Abstracts - American Musicological Society

16 Thursday Morning: Session 1- 15
AMS/SEM/SMT New Orleans 2012
are intentionally/unintentionally transmitted through the musical practices selected? How do the values transmitted/acquired
connect with Ugandan indigenous values or western values, and are these initiatives part of a cultural revival, neo-colonial
or globalization process? This paper will add to the scholarship on musical practices in Uganda by bringing an ethnomusicological
perspective to bear on the interdisciplinary debate about the intervention efforts of NGOs in the country. It will also
demonstrate that music is not “merely musical” by showing how it can be integral to the processes involved in the transmission/acquisition
of values (Guilbault 2005:41).
Administering Lusofonia through Musical Performance: Cultural Entrepreneurs in Lisbon since 2006
Bart Vanspauwen (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Since the turn of the millennium, Portugal has played an important role in promoting lusofonia and supporting organizations
that sponsor Lusophone-oriented events. Especially since 2006, when the documentary Lusofonia, a (R)evolução was
produced by the multinational Red Bull Music Academy, Lisbon has increasingly been the stage for Lusophone musical
manifestations. Individual cultural entrepreneurs have been essential to the organization of Lusophone events and spectacles.
This presentation analyzes the most significant musical examples in the last 5 years. Drawing on Guilbault’s Governing Sound
(2007), I take the concept of governmentality as an useful point of departure to analyze both nation-building and transnationbuilding
in the symbolic community tradition that is continuously evoked and invented by the concept of lusofonia. I want
reveal how the discourse and actions of specific cultural entrepreneurs “administer” the idea of lusofonia by means of musical
performance. I will especially want to clarify how cultural NGO’s mediate between governmental and commercial institutions
that defend the idea of lusofonia, on the one hand, and migrant musicians from Portuguese-speaking countries with
their own agendas, on the other. In other words, my focus is on the administrating agency of Lisbon-based NGOs as well as its
effect on expressive culture in a transnational Lusophone space. This project contributes insights into the contemporary social
realities of Portugal, and it will be significant not only to music studies but also to cultural policy studies.
Democratization, Representation, and Authenticity:
Conflicting Values in Publicly-funded Canadian Music
Parmela Attariwala (University of Toronto)
In 1988, Canada enshrined multiculturalism into law, a democratizing maneuver that allowed practitioners of non-Western
artistic forms to agitate for equitable access to public arts funding. This agitation ultimately forced government-funded Canadian
arts councils to re-examine their Euro-centricity and to expand the parameters by which they fund art. Today’s council
music jurists—faced with a broader range of genres and a political mandate emphasizing multicultural diversity—tend to fall
prey to conflicting notions of authenticity, exhibiting a parallel conflict to that existing between liberal democratic philosophy
and multiculturalism’s “politics of difference” (Taylor 1992). Liberal democracy holds that each citizen be recognized as
equal and have equality of opportunity in order to nurture his or her individual, authentic self. Yet, historically, Canada has
treated many ethno-cultural groups unequally, resulting in the latter now pursuing politics of difference based upon collective
characteristics. Collective difference politics, though, are prone to stereotype, thus making them “inhospitable to the politics
of (individual) recognition” (Ibid.). Musically, this dichotomy plays out when arts council jurists make stereotype-driven assumptions
about non-Western musics, expecting “authentic” ethno-cultural representation. Conversely, jurists laud Western
musics for originality. Based upon many years serving as a jurist, I believe the Canadian situation has important consequences
for how we teach ethnomusicology in the multicultural context: the extent to which we limit or encourage creative expressions
of identity; how we acknowledge ethno-cultural borrowing; and how we nurture socio-cultural respect for all musical cultures
and all musicians.
Session 1-15 (SEM), 10:45–12:15
Music and Political Expression
Matthew Allen (Wheaton College), Chair
Interpreting the Qin in Tokugawa Japan: Ogyu Sorai’s Studies on Chinese Music
Yuanzheng Yang (University of Hong Kong)
The presentation tackles an extremely important issue in East Asian music and Tokugawa intellectual history—the question
why Japanese political thinker Ogyu Sorai (1666–1728), in the last phase of his career, composed a series of works on the Chinese
qin music based on his reading of the two ancient manuscripts discovered in the early years of Kyoho (1716–1736). Written
in Japanese, Ogyu Sorai’s four treatises on Chinese qin music has been looked upon as short introductory essays prepared for
non-literati musicians. Nevertheless, close scrutiny reveals that Ogyu consciously applied Confucian teachings to political