Music, Emotion and Fish with Dr. David Bashwiner Part 2
We are back, with Part 2 of ‘Music, Emotion, and Fish’. If you haven’t had the chance to listen to Part 1, you can click back to Episode 15, Dr. David Bashwiner was just getting to his work on the Midshipman toadfish, and what it can teach us about musical desire in humans. In Part 1, Dr. Bashwiner described the ongoing debate in music theory as to whether music has some sort of evolutionary significance by impacting our ability to pass on our genes, and why focusing too much on this question is distracting. We then talked about what made him want to study the midshipman fish and ended on the drive behind his research – wanting to understand the response of the listener to sound and their appreciation of music.
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.