BCNM at AMS/SEM/SMT 2022
Alumn Ritwik Banerji presented his latest research and Lea Luka Tiziana Sikau presented on alum Sivan Eldar's opera at the American Musicological Society (AMS), Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and Society for Music Theory (SMT) conference. Check out their awesome work below!
Ritwik chaired and presented at "Musical Whiteness and the Researcher’s Racial Positionality" with Lillian Wohl (Universidad de Buenos Aires/IIET), Kelsey Klotz (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Ayden Adler (University of Houston–Downtown), and Kira Thurman (University of Michigan). From the description:
How does the researcher’s race shape their study of musical whiteness? As Sara Ahmed (2004) suggests, whiteness is often most visible to those it excludes and thus this estrangement enables nonwhite scholars to examine whiteness with greater clarity than their white counterparts. Nevertheless, white scholars retain greater welcome within predominantly white musical worlds and are therefore able to observe elements of whiteness that their nonwhite colleagues cannot. How, then, does this greater access reify white privilege by offering white researchers greater access as “insiders?” And what are the human costs nonwhite researchers face as they research white musical spaces?
Find out more here.
Meanwhile, presented on Sivan Eldar's work in "The Simultaneity of Binarity and Queerness in Opera’s Creation: A Rehearsal Ethnography of Sivan Eldar’s Like Flesh." From the description:
Sivan Eldar and Cordelia Lynn’s new opera Like Flesh (2022) tells a story of queer ecology: A woman in their sixties falls in love with a female student and through their kiss, the former transforms into a tree. With the intention to queer opera out, Eldar and Lynn write an opera that doesn’t culminate in a metamorphose. Instead, the libretto delves deeply into the love relationship of a tree and a human. While the mycorrhizal communication manner of trees challenges the student, she entangles herself in the tree’s trunk. While the opera explores the friction between nonhuman/human entanglement and its impediments, this paper reflects on the mycorrhizal structure of opera’s creation. In its production phase at the Opéra de Lille, the separation of artistic roles collides with the simultaneity of composition, staging and musical work. Like Flesh questions how notions of binarity and queerness are intertwined in new opera creation.
Find out more here.