Musicology Colloquium
The University of New Mexico Department of Music and The Latin American and Iberian Institute
Thursday April 2, 2020
2:00-3:30pm
Latin American and Iberian Institute Conference Room
This talk will consider performances and recordings by singer Linda Ronstadt to propose what I refer to as her Americanish musical songbook. The suffix “ish” here intends to accentuate the “somewhat” or “to some extent” of “American” that Ronstadt—Tucson born and raised—lived and sonically imagined through her extraordinary musical career.
Deborah R. Vargas is Associate Professor and The Henry Rutgers Term Chair in Comparative Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Vargas is currently at work on two manuscripts, “Brown Soul: On Blackness and the Cultural Politics of Chicanidad” and “Americanish: Linda Ronstadt’s Brown Sound.” Vargas has contributed a number of oral histories with Chicana singers to the Smithsonian Institute’s Latino Music Oral History Project and is a member of the editorial boards of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture and Latino Studies.
Heterophony: Texture, Technique, and Social Commentary
This lecture is in two parts: the first draws from my research on the 1960s jazz avant-garde and musicians’ interests in heterophonic musical textures. For the second part, I perform original music that utilizes heterophony and “noise” in a solo electronic and improvised format.
The Gay West: From Drug Store Cowboys to Rodeo Queens
The masculine ideal represented by the American cowboy is variously interpreted by spectators, dancers, musicians, and contestants at gay rodeos and country western dances across the U.S. Examining embodied gender practices within these communities, this talk articulates the sonic, social, and geographical spaces of the gay American West.
The Cruelty of Jazz: Toward a Hemispheric Politics of Sound
Rooted in concepts of affect and Empire, this paper argues that jazz operated in various 20th century Latin American settings as a vital touchstone bearing the risks and benefits of urban modernization, hemispheric geopolitics, and transnational cultural production, “cruelly” echoing the United States’ cultural, political, and economic dominance in the hemisphere and beyond.