UC Presentations at SEM Annual Meeting

Every year, the Society for Ethnomusicology convenes more than 900 scholars, educators, students, musicians, activists, curators, and more from across the U.S. and the world for an to share the latest ethnomusicological research. Though, like many things this year, the 2020 Annual Meeting could not be held in person, a new virtual formulation will bring together dozens of presenters in an online format, including 15 current students and faculty from the University of Chicago.

With presentations and discussions engaging in topics including age and disability, politics of music, aesthetics of migration, racial erasure and white supremacy in music, and more, UC students and faculty exhibit the range of interdisciplinary scholarship and inquiry that is a hallmark of the Department of Music. View the schedule of UC-affiliated presentations below, and join the University of Chicago Department of Music at SEM 2020.

Thursday, October 22, 10:00 – 11:30 am – Music Making in Publics and Communities

10:30 am – “I Knew a Banjo Player Once...”: Identity and Disability among Aging Bluegrass Musicians

Emily Williams Roberts, University of Chicago

According to Sami Linton (1998), “Any of us who identify as “nondisabled” must know that our self-designation is inevitably temporary” (p. viii). As aging leads to disability, the majority of older adults could be considered to have, in some fashion, a disability. Due to the large percentage of aging adults remaining active in bluegrass jam sessions through the transition between abled and disabled designation, disability and accommodation are common. However, I have also come to realize that many of these musicians do not self-identify as having disabilities, despite acknowledging their impairments. Specifically, when asked about the role of disability in the genre, some musicians will proceed to talk about someone else who either was born with a disability or acquired a disability while young, rather than acknowledge their own impairment. Therefore, as musicians within jam sessions age and acquire disabilities, both social and musical dynamics of the jam change to accommodate for these needs, aligning themselves with the social model of disability while resisting disability as an identity category. By engaging with aging musicians from East Texas and East Tennessee that actively participate in bluegrass jam sessions through ethnographic interviews and observation, I analyze the relationship between accommodation and identity within the jam session. I demonstrate how this understanding of impairment and disability influences what I have termed as a participatory model of accommodation and, further, shifts the role of accommodation from “making up for” an impairment to creating inclusion for diverse bodies.

Thursday, 2:00 – 4:00 pm – Roundtable: (Re)Positioning the Caribbean: Practical and Theoretical Issues in Caribbean Ethnomusicology

Chair: Jessica Baker, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago

In a special edition of Small Axe, Silvio Torres Saillant notes that the hispanophone Caribbean “exists at the juncture of two competing cultural contexts, the Caribbean on one side and the Latin American on the other, which has historically exposed it to the danger of misrecognition from both flanks.” Because colonial projects divided the Americas into language blocs, contemporary Caribbean music scholarship stills functions within these linguistic silos, which positions the entire region at the intersection of many competing historical, geographical, racial, and institutional contexts. To further complicate the parameters of regional study of the Caribbean, many college and university centers and departments supporting scholarly engagement with the Caribbean do so through a combined emphasis on Latin America and the Caribbean as overlapping though not coterminous concepts where the latter is often subsumed by and ancillary to the former. This panel will offer a critical discussion about navigating the terrain between and across these interlaced practical and theoretical contexts within Caribbean ethnomusicology. Full, Associate, and Assistant Ethnomusicology professors from North America and the Caribbean working within various configurations of Caribbean/Latin American/Africana/Black Studies institutional “homes” will discuss issues attendant to critical Caribbean ethnomusicology, including implications for student mentorship, lack of funding opportunities, and research methods. As scholars focused on the French, Spanish, and English-speaking Caribbean, the participants in this roundtable will begin to chart a course of action for working across language barriers and flanked contexts in service of a robust recognition of the internal and multi-layered diversity of the region.