Conference Agenda

In this year’s AMS President’s Endowed Plenary Lecture, Beverley Diamond will reflect on different ways of telling history as evidenced in the repertoires and performances of traditional Inuit and First Nations songs and musicians. She will first reference Inuit musicians whose drum dance song repertoire describes experiences on the land in the Canadian Arctic over the past century. Among this repertoire is a song that describes the (frightening) arrival of the first airplane in the singer/composer’s far north community. She will then briefly describe a very different mode of history (in Anishnabe communities) through inclusive perceptions of song/dance participants. And she will also share a Beothuk song, collected by Frank Speck, a song that challenges histories that claim Beothuk extinction; the song moves through several musical styles that almost certainly exhibit the composer/singer’s intercultural contact throughout her lifetime.