Music circulates, moves, and is mapped through places, pathways, materials, bodies, and technologies. Together, we will encounter a series of conceptual frameworks and case studies that map the nodes, pathways, boundaries, and movements of sonic phenomena and musical life. How do the movements of music and musicians, the places they occupy, and the boundaries they negotiate communicate spatial information about music practices? How they circulate physically and virtually? What are the different methods that ethnomusicologists use to represent and map these circulating sounds? This seminar not only discusses the physical cartography and circulation of music cultures, but also, the virtual spaces music moves through. In the opening decades of the 21st century, new media practices and Web 2.0 modalities (e.g. Spotify, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook) have enabled new cartographies, patterns, and pathways of circulation, and engendered new approaches to participatory musicking. The seminar also raises questions of how technologies and modes of mobility interface with categories of identity, race, and gender.
In-class discussions foreground the role of movement and how musical movement is mapped and represented. The seminar addresses such topics as: musical movements by way of travel, habitation, refuge, trade, ghettoization, migration, or telecommunication; sonic geography; the ways sounds and music flow and vibrate through, in, and among places (e.g. urban streets and neighborhoods, spaces of protest, music scenes, performance venues); composition as travel writing; why some musics and musical actors are more mobile than others; how travel and migration shape music-making and musical senses of place; how the maps and cartographic representations of places are redrawn as music and musical actors move and aural culture makes claims to space; the place of border theory, cartography, migration studies, transnationalism, and human geography in ethnomusicology; the impact of travel, tourism, festivals, and tours on local music scenes; mobile media and technologies; how subversive and DIY cartographies of music cultures and their movements offer alternative representations to conventional social and political customs; and how the spatiality and materiality of musical mobility is experienced through aural, tactile, visual, and haptic sensations. |