top of page
Study Group on Images, Sounds and Technologies (GEIST)
POWERS OF SOUND
LECTURES / SPEECH
PRE-CONFERENCE / PRE-CONFERENCE
Cine Metrópolis, Campus de Goiabeiras – UFES,
June 03, 2019
J. MARTIN DAUGHTRY
Department of Music at New York University (NYU)
Department of Music – New York University (NYU)
Hyperchoral entanglements: reflections on voice and environment
SHANNON GARLAND – UCLA
Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California (UCLA)
Department of Ethnomusicology – University of California (UCLA)
We demand love: music as an articulator of political affections
LECTURE / LECTURE
EFI Auditorium, Federal University of Santa Catarina – UFSC,
June 05, 2019
J. MARTIN DAUGHTRY
Department of Music at New York University (NYU)
Department of Music – New York University (NYU)
Wartime structures of listening, or When sound is more than sound
Existential precarity and the ongoing threat of forthcoming violence can dictate many of the terms upon which sound is perceived, interpreted, cherished, and hardened. Nowhere is this more true than in the modern combat zone, where people must struggle to create auditory regimes that conform to the extreme demands that wartime sounds place upon them. This paper tracks some of the virtuosic acts of audition and inaudition (ie, refusal or inability to listen) that emerged among US military service members and Iraqi civilians during the 2003-11 Iraq War. Collectively, these acts, and the structures that enable them, can help us better understand the phenomenology of violence and trauma, as well as the fragility and contingency of our sensory engagement with the world.
LECTURE / LECTURE
EFI Auditorium, Federal University of Santa Catarina – UFSC, June 6, 2019
SHANNON GARLAND
Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California (UCLA)
Department of Ethnomusicology – University of California (UCLA)
We demand love: music as an articulator of political affections
In 2012, São Paulo seemed to be full of love. The phrase “more love, please” adorned the city walls, public statues dawned with red Styrofoam hearts, and a public concert called Existe Amor em SP seemed to boost candidate Fernando Haddad to mayoralty. Haddad accepted the call and invoked love again in his campaign against Jair Bolsonaro's campaign with his nationalist love for the country made of hate. In this lecture I discuss how a particular notion of love as a policy came to have affective weight in Brazil, an articulation that first emerged during the 2012 São Paulo election. I show how that happened through the circulation of a song called Não Existe Amor em SP, written by then-underground rapper Criolo, whose work commonly describes the difficult life of the marginalized. The song became especially popular with middle-class cosmopolitan youth who began to use love to index ideal ways of inhabiting the city and creating social bonds. Some cultural and political activists then took advantage of the song's popularity to create non-partisan but political events that empowered Haddad. In this lecture, I interrogate the dynamics of mobility and public space in São Paulo that prepare listeners to resonate with music, allowing its conversion into a public event and political expediency. I argue that the music's modernist aesthetic combined with a notion of political love that, like PT politics in the 21st century, evades the radical transformation of capitalist structures, reproducing class and racial inequalities. In addition to discussing the importance of actors who can convey affective resonance in particular political articulations through musical artifacts, I ask how affectively imbued discourses such as love can be employed to articulate alternative political subjectivities rooted in the transformation of material conditions.
bottom of page