Friday March 8, 2024, 2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

Arts Instruction Technology Resource Center, Room 190

Presentations by Hesam Abedini, Chieh Huang, Michele Cheng, and Oliver George-Brown

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Music Theory for All: A Relatable Approach by Hesam Abedini

Let’s rethink music theory teaching for community college students, particularly those who might not aim for classical paths but still have a passion for music. This talk is about making music theory approachable and meaningful for everyone, by connecting with students’ diverse interests and goals. I will explore practical and creative strategies to make music theory resonate, aiming to spark creativity and support all musical journeys. My goal is to engage the audience in a conversation about empowering students with music theory that’s not just academic, but a real tool for their musical adventures.

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Weaving Worlds: the interlacing of Atayal language and heritage into contemporary composition by Chieh Huang 

Taiwan was colonized by Japan in 1895. During that time, indigenous dialects and culture were heavily restricted. Although the government has slowly promoted the idea of speaking indigenous dialects in the past five to ten years, younger generations are no longer proficient in the language. Language encompasses cultural traditions and values, and as the younger generation is not aware of them, it is an urgent matter to refocus on linguistic values. The Atayal language of Taiwan, which is segmented into the Squliq and C’uli’ dialects, represents the island’s third-largest Indigenous group and encapsulates the rich cultural tapestry of the island. Historically, the Atayal community has passed on its indigenous knowledge and customs through linguistic expressions. However, the younger generation is no longer proficient in the language. Among the numerous indigenous languages experiencing a decline in their speaker populations, for these reasons and given my own Atayal heritage, the status of the Atayal language is, for me particularly wistful and urgent. 

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Puppetry and Music by Michele Cheng

What if we are all puppets? Since 2018, I have been incorporating puppetry in my creative works and teaching practice. I utilize puppetry to expand musical expressions and to curate a safe distance to talk about social issues. The presentation covers examples of my creative projects working with professional musicians as a composer-performer, my experience offering courses to college students and young kids, and my envision for how puppetry can be used to contribute to education, activism arts, and musical improvisation.

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Errant Textility: The Role of Musicking in Jon Rose’s “Great Fences of Australia” by Oliver Brown 

Despite beginning over a decade before Christopher Small first described ‘musicking,’ composer Jon Rose’s Great Fences of Australia (1983–2015) is a multifaceted project which can be retroactively labelled as such. In this paper I identify four different variants of Great Fences, considering how each represents a different hybridity of participatory and presentational performance modalities. This includes the original improvisations with violin bows on wire fences in the Australian outback; the fixed-media works produced using the resultant field recordings; subsequent gallery-installation performances; and, finally, the adaptation of the project into a concert-hall piece commissioned by the Kronos Quartet.

Beginning with the original Great Fences improvisations, I invoke Tim Ingold’s account of processual textility and Édouard Glissant’s notions of errantry and circular nomadism to frame Rose’s project as a participatory process of mapping the Australian outback’s variegated “sonic cartography.” Sounding out these vast physical barriers entails raising their sonic potential from obscurity; transforming dormant, inanimate fences into resurgent, ecologically-situated voices. I discuss how these voices are colonial articulations of sovereign Indigenous lands; in some areas, the arbitrary physical subdivision of the landscape forcefully supplanted traditional use of orally-transmitted navigational and narrative “songlines.” Evaluating Rose’s initial in-situ improvisations alongside the project’s eventual Kronos Quartet adaptation, I contemplate how these different performance modalities influence our interpretation of the fence-as-sounding-body. I contend that the four variants of Great Fences demonstrate how contemporary practices of musicking can encapsulate shifting performer-object dynamics, wherein the fence itself becomes a pseudo-agential element in the musicking paradigm.