he hoped would awe the Japanese authorities
and delight the Japanese people: a complete set of Audubon’s Birds of America, a miniaturized but working steam train,
modern naval ships and weaponry, and all the pageantry soldier, sailors, marines, and three bass bands could muster. In doing
this, Perry consciously mimicked the stereotype of an “oriental potentate.” However, Perry also brought a different kind of
mimetic practice to Japan, a blackface minstrel troupe, the Original Ethiopian Olio Minstrels. Perry’s compatriots remarked
in their journals how immediately and completely blackface performances were enjoyed by Japanese audiences in spite of their
complete lack of experience with American stereotypes of Black slaves and freemen or the white cultural productions being
parodied—not to mention the English language of the dialog. Unbeknownst to Perry and his crew, Japanese were prepared
to appreciate blackface with a long tradition of mimetic othering of their own: Kankan odor, a carnivalesque caricaturing of
foreigners drawing from public memories of embassies from China, Korea, Okinawa, and the Dutch East Indies enclave in
Nagasaki. This paper examines the structural and performative homologies between Kankan odor and blackface minstrelsy,