The Online Program of events for the 2023 AMS & SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Music and the Unique Challenges of Dance Research: MDSG Workshop 2023
Time:
Friday, 10/Nov/2023:
12:30pm - 2:00pm
Location:Plaza Ballroom E
Session Topics:
Popular Music, Dance, Indigenous Music / Decolonial Studies, AMS
Presentations
Music and the Unique Challenges of Dance Research: MDSG Workshop 2023
Chair(s): Stephen S. Hudson (Occidental College), Rebecca Schwartz-Bishir (University of Michigan)
Presenter(s): Stephen S. Hudson (Occidental College), Rebecca Schwartz-Bishir (University of Michigan)
Organized by the AMS Music and Dance Study Group
Musicologists and music theorists face similar challenges when studying dance, music, and motion. Studies in these areas face several essential methodological barriers: the difficulty of representing dance on the printed page, the inaccessibility of traditions that must be learned through in-person participation and training, the unverbalized or pre-discursive meanings and significances of human body motion, and the historical marginality of dance within musicology and related disciplines. In this ninety-minute workshop, we invite members of AMS and SMT who study (or are interested in studying) dance, movement, and gesture to build interdisciplinary understanding and to share strategies for addressing the unique challenges of music-, dance-, and movement-related research.
This ninety-minute workshop will begin with a ten-minute introduction by the leaders, Stephen Hudson, Ph.D., and Rebecca Schwartz Ph.D., detailing the structure and analytical goals of the event. Topics that will be addressed are: (1) The music-dance embodiment of Native Americans as "others"; and (2) Musicians as dancers and dancers as musicians: Who's leading Who in vernacular/popular dance? Introductory remarks will also provide history of the works to be considered, context for the issues they present, and an overview of the readings. (Interdisciplinary scholarship that will stimulate discussion of music-dance liaisons and their challenges will be suggested on the MDSG Listserv and website 30 days ahead of the event.) Articles to be discussed include, but are not limited, to “‘Les Sauvages,’ Music in Utopia, and the Decline of the Courtly Pastoral,” by Reinhard Strohm; “Sauvages, Sex Roles, and Semiotics: Representations of Native Americans in the French Ballet, 1736-1837, Part One: The Eighteenth Century,” by Joellen Meglin; “Choreographies of Listening,” by Christi Jay Wells; and “Feeling Meter: Kinesthetic Knowledge and the Case of Recent Progressive Metal,” by Mariusz Kozak.
Following the introduction, for the middle sixty minutes of the workshop, participants will break into small groups and participate in a real-time examination and discussion of examples from four works that pose challenges to current research. Participants will engage their listening skills, visual acuity, and bodily perspectives in order to understand better and address with more sophistication the challenges of music and dance scholarship.
Finally, workshop participants will come together in the larger group to share their findings for the last twenty minutes of the workshop.
