Abstracts - American Musicological Society

32 Thursday Afternoon: Session 1- 28
AMS/SEM/SMT New Orleans 2012
and spiritual, demarcating novel boundaries for public (popular) Muslim values. While much of the literature outlines implications
for the Gnawa, a population of previously enslaved West Africans brought to Morocco through the slave trade, in
the international music industry, the Gnawa’s expanded position in Morocco’s domestic popular culture remains neglected.
Drawing upon a variety of analytical approaches, I outline techniques used by musicians to align themselves with various
moral aesthetics. Vocal timbre, for example, becomes a proxy for either authenticity (in the case of the Essaouira-based Guinia
family) or Sufi ritual (M’allem Abd al-Kebir’s “sweet” tone mirrors Quranic chanters), demonstrating how aesthetic decisions
emphasize both spiritual legitimacy and performance practice. Second, I ask how popular musicians define the sound of the
Gnawa. As Gnawa practices become part of Morocco’s aural soundtrack, pragmatic artists incorporate songs into inspired
popular contexts. By questioning how actors assimilate these sounds while extracting specific moral implications, this analysis
highlights the place of aural piety in the mediated musical product.
Music and Altered States in Vod(o)u: Talking Spirits and the Entranced Ethnomusicologist
Paul Austerlitz (Gettysburg College)
The African-derived religious traditions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic provide fertile ground for elaborating upon
Gilbert Rouget’s work, which showed that instead of mechanically causing trance, music is part of a larger cultural system in
which altered states of consciousness are facilitated as learned behavior. Haitian Vodou and Dominican Vodu practitioners
believe that music “summons” spiritual entities, who possess initiates’ bodies at public rituals. Trance states in these traditions,
however, are also routinely attained by professional mediums without the aid of music during private consultations with
clients. What, then, is the role of music? The present work tackles this question by 1) attending to interviews conducted with
mediums when they exhibit everyday waking consciousness as well as when they are possessed by spirits; and 2) attending to
the experiences of the author, who is an initiate and trancer in Haitian and Dominican Vod(o)u. The paper argues that music
paves the way for altered states: as in secular contexts, it enlivens and entrains, facilitating psychic transcendence. While novices
rely on music to effect trance, seasoned professional mediums do not. This insight broaches larger questions about how
music is experienced in African-influenced cultures, suggesting that talking to Vod(o)u spirits and attending to the ethnomusicologist’s
entrancement are fruitful avenues for understanding the efficacy of music.
An Acoustemology of Struggle: Indigeneity, Land Conflict, and the
Toré Ritual of the Brazilian Tapeba People
Ronald Conner (University of California, Los Angeles)
In recent decades, the Toré—a sacred ritual consisting of collective singing, percussion accompaniment, circle dancing, and
shamanic activity—has come to symbolize the identity claims and land struggles of reemerging indigenous groups throughout
Northeast Brazil. Among them, the Tapeba people (population 6,580) of Caucaia, Ceará, have been engaged in a quartercentury
of negotiations and conflicts with federal and state government, local law enforcement, and white landholders, in
their attempt to secure official recognition as Amerindians and regain rights to traditional lands lost through processes of
colonization and acculturation. Drawing on six months of recent fieldwork among the Tapeba (2011–12), prior area scholarship
(Barreto Filho 1993; Warren 2001; French 2009), and Feld’s (1994a, 1994b, 2003) notion of acoustemology positioning sound
as a “modality of knowing and being in the world,” I examine how the Tapeba strategically employ Toré performances to
reassert indigenous identity in a state where Amerindians are commonly thought to be extinct and, perhaps most remarkably,
sonically demarcate their lands while awaiting a disastrously stalled federal demarcation process to resume. In this, Toré songs
constitute not only a recognizable tradition contesting the official history of indigeneity in Ceará but a vital musical practice
articulating local knowledge and the experience of luta, “struggle,” a concept powerfully imbricated in Tapeba identity consciousness
and Tapeba relationships to land access, their threatened natural environment, and everyday survival within the
dominant and rapidly modernizing Northeast Brazilian context.
“Outside the House There Are No Laws”: Song, Sacred Space, and
Social Relations at Shona Kurova Guva Rituals
Jennifer Kyker (University of Rochester)
The Shona ritual of kurova guva marks a moment of spiritual transformation, during which the spirit of a deceased individual
is symbolically purified, carried home, and transformed into a mudzimu ancestor capable of interceding in the lives of
living kin. Held a year after the funeral, kurova guva encompasses an unusual diversity of musical styles, integrating overlapping
spheres of song, and resulting in a rich and sometimes cacophonous sonic texture. In particular, participants at kurova
guva distinguish between the religious, familial, and ancestral associations of musical genres such as mbira, played inside the
house of the deceased by family elders, and the secular, recreational qualities of genres such as jiti and jerusarema, performed