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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.

AMS/SMT Joint Annual Meeting 2023

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.

Beyond the Staff: Pedagogies and Practices

AMS Study Group for Music Notation, Inscription, and Visualization

NB: For those who cannot join the AMS/SMT annual meeting, please consider this call for papers as a Call for Proposals for a special journal issue.

For the 2023 meeting of AMS/SMT in Denver, CO, the Study Group for Music Notation, Inscription, and Visualization is soliciting papers for a session titled “Beyond the Staff: Pedagogies and Practices,” focusing on the advantages and limits of oral, staff and non-staff music notations when teaching music history and theory in a post-canonical, decolonial, and global classroom. 

While undergraduate and graduate instructors are increasingly interested in finding alternatives to the limits and epistemologies imposed by staff notation, they do not always have the training or resources to design new materials for the classroom (e.g. graduate students, adjunct and non-tenured faculty, professors with heavy teaching loads). By bringing together the research and pedagogical expertise of those who are currently addressing this problem, the panel’s ultimate goal is to create a special journal issue that would work both as a go-to reference for undergraduate and graduate assignments, and as a model for future efforts with similar objectives. 

“Beyond the Staff: Pedagogies and Practices” invites talks that feature a diverse range of Western and non-Western notations, broadly defined, prompting our speakers:

  • to show through specific case studies how certain notations can change the implicit narratives we bring into the classroom, helping us rethink the ways in which we do music history and analysis.
  • to share original methods and practical solutions for familiarizing students without any previous knowledge to both staff, non-staff notations, as well as modes of music visualization and manipulation afforded by new technologies (e.g. music production softwares)
  • to bring in critical perspectives targeted at classroom discussions about notation/transcription systems and their entanglement with (settler-)colonialism, capitalism, and structural racism.

To expand the scope of our inquiry beyond musicology/music theory/ethnomusicology, and stress the relevance of these issues in a broader cultural context, we have invited Dr. Olufunmilayo Arewa as keynote speaker. Dr. Arewa is currently the ​​Murray H. Shusterman Professor of Transactional and Business Law at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. In her work, she has shown how the visual bias towards staff notation in copyright disputes disproportionately marginalizes improvisation and non-Western music practices. Viewed through the lens of music pedagogy, Dr. Arewa’s work sheds light on what might be the consequences at a legal level of an educational system that uncritically naturalizes Western standard notation.

We encourage submissions from scholars affiliated or who will be affiliated with any of the three societies (AMS/SMT/SEM). Please submit anonymized abstracts (350 words max.) in pdf or doc form to notation.studygroup [at] gmail.com by the end of the day, March 10th.  Please include your affiliation and position (if any) in the body of your email.   

In your submission, please indicate whether you would like your abstract to be considered for a live paper presentation, as an article for the special journal issue, or for both. As there is limited capacity for the live presentations at AMS/SMT, some submissions may only be considered for the journal. In this case, we will contact selected authors to submit a more detailed abstract at a later date. 

Giulia Accornero (PhD Candidate in Music Theory, Harvard University) accornero [at] g.harvard.edu
Ginger Dellenbaugh (PhD Candidate in Musicology, Yale University) ginger.dellenbaugh [at] yale.edu

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