Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 03:22:50am EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
Vingwengwe: Rhythm of the Fipa (Film screening)
Session Topics: African American / Black Studies, Ethnomusicology, Material Culture / Organology, Films
| |
| Session Abstract | |
|
This first-ever film documentation of a 400-year-old current musical practice called Vingwengwe is accompanied by two discussions: one an external analysis, the other, an internal theoretical performance practice analysis. These discussions shed light on a twofold examination of an unexplored organological practice. The first discussion, titled African Organology as “Urtext” explores the historical, social, and cultural context of the Vingwengwe phenomenon in which each claypot is rhythmically frictionalized by a three-legged stool. “Organological Urtext” denotes the ancient musical instruments used polyrhythmically that remain unchanged to this day. Hiding in plain sight, we argue, domestic utensils (claypots and stools) were transmogrified unchanged into musical instruments, accounting for the paucity of musical scholarship on Western Tanzania’s Vingwengwe ritualistic practices. The second exploration, Geometry and Tradition, uses Jay Rahn’s and Godfried Toussaint’s applications of the theory of maximal evenness to argue: “Does the ubiquity of these maximal evenness patterns suggest a historical tie between various African traditions, or should they be seen as a natural preference of the human ear?” Preliminary analysis reveals that Vingwengwe performance shares a mathematical grammar with better-known Sub-Saharan traditions. By comparing Vingwengwe rhythms to mathematical models of evenness, this presentation explores whether these structures are "cultural fossils" passed down through generations or "auditory optima" that emerge independently across different societies. This unreleased new short documentary (36 minutes) reveals that overlooked water- and cooking-claypots when used as sophisticated polyrhythmic idiophones, are the original progenitors of the contemporary musical instruments of the Fipa people of Western Tanzania. These instruments serve as “organological urtexts.” The larger maximal evenness questions connect initial theoretical findings to broader concerns of musical disciplines, which require close interdisciplinary collaboration between musicology and music theory. Combining a macrocosmic with a microcosmic discussion, this unprecedented academic film presents a persuasive new approach to a living-in-plain-sight ethnographic musical practice. |