Past Global Music History Study Group Sessions
Below are descriptions of GMH sessions at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society since the group’s inception in 2019.
2021 AMS Virtual Conference
Sunday, November 21, 2021
Session: Centering Discomfort in Global Music History (Global Music
History Study Group)
Chairs:
Yvonne Liao, University Of Edinburgh
Olivia Bloechl
As global music history continues to gain currency worldwide, conference panels and publications are increasingly articulating field-defining questions, beyond the work of contributing relevant case studies. An aspiration to democratize professional music history arguably lies at the heart of these efforts, against the concentration of resources and authority in the hands of those working in wealthy institutions, in imperial (or formerly imperial) nations, and in dominant “universal” languages such as English. Yet, if there is an emerging consensus on the importance of decentering knowledge production internationally, there is less cohesion on how to resist pressure exerted by hegemonic pasts, narratives, and social groups closer to home, wherever “home” might be.
Call this a grounded global music history that proceeds from local discomfort and is most at home with contextually uprooted pasts. Such music histories may center the memories of Indigenous, dispossessed, and racially or religiously oppressed peoples; those of the poor or the untouchable; or those whose lands have been polluted or rendered uninhabitable by climate change, and so forth. Indeed, as global approaches gain traction in musicology, how might we not just include, but recenter discomforting pasts within the “home” practices of global musicology; and how might we critically intervene in the likelihood that uneven power and hegemonic narratives will tend to predominate? Our study group session features speakers whose research and public-facing work give them valuable fresh perspectives on these pressing scholarly questions.
Speakers and topics
Alexandria Carrico
“Listening to Understand: Unsettling Hierarchies of Musical Excellence through Disability Studies”
Daniel Castro Pantoja
“Modernity as Coloniality, Arche-Politics, and Other Decolonial Intimacies: Transmodern Thoughts on Centering Discomfort in Global Music History Studies”
Hedy Law
“Just Sound Right: Cantonese Music in the Age of Global Music History”
Pablo Palomino
“Music, Global Frameworks, and Cultural History: Discomforts of a Latin Americanist”
Jessica Bissett Perea
“Toward a More Native Music Studies and a More Musical Native Studies: Indigelogical and Eurological Perspectives on American Music Histories since 1970”
Maria Ryan
“White Adjacency and Settler Moves to Innocence”
Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit
“On Offering Oneself to Music History: Positionalities and Perspectives from Colonial Siam”
AMS/SMT Virtual Conference 2020
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Global Music Histories at the Interstices: Perspectives across North and South (Global Music
History SG)
Moderators:
Gabriel Solis
Yvonne Liao, University Of Oxford
Olivia Bloech
Speakers/topics:
Aliah Ajamoughli
“Listening to the Silences in the Archive of Anti-Muslim Racism in the United States”
Brian Barone
“Black Orpheus: Colonialism and the Early Modern Globalization of African Musics”
Juliana M. Pistorius
“Speaking in Tongues: Language, Diversity, and the Challenge of Musicological Translation”
Carlos Roberto Ramírez
“Todos juntos: Using Codicology, Organology and Ethnohistory as a Framework for Global Histories of Music”
Sergio Ospina Romero
“Recording Scouts in the Acoustic Era, or the Writing of a Global History of the Phonograph from Below”
Makoto Harris Takao
“All for One and One for All? Japanese Contributions to “Global History” and the Need for Emic Musicology”
CFP:
CFP: The AMS Global Music History Study Group will host a roundtable at the 2020 AMS and SMT Joint Meeting in Minneapolis. This year’s theme, building on the inaugural session, is “Global Music Histories at the Interstices: Perspectives across North and South.” We invite abstracts of no more than 200 words for 10-minute position papers. Proposals from early career researchers and senior graduate students are especially welcome.
We are particularly interested in proposals from music historians, including historical ethnomusicologists, and theorists that explore global music histories and their potentiality in remapping the Global North and South at the interstices, and in engendering new, connected perspectives that seek to bridge and collaboratively engage ideas of the “North” and “South.”
AMS Boston 2019
Thursday, October 31st, 2019 Afternoon 4:00–5:30
“Global Music History”: Rethinking Questions of Knowledge and Access
Olivia Bloechl (University of Pittsburgh), Yvonne Liao
(University of Oxford), Gabriel Solis (University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Co-conveners
The new AMS Global Music History Study Group provides a timely forum for
scholars and teachers working in this rapidly growing area of musicological study.
The Study Group was established in response to the recent resurgence of interest
among the Society’s members in music histories whose scope extends beyond regional
and national boundaries, and beyond a central focus on socially dominant musics
of western Europe and its settler colonies. Indeed, excluding non-western musical
pasts from the customary study of music history has cut the discipline off from a
crucial mode of understanding even canonic western and western-influenced musics.
As importantly, expanding the geo-cultural scope of “music history” can reveal wider
trajectories of connection among past musics and musical actors, present scholarship,
and future agendas for research, pedagogy, and public engagement.
Music histories on a large scale are not new, of course. Since the early modern
period, general or “universal” histories of music have offered chronologically and geo-
graphically broad treatments of the world’s musical pasts, usually from a Europe-cen-
tered perspective. The problems with this historiographic tradition are well known,
and the new Study Group has a distinctly different mandate. Its conception of “global
music history” does not refer to the “history of everything” i.e. a collapsing of all
musics everywhere, much less general, universal, or world music histories. Rather,
the Study Group is interested in charting the knowledge terrain of geo-culturally
connected or integrated musical pasts, explored in a mode of trans-historical inquiry
that is scaled diversely across time and place, sources and subjectivities, and institu-
tions and locations.
By extension, the Study Group takes a particular interest in rethinking questions
of distributive knowledge, including notions of access across multiple research lan-
guages and archival experiences. How and to what degree, in global academies of
the twenty-first century, can scholars and teachers more equitably understand the
long-contested histories of cross-cultural encounter, and their multiple worlds of
performance and listening? What prospects and challenges are there in interrogat-
ing received practices that exclude Indigenous voices from scholarly constructions of
music history and historical musicology? Crucially, too, such questions will dovetail
with the rise of decolonial epistemologies and decolonizing methodologies across the
humanities, including in the AMS.
Moreover, this Study Group is keen to approach (rather than frame) “global music
history” as a constellation of intersections between the Global North and the Global
South (itself a problematic binary). In that explorative spirit, the Study Group’s inau-
gural meeting will take shape as a participatory seminar for students and pedagogues
alike, a “knowledge lab” in lieu of position statements and a general Q&A. As such,
the first seminar will center on the various possibilities and limitations of a “collab-
orative global repertoire,” notably the proven scenarios and ongoing complexities of
cultivating a democratic knowledge for historical music studies, and potential key
directions, going forward, for the Study Group’s activities. In order to initiate that
debate and reflection, the seminar will be structured around (but not bound by) the
discussion of two topical inter/disciplinary texts, pre-circulated on the Study Group’s
AMS webpage.
From the Study Group’s AMS webpage forum (2019):
Our inaugural meeting will be an exciting participatory seminar entitled “‘Global Music History’: Rethinking Questions of Knowledge and Access.” As such, it will explore the possibilities for cultivating democratic knowledge of global historical music studies (including what “globality” might mean), and key directions going forward for the group’s activities.
The seminar itself will focus on two topical readings: the introduction to Sebastian Conrad’s What is Global History? (2016), and Martin Stokes’s opening essay in Reinhard Strohm’s Studies on a Global History of Music (2018).