The Online Program of events for the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Presenter(s): Rena Roussin (University of Toronto), Bridget Cauthery (York University), Amy Hull (York University), Olivia Shortt (University of Toronto)
Over the past decade, as musicologists have worked to implement anti-coloniality and towards the undoing of the discipline’s Eurocentrism and hungry listening (Robinson 2020), Indigenous (Native American) art music has become an increasing area of interest. However, academic discussions of Indigenous art music frequently remain siloed in entirely academic contexts. By bringing together Indigenous and settler scholars, artistic practitioners, and arts-based activists who study and work within Indigenous-led art music, this roundtable seeks to open greater dialogue and relationality between scholars and practitioners, while also addressing several central questions music scholarship must grapple with when interacting with Indigenous creative practice and musicking. What is Indigenous-led art music, and what does it mean for Indigenous artists to choose to create in this traditionally colonial art form? How might we position and reflect on historical pieces of Western art music that are about (rather than led by) Indigenous communities, but which nevertheless linger in North American cultural milieus and inform audience expectations? How should settler allies engage with Indigenous-led musics?
While this roundtable will predominantly focus on discussion of these questions among the participants and the audience, we will open with lightning talks from each participant to situate the conversation. Bridget Cauthery will discuss two ballets, In the Land of Spirits (1988) and Going Home Star (2014), to demonstrate the changing but continual challenges of bringing Indigenous arts and colonial art forms into dialogue, and the need for further Indigenous leadership. Amy Hull will draw on Victor Davies’s 2018 opera The Ecstasy of Rita Joe to demonstrate a history of ventriloquism in operas about Indigenous communities in North America, making clear the distinction between operas about these communities as opposed to operas led by them. Rena Roussin will foreground the bridging of scholarship with arts-based activism, discussing the creative development of Ian Cusson’s Indigenous-led operas Indians on Vacation and Empire of Wild, both currently in workshopping stages. Lastly, Olivia Shortt will discuss their work to create experimental music that focuses on repa/matriation of Indigenous artefacts, ancestors, and music across Canada and the United States.
