Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries Interest Group

In the 2024 SMT Conference at Jacksonville, the Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries IG worked together with the Post-1945 Music Analysis IG. A call was sent out for talks on modernist, experimental and avant-garde musics that reflect intercultural influences beyond the Western canon. Three papers were presented with responses from Dr. Yayoi Uno Everett and Dr. Chelsea Burns: 

• Stephen Slottow, "Frontier Zen: Transformations of Japanese-Derived Zen Chanting in American Zen Groups"
• Chenyu Xiao, "'Sheng But Not Quite': Manifestations of Hybridity in Unsuk Chin’s Šu for Sheng Concerto (2009)”
• Juan Patricio Saenz, "America Mágica: Identity, Migration, and Pan-Americanism in Ginastera’s Late Style"

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The Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries Interest Group (GIMPIG) hosted a session, “Interculturalism in Latin American Music” at this year’s SMT/AMS meeting. The session featured four 15-minute lightning talks followed by a 30-minute discussion: 1) “The Impact of Acculturation Processes on Foreign Music Theories in Brazil” (Cristina Gerling, presenter, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul; Ilza Nogueira, Federal University of Paraíba; Maria Lúcia Pascoal, State University of Campinas; Guilherme Sauerbronn, State University of Santa Catarina; Gabriel Navia, Federal University for Latin-American Integration); 2) Teaching the National Intervals: Learning to Hear & Feel Brazil in a 1930s Music Class (Micah Oelze, Adelphi University); 3) Functional Tonality and Equi-Heptatonicism in Colombia’s South Pacific (Lina Tabak, CUNY Graduate Center); 4) Counter-Narrative in the Post-Tonal Thought of Julián Carrillo (Lee Cannon-Brown, Harvard University). 

The Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries Interest Group (GIMPIG) hosted a session for the joint symposium “Decolonizing East Asia in Music Research and Pedagogy” at this year’s SMT/AMS/SEM meeting. Three speakers gave presentations: Ji Yeon Lee’s “Empowering Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly: Against Bias and Cliché of the Asian Female,” He Xuan’s “Old Imageries, “New Cultural ‘Re-merger’: Lei Liang’s Inheritance and Development of Chou Wen-Chung’s Wenren Style,” and Gui Hwan Lee’s “Contextualizing Unsuk Chin’s Post-Colonial Creativity: A Case Study of Gougalon: Scenes from a Street Theater (2009/2011).” Lee also participated in the symposium’s panel discussion and talked about the “decolonization” and “decentralization” in music theory.

The Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries Interest Group (GIMPIG) hosted two sessions in SMT 2021. A special session “Celebrating Unsuk Chin” presented three papers, including Jungmin Mina Lee’s “Unsuk Chin’s Textural Expansion and Collapse as Formal Processes,” Imri Talgam’s “A Perception-informed Approach to Performance of Metric Structure in Unsuk Chin’s Etudes,” and Yayoi Uno Everett’s “Ritual and Rotation in Unsuk Chin’s Šu: Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra (2009).” The IG also held a session “Beyond Biases, Borders, and Boundaries” during the regular meeting time, as a response to the current academic climate. The session featured three papers, Andrew Chung’s “Racialized Neoliberalism and the Pitfalls of Meritocratic Ideology in the (Musical) Academy,” Toru Momii’s “Moving Beyond Representation: Music Theory and the Coloniality of Power,” and Ya-Hui Cheng’s “The Oriental Fantasy and Its Problems: Remapping the Image of Madame Butterfly in the Twenty-first Century,” joined by two respondents, Jan Miyake and Eric Hung.

The SMT Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries Interest Group (GIMPIG) co-hosted with Analysis of World Music Interest Group, a successful 2-hour symposium at SMT 2020 entitled “Counterframing Music Theory: Minorities and Marginalities.” The symposium was inspired by the papers on race and ethnicity by Yayoi Uno Everett and Philip Ewell in the SMT 2019 Plenary Session. Eight papers on issues of race in pedagogy and scholarship, musical and cultural theories, colonial and post-colonial intersection, non-western and non-white perspectives, and posthumanist music theory were presented with Everett and Ewell serving as the respondents. Following are the presenters:

• Dustin Chau, “Gates’ Signifyin(g), Kane’s Ontology: Jazz Standard Replications Through an Afrological Lens”
• Clare Sher Ling Eng, “Between Cultural Appropriation and Perpetuating White Superiority: Are There Really Good Choices Left?”
• Nathan Lam, “Jianpu and the Third Solfege"
• Gavin Lee, “Posthumanist Music Theory, Or, The End of Formalism”
• Stephen Lett, “Hungry Theorizing”
• Lucy Liu, “Counter-framing and the Styles of Analytical/Critical Discourse”
• Priyanka Venkatesh, “Discovering India in Western Art Music: An Exploration of Exoticism and Interculturality in Works for Western Violin”
• Anna Yu Wang, “In Exchange for Modernity: Jianpu Notation as a Colonial Technology”

GIMPIG also served as the co-organizer of a special session: Modulations and Intersections: Disability and the (Un)Critical Role of Music (2020), with the SMT Music and Disability Interest Group and AMS Study Group on Music and Disability.

• Barry Wiener (New York City), Dialectical Polarities in Per Nørgård’s Nuit des Hommes (1996)
• Yahui Cheng (University of South Florida), Who’s Authorship? Authenticity in Chinese Popular Music under Global Modernism (case study in Li Jinhui's Drizzle, 1927)
• Tomoko Deguchi (Winthrop University), The Appeal of the Foreign in Toshio Hosokawa’s Opera Matsukaze (2010)
• Gavin Lee (Soochow University), The Promise of Global Musical Modernism

Online workshop

We held a "Global Musical Modernism" workshop to create a framework for decentering the West and expanding the spatial and temporal boundaries of Western modernism, based on Hayot et. al. eds., A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2016).

Participants: Gavin Lee, Tomoko Deguchi, Yahui Cheng.

Panel

• Navid Bargrizan (University of Florida), Polymodality, Polyphony, and Microtonality in Hamidreza Dibazar's Persian Quartet
• Miki Kaneda (Boston University), Hong-Kai Wang’s Southern Clairaudience and Listening as Decolonial Feminist Work
• Penny Brandt (Institute for Composer Diversity), The human equation: fractal form and activism in the music of Niloufar Nourbakhsh
• Joshua Banks Mailman (Columbia University), Trans-cultural-stylistic Solutions of Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Transfiguration of the Moon (1988), for Shô and Violin
• Antares Boyle (University of Northern Colorado), Flexible Grooves and Formal Processes in Craig Taborn's Avenging Angel (2011)
• Xie Zhangmin, Tan Dun's Ode to Nanxiang
• Ji Yeon Lee (University of Houston), Decoding the Riddle: Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland Tea-Party
• Oksana Nesterenko (Stony Brook University), Algorithmic Method and Delicate Patterns in Leonid Hrabovsky’s Concerto Misterioso
• Craig B. Parker (Kansas State University), The Sori of Young Jo Lee, with an emphasis on Sori No. 13 for unaccompanied trumpet

• Tomoko Deguchi (Winthrop University): Toru Takemitsu (Japan), Far Calls. Coming, far! (1980)
• Anton Vishio (William Paterson University): Jo Kondo (Japan), Paregmenon (2011)
• Barry Wiener (NYC): Akemi Naito (Japan/NY), The Woman in the Dunes for Solo Percussionist (2012, NY)
• Jungmin Lee (Montclair State University): Unsuk Chin (South Korea/Germany), Cello Concerto, 2008 (rev. 2013, premiered in London 2009)
• Gavin Lee (Soochow University, China): John Sharpley (USA/Singapore), Emptiness (2002, Singapore)
• Amy Baur (UC Irvine): Helena Tulve (Estonia), L'Équinoxe de l'âme (The Equinox of the Soul) (2008)
• Ya-Hui Cheng (University of South Florida): Cui Jian (PRC), A Piece of Red Cloth (1991)