UCLA Musicology Distinguished Lecture Series

Coming Up This Week!

Please join us this afternoon for the last DLS lecture of the quarter with Louis Niebur! Today, 12/6 at 4:00 p.m. in SMB 1420. Hope to see you there!

Final day of the Dancehall Moves symposium (seminar and dance workshop)

“HOW DO I ANALYZE CULTURE?” DANCEHALL STUDY HALL

Wednesday May 15 (4-5pm, Schoenberg Music Building Green Room)
Professor Donna Hope guides undergraduate students in strategies and skills for courses from departments such as African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicana and Chicano Studies, Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and more.

Please join us and our co-sponsors NSU Modern next week for the final DLS symposium of the year “Dancehall Moves: Jamaican Popular Music and Dance”.

Professor Donna Hope (University of the West Indies, Mona) will deliver a keynote lecture at 5pm on Thursday, May 17th in Shoenberg Music Building 1325. Below, you will find her abstract.

REMAKING SOCIAL AND CULTURAL REALITIES IN DANCEHALL’S SCATTERED CHILDREN

Dancehall culture’s explicit concerns with materializing identities via its politics of fashion, music and dance remain a crucial component of sociocultural activity in the post-millennial realities of Jamaica. This presentation explores the cultural and social pathways via which cultural identity is materialized and curated within contemporary movements in dancehall dance. The work is specifically based on my research on the movement of Jamaican dancehall dance into Europe, Latin and South America that seeded in 2009 but formalized in 2014 under the title Dancehall’s Scattered Children.

I examine how the manifestation of dances from the Jamaican streets and inner cities embodying the hopes and dreams of local dancers and a wider connected group, are materialized across popular cultural and technological networks such as Instagram and Facebook. Drawing on narrative interviews, participant observation at dancehall camps in Jamaica and Europe, informal conversations with dancers, and organizers, among other strategies, I assess the social and cultural pathways from Jamaican street dances to European dance studios and the necessary return ‘home’ to Jamaica that is incorporated in this cycle.

In the final analysis I assert that these interconnected networks of dance and technologies of materiality transmit a direct response to the harsh, marginalized conditions of local dancehall actors and others immobilized by the politics of identity in Jamaica. In so doing, these networks simultaneously create a renewed space of existence for agency and identity-making that locates indigenous and non-indigenous dancers and actors in an empowering and empowered cultural community that challenges Jamaica’s social and cultural hegemonies.

*Funding for this program provided by the Campus Programs Committee of the Program Activities Board. Backed by Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

Save the dates of our final event of the 2017-2018 Distinguished Lecture Series!

Please join us tomorrow for our first DLS of Spring quarter in Schoenberg Music Building 1344 at 4pm. Phil Ford (Indiana University) will present “The Devil’s on your Side: A Meditation on the Perennially Disreputable Business of Hermeneutics”.

For more information, visit the event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/172921529964134/permalink/200991940490426/

Please join us next Thursday at 4pm in Schoenberg Music Building 1344 for an exciting talk by visiting scholar Robynn Stilwell (Georgetown) titled "Ernie Kovacs: Defining Television in Negative Space." See her description below:

Pioneering television personality Ernie Kovacs constantly pushed the boundaries of the new medium in its first decade. He more or less invented daytime television, then turned to late night and prime time, revolutionizing (and/or satirizing) everything from talk and variety shows to quiz shows and cooking shows. His anarchic comedy often hinges on the transgression of frames and trajectories that are familiar from the constituent media that feed into the new medium of television c1950, whether it's breaking the “glass ceiling” between diegesis and voiceover, turning radio into a spectacle, or taking cardboard and masking tape to turn a television camera into a kaleidoscope. His love and understanding of music also leads to a variety of musical “sketches” from the abstract to humorously animated to the narratively poignant, many of which strain the new technology in ways that predict the future of the medium or remain startling to audiences today.

Please join us for our first panel of 2018 this Thursday at 4pm in Royce 314. UCLA scholars Robert Fink, Jessica Holmes, and Uri McMillan and guest scholars Beth Levy and Stephan Pennington address growing concerns surrounding intersectionality in academic discourse and critically examine Western culture and values — all through a musical lens. See talk titles below:

Holmes: Un-disciplining Musicology?: Music, Disability, and Deafness

Levy: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”: Thoughts on Teaching American Music

McMillan: 'When You Touch Me': On Disco & Being

Pennington: What is Our Job Again?: White Supremacy and the Civilizing Mission in the Music Academy

The speakers in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Department of Musicology’s Winter–Spring 2018 Distinguished Lecture Series will be examining topics including intersectionality, the early television work of American comedian Ernie Kovacs, magical and occult styles of thought, and also convening a mini-symposium on Jamaican popular music and dance.

UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music announces Winter–Spring 2018 Distinguished Lecture Series The annual series includes talks on intersectionality, as well as magical and occult styles of thought, and a mini-symposium on Jamaican popular music and dance.