Abstracts - American Musicological Society

2 Thursday Morning: Session 1- 2
AMS/SEM/SMT New Orleans 2012
fine interrogation: aesthetic narratives are also vehicles for the wielding of power—and will a performance piece involving a
hundred triangle players really create a space for redemptive discourse?
Musical Lives and Aesthetics in the Worship Wars
Jonathan Dueck (Duke University)
What is at stake in the “worship wars,” the central musical conflict in Western Christianity? Since the 1960s, Western
Protestants have engaged in a debate over whether to sing hymnody or popular music in church. Periodicals like Christianity
Today contain a public transcript of this conflict: popular music is lauded because of its connections with contemporary mass
culture and a Biblical tradition of embodied, direct praise; or it’s seen as threatening theology and liturgy tied to hymnody
and thus threatening the church’s self-constitution through corporate worship. Here, drawing on my ethnographic study of
the “worship wars” among Canadian Mennonites, I argue that aesthetics, not theological principle or liturgical function, is
centrally at issue in “the worship wars.” While the Mennonites I studied often defended their positions on music theologically,
they also told complicated musical life stories that accounted for the ways music became beautiful to them. I therefore
argue that “aesthetics “ when used as an analytic category concerning music, needs to take into consideration the musical life
histories of individuals—in other words, the contingent set of relationships a person has had through music, and the ways
they link that person’s memory with their feelings and understandings of beauty. In making this argument, I, connect the
“ethnomusicology of the individual” with musicological reflections on aesthetics as category; and I complicate the divide that
both Christians and scholars commonly make between the sacred as the realm of functional ritual and the secular as the realm
of the aesthetic.”
Session 1-2 (SEM), 8:30–10:30
Between Festival, Celebration, and Carnival: Reclaiming, Resignifying, and Performing Tradition and
Identities in Mexico and Colombia
Brenda M. Romero (University of Colorado, Boulder), Chair
“ ¡ Todos somos huastecos! ” “We are all Huastecan!”: Performance of the Democratization
of Son Huasteco at El Festival de la Huasteca (The Festival of the Huasteca)
Kim Carter Muñoz (University of Washington)
The processes of folklorization “ and the adaptation of “local” practices to “cosmopolitan” aesthetics, have each been used
to explain how genres such as Mexican son huasteco are transported from the “participatory” to the “presentational” context
(Mendoza 2000; Turino 2000 and 2008). However, when what is marked as essential to the style is participatory music, poetry
and dance-making, folklorization is not a one-way ticket onto the stage. This paper will examine the democratization
of son huasteco as enacted by organizers, embodied and performed by musicians at El Festival de la Huasteca, a rich site for
contemplating the multi-directional processes of making folklore. Since 1994, each night at the festival’s Encuentro de Huapangueros
has brought together people from the Huasteca region and elsewhere to play at a participatory music, poetry and
dance gathering of dancers, singers, musicians and poets. Organizers’ values of equal representation and education (inherent
in democratizing projects) have increased the participation on the stage of indigenous, mestizos, youth, women, middle-class
urban and rural residents as son huasteco musicians, a role previously passed down within families. Some proclaim, “¡Todos
somos huastecos!” “We are all Huastecan.” Yet, the presence of non-Huastecans, and ethnic, gender and class differences among
Huastecans, spotlights inclusion and exclusion. Not all are enfranchised. I contend that this performance of son huasteco is
shaped by participation, not only from the top but also from the sides and below, and by tradition bearers’ desire for transmission,
on, back, and offstage.”
Festival Son Raíz: Building Community and Signifying Identity and
Culture Ownership Across Mexican Regions
Raquel Paraíso (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Social changes in Mexico during the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century contributed to the disappearance
of social contexts and conditions for the performance of traditional music. By 1980s, governmental institutions, musicians
and cultural promoters started to organize festivals in different regions as a way to overcome the abandonment of musical
traditions and traditional culture. Festivals functioned as platforms for gaining back social places and spaces for the music, as
well as to create new ones in which to share, experience, promote, and revitalize the legacies of these music cultures. Creating
community and reinforcing identity within and across regions were particularly important at these festivals. For six years (2005