CFP: 2010 AAAs, Music & Language

[Steve Black]

CALL FOR PAPERS:
AAA 2010 Panel
“Sung Performance and the Circulation of Linguistic Forms”
Steven P. Black (panel organizer)

If you are interested in participating in this panel, please send  
paper proposals to Steve Black, sblack at ucla.edu.  For more  
information about paper requirements and the AAA call for papers, see  
http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm

PANEL PROPOSAL
This panel follows recent calls for a ‘vocal anthropology’, exploring  
how unique patterns in the circulation of linguistic forms are linked  
to properties distinguishing sung performance from other forms of  
communication. Numerous powerful social movements have been voiced  
through music.  Often, this recognizable force of music has been  
reduced to the tautology that “music is the universal language”, yet  
the phrase minimizes a complex interrelationship between spoken and  
sung performance. Anthropologists have identified key loci where  
vocal performance is linked to affective meaning, such as  
manipulation of timbre, rhythmic repetition, poetic virtuosity, and  
moral loading of aesthetic conventions. This panel addresses the  
question of how these and other features of meaning making in musical  
performance impact the circulation of discourse, and how musical  
performance is thus linked to the (re)production or transformation of  
socio-cultural structures.

Since the inception of four-field anthropology scholars have  
incorporated analyses of music into studies of ritual and verbal art.  
Despite this recognition, music has often been marginalized or  
overlooked. The past twenty years have seen a resurgence of  
anthropological interest in music, resulting in the recent formation  
of a Music and Sound Interest Group in the American Anthropology  
Association. New Orleans is an appropriate site for a contemporary  
revisiting of the linkages between music and circulation, being the  
birthplace of jazz—a global musical phenomenon in its own right, and  
the roots of R & B, rock, and hip-hop.

The panel will bring together scholars conducting anthropological  
research on music and language in a variety of cultural contexts with  
the aim of promoting dialogue on linguistic anthropological  
understandings of music in cross-cultural perspective. Recent  
scholarship connects the study of vocal performance to macro-social  
theoretical frameworks, and this panel will reflect such a focus. In  
discussion of the connections among music, language and circulation,  
panel members will explore such themes as: the relationship between  
sung performance and structural inequality; the utility of music in  
voicing concerns about markedness and stigmatization; the limits of  
agency through music; and the hegemony of dominant musical forms.

Steve Black
University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Anthropology
341 Haines Hall - Box 951553
375 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553