Conference Agenda

The work On the Transmigration of Souls (2002) by John Adams conveys the trauma of 9/11 and its aftermath. Commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic, it was initially well-received. Since then, however, it has been criticized for its political position (or lack thereof), its use of text from missing persons posters, and dissonant musical content. In this way, its reception is similar to criticisms of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City. As in the musical work, the memorial-museum’s politics, jingoism, and display of victims’ names and images have received negative press. These memorials confronted the same ethical challenge: to create space for public memorialization while meeting dominant political expectations.

I use musical and cultural theory to compare Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Following James Herbert (1999), juxtaposing the structure of the physical memorial-museum alongside the aesthetic features of Adams’s piece reveals the interdependence between identifying Americans as victims yet entitled to righteous vengeance. Both the memorial-museum and the music reproduce what Erika Doss (2010) calls a “unified narrative of national innocence.” Such narratives inspire intense sentiments that remove the demand for national or political culpability while supporting calls for retaliation. I argue that these presentations create the perception of innocence that, in turn, allows 9/11 deaths to be manipulated for the purposes of American militarism. In Adams’s piece, 9/11 becomes a tragedy remembered through a lens of personal trauma without reference to either prior historical context or post-9/11 U.S. foreign policies. Adams’s use of children’s choir further conveys innocence in the piece (Blim 2013). Attending to the loss of life and ongoing sacrifices of victims’ families remains important. However, here we see how attempts to appear apolitical in fact implicitly endorse a unified narrative of nationalism with the United States as victim. Ultimately my work shows how aesthetic choices in memorializing 9/11 have ethical consequences that support American imperialism and militarism.

On December 31, 2024, YouTube viewers tuned in to a New Year’s Eve broadcast from Times Square—but they were not watching the 2024 edition of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. Instead, the livestream featured video clips from the show’s 1999 episode interspersed with various 1990s US television commercials. Notably, the clips were all muted: their original audio had been replaced with distorted, reverberant, looping remixes of contemporaneous smooth jazz and R&B—examples of what is known as vaporwave music—as curated by prominent vaporwave artist Luxury Elite. Vaporwave, which emerged in the mid-2010s as a remix style comprised of altered music and visuals from the 1980s and 90s, has become known as a facilitator of nostalgia, evoking an unrealized past. As Laura Glitsos (2018) explains, listeners in part use vaporwave to “articulate” the loss associated with the “discard” of capitalism (108). They have often been depicted as an asynchronous listening community. How, then, do livestream events—especially those modeling historical moments such as this—promote (and mediate) collective musical memory?

In this presentation, I argue that Vaporwave livestreams enhance the music’s ability to enact what Svetlana Boym (2001) calls “reflective nostalgia" (41). Reflective nostalgia romances the past but does not attempt to recreate it. During Luxury Elite’s New Year’s event, for instance, listeners synthesize a quasi-historical atmosphere of Y2K—emulating syndicated television viewership, including commercials—so that they might reanimate elements of a shared past. The music’s relaxing, nostalgic affect transforms an otherwise anachronistic activity into a therapeutic one: it encourages listeners both to reminisce about the Y2K transition—marked by its own immediate political and technological unease—and to gently reflect on their own anxieties about the upcoming year. Its livetream chat facilitates a vibrant and supportive community for these contemplations. In so doing, listeners perceive their past and present as a cohesive continuum and accept its irrevocability. In other words, the vaporwave livestream becomes a musical site to enact “not [a] recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth, but [a] meditation on history and the passage of time" (Boym 2007, 14).

Taipei’s Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and Liberty Plaza is a place that holds room for leisurely activity, political awareness, and intersecting histories. A walk through the plaza will provide the visitor with such sonic and musical experiences as children laughing, marching bands practicing for competition, and jazz drifting from a stage. These experiences are ephemeral moments that represent the shifting, changing landscape of daily life and of Taiwanese identity. Within the statue room of the Memorial Hall however, a militaristic sonic experience held every hour compels the visitor to engage with the reconstructed history of a dictator, a military regime, and a fixed view of Taiwanese identity. This paper discusses how opposing sonic and musical experiences in these two distinct yet adjacent places represent opposing political maneuvers, and how these sonic and musical experiences facilitate not only a government’s dedication to reconstructed history but a starkly contrasting reclaimed collective memory by the Taiwanese community. By utilizing four months of fieldwork including participant observation and interviews, this paper shows how the reclaiming of collective memory regarding Chiang Kai-shek and the space his memorial inhabits is facilitated by musical practice, even while forced historical significance is in turn facilitated by sonic practice. This paper adds to the body of research concerning the importance of music in the making of place, reconstructed history, and collective memory, and provides a case study for how music and sonic experiences continue to be used as tools in the contestation between government authoritarianism and democracy.