Lecture by UNM Emeritus Distinguished Professor, Steve Feld: “HEARING HEAT: AN ANTHROPOCENE ACOUSTEMOLOGY”
Thursday February 22, 2018
2:00-3:30pm
Location: Waters Room, Zimmerman.
Bruno Latour argues that even if poisoned, the anthropocene is a deep gift to human research, inciting new approaches to environmental responsibility. Taking up Latour’s challenge through acoustemology, the study of sound as a way of knowing, this talk engages histories of hearing heat that affectively entangle cicadas and humans in Papua New Guinea, Japan, and Greece.
Steven Feld is an anthropologist, musician/sound artist, and filmmaker. His acoustemology research projects include rainforest sound ecology in Papua New Guinea, the history of bells in Europe, and jazz cosmopolitanism in West Africa. He taught in multiple fields for 35 years, the last 10 of them at UNM. Presently he is Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, working on Voices of the Rainforest, a documentary feature film building on a 7.1 surround virtual rainforest that he composed this year at Skywalker Sound.
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.
Decolonizing Strategies in Ethnomusicology, Teaching, and Performance
Perspectives from the US Southwest and Latin America featuring performances by J.D. Robb Trust. This symposium consists of an initial roundtable centered on decolonizing strategies in ethnomusicology followed by two shorter sessions: the first focusing on decolonizing pedagogies and the second on performance and activism.