Musicology Colloquium
Thursday March 12, 2020
2:00-3:30pm
CFA 2100
This talk explores the relationship between trauma and identity by examining Arab music performance on the U.S.–Mexico border. Drawing on the musicking of Syrian and Mexican migrant communities, I interrogate theories of cultural and psychological trauma and borderland epistemologies to explore how border tensions influence the often-fraught views of identity.
Dr. Andrea Shaheen Espinosa is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Oboe at the University of Texas, El Paso, and currently serves as the Musicology Area Coordinator for the Department of Music. She is the founder and director of the UTEP’s internationally recognized Middle Eastern music ensemble, Layali Al-Sham. She is a Fulbright Fellow, a FLAS recipient, and a Medici Scholar, and is currently serving as the UTEP College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Faculty Fellow. Her research focuses on music, migration, and trauma, and her recent publications include articles in The Double Reed, Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie, and Yearbook for Traditional Music.
Dr. Ana R. Alonso-Minutti Releases Book of Co-Edited Collection of Essays
A Book Presentation & Signing event for Dr. Alonso-Minutti co-edited collection of essays, Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives in Latin America, published by Oxford University Press earlier this year, at the UNM Bookstore.
Cuncordu Sas Bator Colonnas perform at Outpost
Sas Bator Colonnas is a multipart singing group from the Scano di Montiferro, a mountainous region in central Sardinia, Italy. Antioco Milia, Antonio Carboni, Stefano Desogos and Francesco Fodde started singing together in 2002, carrying on the vernacularmultipart singing practice, one of the most representative cultural forms of their village and their island, which is performed by four male singers and called cuncordu.
Different Rivers: Sardinian Hill Country and the DIY Ethos of River of Gennargentu
In the summer of 2014, the Bluesman “River of Gennargentu” released, on his SoundCloud page, three songs of hill country blues, sung in English and played with a technique like those of historical Delta blues artists, recorded in low-quality sound. Within a few months, the web page collected dozens of comments from users who were amazed by this new “discovery” and demanded the real artist’s origin, as-yet-not-specified.