Sarah Koval

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June 10 2024

AMS 90th Annual Meeting Call for Respondents

“Memes, Reels, TikToks: Inscribing and Visualizing Music in the Age of Social Media”

The AMS Musical Notation, Inscription, and Visualization Study Group invites expressions of interest for the role of respondent at the panel “Memes, Reels, TikToks: Inscribing and Visualizing Music in the Age of Social Media” taking place at the AMS 90th Annual Meeting on 14-17 November 2024 in Chicago, Illinois.

Keynote speaker Braxton Shelley will present a case study focusing on the remediation of Black gospel online to explore how social-media users play with the materiality of musical sound working within the antiphonal affordances of digital infrastructures. Following his presentation, three respondents will each have 10 minutes to prompt discussion around questions, such as:

From TikTok to Snapchat to Instagram Reels, how do digital platforms and the musical activities they afford challenge musicological concepts traditionally associated with the score such as “work” and “authorship”? In the post-canonical world of TikTok, where is the work, or what does the work become?
On digital platforms a sound sample becomes a unit of cultural information, a meme, with the potential for generating endless chains of reference. In what way do these new technologies re-envision the relationship between the moving image, sound, and its perceived source?
The techniques at the foundations of meme culture have historical precedent in musical techniques such as centonization, variation, musical borrowing, and sampling, inviting us to reconsider it within a continuity of practices. What is new and what is old about musical memetic practices?
Digital platforms invite users to become creators, accelerating the recycling, repurposing, and circulation of musical material in new and exciting ways. What is the role of human actors and algorithms in determining how digital inscriptions defer, recall, and alter the meaning of musical information?
What kind of notion of history are these new musical inscriptions engendering?

Please submit an indication of interest via the following form by July 1st. Questions can be addressed to notation.studygroup@gmail.com.

October 31 2023

AMS/SMT Joint Annual Meeting 2023

Sarah Koval News

Beyond the Staff: Notation Pedagogies and Practices

For the 2023 meeting of AMS/SMT in Denver, CO, the Study Group for Music Notation, Inscription, and Visualization will be holding a session titled “Beyond the Staff: Notation Pedagogies and Practices.” This session is dedicated to the role that music notations might have when teaching music history and theory in a post-canonical, decolonial, and global classroom.

Our keynote speaker Olufunmilayo B. Arewa (Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University) will bring her legal expertise to shed light on the consequences for underrepresented communities of an educational system that uncritically naturalizes Western standard notation. Papers by Toru Momii (Harvard U.), and Jonathan Gómez (USCalifornia), and Anabel Maler (UBC) will follow.

Momii’s paper proposes a interactive lesson plan involving oral mnemonics (shōga) and visual notation for the shō, inviting students to reflect on how these two systems emphasize different musical parameters, reflect critically on which musical features are made explicit, implicit, or absent in each system, and evaluate the complementary relationship between oral and visual methods of learning music. Gómez’s paper focuses on the ambivalent relationship of Black American music with Western staff notation through the work of musician and composer Braxton Cook (b. 1991), proposing a phenomenology of “presence” to understand the role of staff notation in Black musical history. Maler’s paper centers on sign language as a form of embodied inscription, presenting analytical case studies of translated sign language music, signed rap and original signed music by Deaf artists Paris Glass, Harmony Baniaga, Rosa Lee Timm, Sean Forbes, Wawa, and Pamela Witcher.

The session will take place on Thursday, November 9th, 8-10pm in the Majesty Ballroom of the Conference Hotel in Denver, CO. We look forward to seeing you there!

A poster with the AMS logo featuring photos of the four speakers at the Notation, Inscription, Visualization study group of the AMS.