Skip to main content

Dr. Scott Swan

Flagler College, Anthropology, Faculty Member

Florida State University, Anthropology, Alumnus

University of Florida, Anthropology, Alumnus

Florida State University, Musicology/ethnomusicology, Alumnus

University of North Florida, Department of Music, Alumnus

Followers

39

Following

79

Public Views

Scott Swan is a multi-instrumentalist (primarily guitar, piano, harmonica) with a performance background in jazz, blues, soul, and folk styles. His research interests in popular and folkloric musics articulate with identity, conflict, gender, and performance studies across various geographic areas, including the American South, Ireland, mainland Southeast Asia, and Mediterranean Europe. For his PhD (FSU), Scott excavated the social aesthetics of performance in multipart polyphonic singing in the historic Occitan region of southern France. In addition to his PhD in Ethnomusicology, Scott holds a BA in anthropology (UF) and an MA in anthropology (FSU), and his Master’s Thesis, “Music is My Vessel,” explored African American musical heritage through the life story of 1960s and 70s soul musician Lavell Kamma.
Supervisors: Frank Gunderson
Address: Jacksonville, Florida, United States

less

kimberly murray

Heather N Buffington-Anderson

King's College London

Harm Langenkamp

Utrecht University

Le-Tuyen Nguyen

The Australian National University

Ioannis Christidis

University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

Cardiff University

University College London

University College London

The University of Melbourne University

Jeanette Mollenhauer

Victorian College of the Arts - University of Melbourne

InterestsView All (25)

Uploads

Papers by Dr. Scott Swan

“Music Is My Vessel:” An Exploration Of African American Musical Culture Through The Life Story Of Lavell Kamma

The life story of Farouk Lavell Kamma offers a glimpse into the changing cultural attitudes about... more The life story of Farouk Lavell Kamma offers a glimpse into the changing cultural attitudes about popular music, race relations, and black national consciousness in 1950s and 1960s America. His reflectively reconstructed musical life story serves as a window on the experiences of an African-American musician during a socially dynamic period in American history. Between 1960 and 1975, Lavell –

Review Gong Mong Suung: Sword Dances and Courting Songs of Chiang Mai, Thailand Morton David Dyck Gerald Earthcd Partners Makanda, Illinois

Ethnomusicology, 2013

Music Is My Vessel:” An Exploration Of African American Musical Culture Through The Life Story Of Lavell Kamma

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

Conference Paper Abstracts by Dr. Scott Swan

November 2022 Individual Paper Presentation: Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference. “We sing living memory”: Exploring the Role of Embodiment and Emotions in the Formation of Cultural Memory in the Historic Occitan Region of Southern France

This paper foregrounds the 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) interpretive... more This paper foregrounds the 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) interpretive approach to music-making, as well as the affective aspects of embodied socio-musical interaction, to illuminate macro-level, socio-cultural processes in the formation of an “imagined” (Anderson 1991) cultural heritage community at a traditional music festival in the Occitan region of southern France. Specifically, I follow a multipart polyphonic vocal group who – through embodied, enacted musicking - uses an annual music festival to generate among participants the “affective embracement” (Holyfield et al. 2013) of an invented nostalgic narrative of shared cultural memory and common musical heritage. The week-long music festival serves as an embedded performance narrative, during which performers and attendees engage in a musically-infused cultural heritage pilgrimage (Bohlman 2017). Traveling to different villages each night of the festival, performers and attendees offload and extend their affective embracement of the nostalgic narrative onto the local landscape through socio-musical interactions, thereby mapping local social memory and shared musical heritage to place. The festival therefore operates as a narratively-organized “memory-frame” (Brockmeier 2002) within which performers embody and instantiate collective memory to generate an emotionally felt sense of collective affiliation and identity among festival participants. Within this narratively performed memory-frame, local social memory is sutured to a pan-Mediterranean traditional vocal practice and to the wider, invented cultural memory of the historic Occitan region of southern France. This cultural memory serves as the foundation for an “imagined” heritage community that is simultaneously local and translocal in its symbolic references and nostalgic evocations.

November 2019 Panel Presentation: American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Vancouver, B.C., Canada. "Le chant polyphonique est toujours beaucoup plus que chanter": Excavating nostalgia through the "grain" of collective voices in polyphonic singing.

This paper shifts from the singular to the plural in Roland Barthes' concept of the "grain of the... more This paper shifts from the singular to the plural in Roland Barthes' concept of the "grain of the voice." I sift through the "grain of collective voices" in a polyphonic vocal practice to explore 1) how my ethnographic collaborators emically imply a Turnerian social drama writ large in their cultural memory of a nostalgically conceived idealized past, 2) how they vicariously tether their folkloric vocal practice into the cultural memory and musical heritage of this nostalgic idealized past, and 3) how they instantiate the cultural values from this idealized past in musical performance.

November 2019: Individual Paper Presentation at the Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting. "We sing living memory: Exploring community formation through the enacted socio-musical interactions in collective music performance."

This paper foregrounds the affective/emotional dimension in music performance to explore the form... more This paper foregrounds the affective/emotional dimension in music performance to explore the formation of community and the augmentation of collective identity. Believing that "community is where community happens," I contend that embodied socio-musical interactions in performance serve as the generative locus for an emotionally "felt" sense of community at a polyphonic singing festival in the Pyrenean Occitan region of southern France. I contend that studies of community and community formation remain viable subjects and objects of ethnographic research and that a primary impediment to appreciating the constitutive role of music in strengthening collective identity and in community formation is an exclusive focus on symbolic and textual approaches in interpretation. I therefore foreground a focus on the micro-level affective/emotional qualia-the what it feels like" aspect-in enacted socio-musical interactions in performance. In this perspective, the question becomes not "what does music-making mean?" but "what does music-making door afford?". This Copernican turn reinvigorates a phenomenologically rich space for community and community formation in the socio-musical interactions in performance. Membership in a community involves both emotional affinity and symbolic affiliation, but I believe emphasis on the symbolic dimension eclipses the phenomenal dimension of affect and emotions in community formation. While symbolic/ideological affiliation is important, what excites and inspires communal affiliation is the emotionally "felt" interactions between members of a community in interaction-both real and virtual. I discuss how my ethnographic collaborators co-create a continuing "felt" sense of cultural continuity through enacted socio-musical interactions in performance.

6th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group for Multipart Music 23-27 September 2019 Sarajevo, Serbia. Excavating the Performative Role of Affect and Embodiment in Multipart Music Performance in the Formation of a Cultural Heritage Community in Southern France

Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology - Graz, Austria 26-28 September 2019: "Exploring the Role of Embodied and Affective Performance in the Formation of Cultural Memory and a Cultural Heritage Community in Southern France"

memory: Exploring community, memory, and nostalgia through the sociality of affect in embodied co... more

November 2017: American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington DC: “Nous chantons mémoire vivante”: exploring the performative and chronotopic dimensions of Occitan identity at a vocal music festival in the French Pyrenees

Citing ethnographic research from the Pyrenean region of southern France, this paper foregrounds ... more Citing ethnographic research from the Pyrenean region of southern France, this paper foregrounds a vocal music festival to excavate the performative and chronotopic dimensions of collective memory in the construction of local and translocal language-identity. Each Fall, the vocal group Le GESPPE hosts the annual week-long musical festival in Espéraza, France, celebrating a style of multipart polyphonic singing specific to this part of southern Europe. Espéraza, and the surrounding Aude River valley, is one of the last remaining pockets of this vocal practice in France, and Le GESPPE was founded in 1992 to preserve this practice in the cultural memory of the region. Le GESPPE shares its musical practice with related vocal styles in Catalonia, Corsica, Sardinia, and northwestern Italy, and all of these regions also share linguistic affiliation and cultural memory as part of the historical region of Occitania. Feeling that they are “at the edge of their history” regarding the collective memory of their vocal practice and its connection to Occitan history, culture, and language, Le GESPPE inaugurated an annual festival in 2001 to connect to vocal groups in the contemporary imagined community of Occitania. In performance, the vocal groups instantiate and index Occitan cultural memory and language-identity, and the festival is iconic of that Occitan affiliation across geographic distance. Performing nightly at a different village in the Aude River Valley, each concert and each village serve as chronotope and mneumonic peg for local and translocal lived expressions of their shared linguistic affiliation and cultural memory.

July 2017: Feminist Theory & Music Conference, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA. “Crayon Angel Songs are Slightly Out of Tune”: Judee Sill’s écriture feminine and the relational jouissance between music-As-text and the feminine body.

Adducing analysis of musical and lyrical elements, this paper posits that the singer/songwriter J... more Adducing analysis of musical and lyrical elements, this paper posits that the singer/songwriter Judee Sill created a distinct écriture féminine (Cixous) in the early 1970s through creative manipulation of lyrical and musical conventions imposed by the dominant phallocentric narrative of the Symbolic order (Kristeva, Lacan). Sill’s musical écriture féminine challenged the phallocentric narrative and musical conventions in American popular music in the early 1970s, and is a primary reason for her relative obscurity. Sill’s creation of a musical écriture feminine followed a troubled early life: death of a father, possible sexual abuse by a step-father, heroin addiction, prostitution, and a robbery conviction – all before the age of 20. These experiences sharpened her focus and her determination to develop her skills as a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and arranger. Musically and lyrically, Sill expressed a feminine jouissance of multiplicity (Irigaray) - a combination of mental, physical, and spiritual aspects beyond the phallus in women’s experiences – that has remained underappreciated since her death in 1979. French post-structuralist feminism of the 1970s, with its focus on language, expression, and experience, offers an illuminating interpretation of the ways in which Sill manipulated musical and lyrical conventions to create her musical écriture feminine. Describing her music as ‘country-cult-Baroque’ Sill activates diverse lyrical and musical elements, as well as spiritual themes, to evoke the relational jouissance existing between the music-as-text and the feminine body. “Crayon angel songs are slightly out of tune" indexes the multiplicity (Irigaray) and complexity of Judee Sill's écriture feminine.

March 2017: SEMSEC Annual Conference, 2017, University of Charleston, Charleston, SC. “At The Edge of Our History”: Performing Collective Memory in the French Pyrenees.

Adducing ethnographic research among vocal groups in the Pyrenean region of southern France, this... more Adducing ethnographic research among vocal groups in the Pyrenean region of southern France, this paper offers an exploration of collective memory as a performative act sui generis. The vocal group Le GESPPE performs multipart polyphonic vocal music in the Aude River valley: one of the last remaining pockets of this vocal practice in France. This vocal practice shares affiliation with similar vocal groups in Catalonia, Corsica, Sardinia, and northwestern Italy. This shared vocal practice also indexes a common cultural history and linguistic/political affiliation with the larger historical region of Occitania in southern Europe. Each year Le GESPPE hosts vocal groups from across southern Europe at a week-long festival celebrating multipart polyphonic singing, as well as Occitan/Catalan identity. Feeling that they are “at the edge of our history” regarding the collective memory of their vocal practice and its connection to Occitan history, culture, and language, Le GESPPE instantiates through performance the collective memory of the vocal practice and its association with Occitania by organizing concerts during the festival at different, remote villages in the Aude valley each night of the festival. As an intergenerational group – from 18 to 85 - of 30 plus members, Le GESPPE also seeks to (re)present an inclusive and – in their words – “age-polyphonic” narrative of collective memory to forestall the loss of connection between vocal practice, place, and language affiliation in the Aude River valley. This paper excavates the different ways of remembering among group members, as well as and the social aesthetics of performance.

August, 2017: Royal Geographic Society Annual Conference, London. "Decolonizing Geography by Examining The Ways Lumberjacks Mapped Liminal Experience Onto the Landscape Through Song."

The songs of lumberjacks in the Northeastern United States provide perspective on the ontological... more The songs of lumberjacks in the Northeastern United States provide perspective on the ontologically creative relationship between humans and geography in one of the more environmentally destructive activities of the Anthropocene: timber-extraction. The Western doxa (Bourdieu 1972) of environmental activism and sustainability reinforces a narrative of hegemonic destruction in the relationship between humans and nature. By mapping liminal experience onto the landscape, the songs of lumberjacks reveal that, at its core, the relationship of humans to geography is also an ontologically creative one, regardless of its destructive outcome. Decolonizing geography necessarily involves exploring this ontologically creative relationship to better understand the seemingly paradoxical expressive and destructive processes implicated in that relationship. Adducing a work song from the nineteenth century, this paper reveals the imaginative way lumberjacks expressed this ontological relationship. From their multivalent landscape (Massey 2005) lumberjacks localized and mapped experientially the liminality of their working lives onto the landscape. Several lumberjack songs exist that evidence this “geo-anthropomorphic” mapping of liminal experience onto the landscape, but “The Jam at Gerry’s Rock” was – and remains – one of the most popular work songs, not only among lumberjacks but also among others whose work involves intimately liminal engagement in the physical landscape.

September, 2015: Royal Geographic Society Conference, University of Exeter. "The aestheticization of the mundane in intraregional tourism in southern France"

This paper explores experiential and semiotic aspects of intra-regional tourism by adducing a mus... more This paper explores experiential and semiotic aspects of intra-regional tourism by adducing a music festival to examine the performative creation of place and the aestheticization of everyday life. In the Pyrenean region southern France, residents hear, see, and experience ordinary place differently during a week-long music festival celebrating an indigenous vocal practice. Festival organizers and performers aestheticize daily places by holding concerts in a different, remote regional village each night of the week. Local residents experience and interact with familiar places differently in both sight and sound as they move outside the lived lines of their daily existence. By mapping music performances on landscape, festival organizers and performers "map out, signify, and categorize the world" (Cullter 1982). The perspective of local residents changes from representation to aestheticization and presencing as they travel in anticipation of the performance.

April, 2015: American Anthropological Society Mid-West Chapter Annual Conference: "Crayon Angels: The Life of Singer/Songwriter Judee Sill as a Challenge to the Male Narrative in Biographical Writing.

How do you grapple with the complexity of a creative woman's life in biography, particularly if i... more How do you grapple with the complexity of a creative woman's life in biography, particularly if issues of gender and sexuality figure prominently in that life? I contend that biographers writing about issues of gender and sexuality in the lives of creative women tend to adopt a male narrative, The male narrative approach to biography is ill-suited to capturing the complexity of women's lives for two reasons: 1) the male narrative approach reflects the dominant, teleological arc of men's lives, which does not adequately capture the non-teleological quality of women's lives; and 2) when incorporated into a male narrative, gender and sexuality are represented and read differently for a man than they are for a woman. In creative men's lives -following the classic bildungsroman, the role of gender and sexuality tends toward positive treatment -as a quality that adds to the man's creative impulse and output; while in the lives of creative women, especially in popular music, the role of gender and sexuality tends toward negative treatment and representation -as a weakness and an impediment to creative impulse and output.

January 2015: Hearing Landscapes Critically Conference, Harvard University, Boston. “The Jam at Gerry’s Rocks”: Mapping the Liminal Experiences of Lumberjacks on Landscape

March, 2014: SEMSEC Annual Conference. "Taking it to the Streets": The Social Aesthetics of Doo Wop in Jacksonville, Florida in the 1950s

This paper explores the social and musical characteristics of doo wop in the public spaces of lat... more This paper explores the social and musical characteristics of doo wop in the public spaces of late 1950s Jacksonville, Florida. Based on the experiences of Lavell Kamma, a former soul performer from the 1960s whose origins lie in doo wop in Jacksonville, this paper challenges conventional consideration of late 1950s doo wop. Compared to other forms of African American musics -blues, gospel, jazz -doo-wop is often overlooked, viewed as commercialized and less authentic in its creative expression. Closer examination, however, reveals doo wop as a complex, uniquely urban music, expressive of a distinctly urban social and cultural context. In Jacksonville -also known as the "Harlem of the South," public spaces served as the stage and rehearsal space for young, local doo-wop artists. On Street corners and alleyways, in segregated public pool areas, doo wop groups sang for black and white audiences. This urban audience actively shaped and sharpened the doo wop aesthetic through participatory consumption, explicitly rejecting and/or rewarding the artists' expressive efforts. Doo-wop was therefore a distinctly urban and communal music, performed by a group for a community. I emphasize the social aspect of doo wop in this paper, and I contend that the interactive quality of social relations among singers and listeners influences directly the contestation of ethical and aesthetic values in song. Singers and listeners chide, challenge, and cooperate in the creation of a musical community that resonates and articulates with a distinctly urban African American consciousness.

November 2013 - Doo Wop: Black Urban Consciousness and the Limits of Communitas in Digitally Mediated Performance

Based on anecdotal evidence from oral history and supporting research, this paper proffers two ch... more Based on anecdotal evidence from oral history and supporting research, this paper proffers two challenges. First, this paper challenges conventional consideration of 1950s "doo wop" music as a primarily commercial phenomenon exemplifying the exploitive, commodifying interests of the recording industry. Second, this paper, using doo wop as an example, exposes the limits of mediated performance in the digital diaspora to create a sense of communitas in listeners/consumers. This paper posits that the physical co-presence of performer and audience is a necessary condition for the sense of communitas offered by Roberto Espisito, contra Edith Turner et al. Physical co-presence in performance thickens and activates local social and moral assets across a rhizomatic network of performer/audience interactions in a way not possible across the digital diaspora. African American doo wop groups from the 1950s receive scant scholarly consideration as an expression of black urban consciousness. Compared to more "authentic" African American musical expressions, doo-wop is viewed as a manipulated commercialized product. This focus belies the generative social, moral, and cultural assets activated in the urban African American community. The urban audience actively shaped and sharpened the doo wop aesthetic through participatory consumption. Doo-wop was a distinctly urban and communal music, performed by a group for a community. The research-supported anecdotes of Lavell Kamma, a former soul recording artist in the 1960s and 1970s, demand reconsideration of doo wop as an expressive chronotope, and doo wop also challenges th

Busking in the London Underground: Liminal Performance in Liminal Space

Busking in the London Underground exemplifies liminal performance in liminal space. Performing ou... more Busking in the London Underground exemplifies liminal performance in liminal space. Performing outside the normative standards of the "musician-as-professional," buskers in the labyrinthine London Tubes are structurally invisible to the thousands of daily commuters and tourists, who themselves contribute to the buskers' structural invisibility through their transience. While constitutive of the London Underground soundscape, buskers -by virtue of their strategic invisibility -fall into the interstitial cracks between musicians and beggars: "not-beggars" performing as "not-musicians." The lack of a physical structure for performance (i.e. stage or platform) reinforces the busker's structural invisibility and liminal status as "non-musician," primarily because their space does not conform to normative expectations prescribed for "legitimate" music performance. Buskers in the London Underground must create temporary structure in an unstructured space through itinerant performance. In the same way that a beggar works a street corner, the Underground busker carves out a performance venue in the hopes of catching the ear and coin from the stream of passersby in liminal transit between their own structured spaces. But the busking lifestyle in the London Underground is often a lifestyle of choice, not necessity. Through that choice, the busker constructs a professional and a personal identity that is itself liminal and structurally invisible. Exemplified through photographic essay, this paper draws attention to the nuanced complexity of busking as liminal performance in the London Underground. I invite conversation about identity formation through liminal performance, as well as the importance of structurally invisible music in the creation of a soundscape.

Reviews by Dr. Scott Swan

Peer Review: “Speech and song: investigating the borderland,” Anastasia Karlsson, Håkan Lundström, Jan-Olof, Svantesson, Siri Tuttle. Jahrbuch des Phonogrammarchivs der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 4, edited by Gerda Lechleitner and Christian Liebl.

Peer Review: "Speech and song: investigating the borderland," Anastasia Karlsson, Håkan Lundström... more

Review in "Ethnomusicology," 57(2), 2013: "Gong Mong Suung: Sword Dances and Courting Songs of Chiang Mai, Thailand,1969," Directed by Robert Morton and Gerald Dyck. DVD/CD.

“Music Is My Vessel:” An Exploration Of African American Musical Culture Through The Life Story Of Lavell Kamma

The life story of Farouk Lavell Kamma offers a glimpse into the changing cultural attitudes about... more The life story of Farouk Lavell Kamma offers a glimpse into the changing cultural attitudes about popular music, race relations, and black national consciousness in 1950s and 1960s America. His reflectively reconstructed musical life story serves as a window on the experiences of an African-American musician during a socially dynamic period in American history. Between 1960 and 1975, Lavell –

Review Gong Mong Suung: Sword Dances and Courting Songs of Chiang Mai, Thailand Morton David Dyck Gerald Earthcd Partners Makanda, Illinois

Ethnomusicology, 2013

Music Is My Vessel:” An Exploration Of African American Musical Culture Through The Life Story Of Lavell Kamma

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

November 2022 Individual Paper Presentation: Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference. “We sing living memory”: Exploring the Role of Embodiment and Emotions in the Formation of Cultural Memory in the Historic Occitan Region of Southern France

This paper foregrounds the 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) interpretive... more This paper foregrounds the 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) interpretive approach to music-making, as well as the affective aspects of embodied socio-musical interaction, to illuminate macro-level, socio-cultural processes in the formation of an “imagined” (Anderson 1991) cultural heritage community at a traditional music festival in the Occitan region of southern France. Specifically, I follow a multipart polyphonic vocal group who – through embodied, enacted musicking - uses an annual music festival to generate among participants the “affective embracement” (Holyfield et al. 2013) of an invented nostalgic narrative of shared cultural memory and common musical heritage. The week-long music festival serves as an embedded performance narrative, during which performers and attendees engage in a musically-infused cultural heritage pilgrimage (Bohlman 2017). Traveling to different villages each night of the festival, performers and attendees offload and extend their affective embracement of the nostalgic narrative onto the local landscape through socio-musical interactions, thereby mapping local social memory and shared musical heritage to place. The festival therefore operates as a narratively-organized “memory-frame” (Brockmeier 2002) within which performers embody and instantiate collective memory to generate an emotionally felt sense of collective affiliation and identity among festival participants. Within this narratively performed memory-frame, local social memory is sutured to a pan-Mediterranean traditional vocal practice and to the wider, invented cultural memory of the historic Occitan region of southern France. This cultural memory serves as the foundation for an “imagined” heritage community that is simultaneously local and translocal in its symbolic references and nostalgic evocations.

November 2019 Panel Presentation: American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Vancouver, B.C., Canada. "Le chant polyphonique est toujours beaucoup plus que chanter": Excavating nostalgia through the "grain" of collective voices in polyphonic singing.

This paper shifts from the singular to the plural in Roland Barthes' concept of the "grain of the... more This paper shifts from the singular to the plural in Roland Barthes' concept of the "grain of the voice." I sift through the "grain of collective voices" in a polyphonic vocal practice to explore 1) how my ethnographic collaborators emically imply a Turnerian social drama writ large in their cultural memory of a nostalgically conceived idealized past, 2) how they vicariously tether their folkloric vocal practice into the cultural memory and musical heritage of this nostalgic idealized past, and 3) how they instantiate the cultural values from this idealized past in musical performance.

November 2019: Individual Paper Presentation at the Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting. "We sing living memory: Exploring community formation through the enacted socio-musical interactions in collective music performance."

This paper foregrounds the affective/emotional dimension in music performance to explore the form... more This paper foregrounds the affective/emotional dimension in music performance to explore the formation of community and the augmentation of collective identity. Believing that "community is where community happens," I contend that embodied socio-musical interactions in performance serve as the generative locus for an emotionally "felt" sense of community at a polyphonic singing festival in the Pyrenean Occitan region of southern France. I contend that studies of community and community formation remain viable subjects and objects of ethnographic research and that a primary impediment to appreciating the constitutive role of music in strengthening collective identity and in community formation is an exclusive focus on symbolic and textual approaches in interpretation. I therefore foreground a focus on the micro-level affective/emotional qualia-the what it feels like" aspect-in enacted socio-musical interactions in performance. In this perspective, the question becomes not "what does music-making mean?" but "what does music-making door afford?". This Copernican turn reinvigorates a phenomenologically rich space for community and community formation in the socio-musical interactions in performance. Membership in a community involves both emotional affinity and symbolic affiliation, but I believe emphasis on the symbolic dimension eclipses the phenomenal dimension of affect and emotions in community formation. While symbolic/ideological affiliation is important, what excites and inspires communal affiliation is the emotionally "felt" interactions between members of a community in interaction-both real and virtual. I discuss how my ethnographic collaborators co-create a continuing "felt" sense of cultural continuity through enacted socio-musical interactions in performance.

6th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group for Multipart Music 23-27 September 2019 Sarajevo, Serbia. Excavating the Performative Role of Affect and Embodiment in Multipart Music Performance in the Formation of a Cultural Heritage Community in Southern France

Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology - Graz, Austria 26-28 September 2019: "Exploring the Role of Embodied and Affective Performance in the Formation of Cultural Memory and a Cultural Heritage Community in Southern France"

memory: Exploring community, memory, and nostalgia through the sociality of affect in embodied co... more

November 2017: American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington DC: “Nous chantons mémoire vivante”: exploring the performative and chronotopic dimensions of Occitan identity at a vocal music festival in the French Pyrenees

Citing ethnographic research from the Pyrenean region of southern France, this paper foregrounds ... more Citing ethnographic research from the Pyrenean region of southern France, this paper foregrounds a vocal music festival to excavate the performative and chronotopic dimensions of collective memory in the construction of local and translocal language-identity. Each Fall, the vocal group Le GESPPE hosts the annual week-long musical festival in Espéraza, France, celebrating a style of multipart polyphonic singing specific to this part of southern Europe. Espéraza, and the surrounding Aude River valley, is one of the last remaining pockets of this vocal practice in France, and Le GESPPE was founded in 1992 to preserve this practice in the cultural memory of the region. Le GESPPE shares its musical practice with related vocal styles in Catalonia, Corsica, Sardinia, and northwestern Italy, and all of these regions also share linguistic affiliation and cultural memory as part of the historical region of Occitania. Feeling that they are “at the edge of their history” regarding the collective memory of their vocal practice and its connection to Occitan history, culture, and language, Le GESPPE inaugurated an annual festival in 2001 to connect to vocal groups in the contemporary imagined community of Occitania. In performance, the vocal groups instantiate and index Occitan cultural memory and language-identity, and the festival is iconic of that Occitan affiliation across geographic distance. Performing nightly at a different village in the Aude River Valley, each concert and each village serve as chronotope and mneumonic peg for local and translocal lived expressions of their shared linguistic affiliation and cultural memory.

July 2017: Feminist Theory & Music Conference, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA. “Crayon Angel Songs are Slightly Out of Tune”: Judee Sill’s écriture feminine and the relational jouissance between music-As-text and the feminine body.

Adducing analysis of musical and lyrical elements, this paper posits that the singer/songwriter J... more Adducing analysis of musical and lyrical elements, this paper posits that the singer/songwriter Judee Sill created a distinct écriture féminine (Cixous) in the early 1970s through creative manipulation of lyrical and musical conventions imposed by the dominant phallocentric narrative of the Symbolic order (Kristeva, Lacan). Sill’s musical écriture féminine challenged the phallocentric narrative and musical conventions in American popular music in the early 1970s, and is a primary reason for her relative obscurity. Sill’s creation of a musical écriture feminine followed a troubled early life: death of a father, possible sexual abuse by a step-father, heroin addiction, prostitution, and a robbery conviction – all before the age of 20. These experiences sharpened her focus and her determination to develop her skills as a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and arranger. Musically and lyrically, Sill expressed a feminine jouissance of multiplicity (Irigaray) - a combination of mental, physical, and spiritual aspects beyond the phallus in women’s experiences – that has remained underappreciated since her death in 1979. French post-structuralist feminism of the 1970s, with its focus on language, expression, and experience, offers an illuminating interpretation of the ways in which Sill manipulated musical and lyrical conventions to create her musical écriture feminine. Describing her music as ‘country-cult-Baroque’ Sill activates diverse lyrical and musical elements, as well as spiritual themes, to evoke the relational jouissance existing between the music-as-text and the feminine body. “Crayon angel songs are slightly out of tune" indexes the multiplicity (Irigaray) and complexity of Judee Sill's écriture feminine.

March 2017: SEMSEC Annual Conference, 2017, University of Charleston, Charleston, SC. “At The Edge of Our History”: Performing Collective Memory in the French Pyrenees.

Adducing ethnographic research among vocal groups in the Pyrenean region of southern France, this... more Adducing ethnographic research among vocal groups in the Pyrenean region of southern France, this paper offers an exploration of collective memory as a performative act sui generis. The vocal group Le GESPPE performs multipart polyphonic vocal music in the Aude River valley: one of the last remaining pockets of this vocal practice in France. This vocal practice shares affiliation with similar vocal groups in Catalonia, Corsica, Sardinia, and northwestern Italy. This shared vocal practice also indexes a common cultural history and linguistic/political affiliation with the larger historical region of Occitania in southern Europe. Each year Le GESPPE hosts vocal groups from across southern Europe at a week-long festival celebrating multipart polyphonic singing, as well as Occitan/Catalan identity. Feeling that they are “at the edge of our history” regarding the collective memory of their vocal practice and its connection to Occitan history, culture, and language, Le GESPPE instantiates through performance the collective memory of the vocal practice and its association with Occitania by organizing concerts during the festival at different, remote villages in the Aude valley each night of the festival. As an intergenerational group – from 18 to 85 - of 30 plus members, Le GESPPE also seeks to (re)present an inclusive and – in their words – “age-polyphonic” narrative of collective memory to forestall the loss of connection between vocal practice, place, and language affiliation in the Aude River valley. This paper excavates the different ways of remembering among group members, as well as and the social aesthetics of performance.

August, 2017: Royal Geographic Society Annual Conference, London. "Decolonizing Geography by Examining The Ways Lumberjacks Mapped Liminal Experience Onto the Landscape Through Song."

The songs of lumberjacks in the Northeastern United States provide perspective on the ontological... more The songs of lumberjacks in the Northeastern United States provide perspective on the ontologically creative relationship between humans and geography in one of the more environmentally destructive activities of the Anthropocene: timber-extraction. The Western doxa (Bourdieu 1972) of environmental activism and sustainability reinforces a narrative of hegemonic destruction in the relationship between humans and nature. By mapping liminal experience onto the landscape, the songs of lumberjacks reveal that, at its core, the relationship of humans to geography is also an ontologically creative one, regardless of its destructive outcome. Decolonizing geography necessarily involves exploring this ontologically creative relationship to better understand the seemingly paradoxical expressive and destructive processes implicated in that relationship. Adducing a work song from the nineteenth century, this paper reveals the imaginative way lumberjacks expressed this ontological relationship. From their multivalent landscape (Massey 2005) lumberjacks localized and mapped experientially the liminality of their working lives onto the landscape. Several lumberjack songs exist that evidence this “geo-anthropomorphic” mapping of liminal experience onto the landscape, but “The Jam at Gerry’s Rock” was – and remains – one of the most popular work songs, not only among lumberjacks but also among others whose work involves intimately liminal engagement in the physical landscape.

September, 2015: Royal Geographic Society Conference, University of Exeter. "The aestheticization of the mundane in intraregional tourism in southern France"

This paper explores experiential and semiotic aspects of intra-regional tourism by adducing a mus... more This paper explores experiential and semiotic aspects of intra-regional tourism by adducing a music festival to examine the performative creation of place and the aestheticization of everyday life. In the Pyrenean region southern France, residents hear, see, and experience ordinary place differently during a week-long music festival celebrating an indigenous vocal practice. Festival organizers and performers aestheticize daily places by holding concerts in a different, remote regional village each night of the week. Local residents experience and interact with familiar places differently in both sight and sound as they move outside the lived lines of their daily existence. By mapping music performances on landscape, festival organizers and performers "map out, signify, and categorize the world" (Cullter 1982). The perspective of local residents changes from representation to aestheticization and presencing as they travel in anticipation of the performance.

April, 2015: American Anthropological Society Mid-West Chapter Annual Conference: "Crayon Angels: The Life of Singer/Songwriter Judee Sill as a Challenge to the Male Narrative in Biographical Writing.

How do you grapple with the complexity of a creative woman's life in biography, particularly if i... more How do you grapple with the complexity of a creative woman's life in biography, particularly if issues of gender and sexuality figure prominently in that life? I contend that biographers writing about issues of gender and sexuality in the lives of creative women tend to adopt a male narrative, The male narrative approach to biography is ill-suited to capturing the complexity of women's lives for two reasons: 1) the male narrative approach reflects the dominant, teleological arc of men's lives, which does not adequately capture the non-teleological quality of women's lives; and 2) when incorporated into a male narrative, gender and sexuality are represented and read differently for a man than they are for a woman. In creative men's lives -following the classic bildungsroman, the role of gender and sexuality tends toward positive treatment -as a quality that adds to the man's creative impulse and output; while in the lives of creative women, especially in popular music, the role of gender and sexuality tends toward negative treatment and representation -as a weakness and an impediment to creative impulse and output.

January 2015: Hearing Landscapes Critically Conference, Harvard University, Boston. “The Jam at Gerry’s Rocks”: Mapping the Liminal Experiences of Lumberjacks on Landscape

March, 2014: SEMSEC Annual Conference. "Taking it to the Streets": The Social Aesthetics of Doo Wop in Jacksonville, Florida in the 1950s

This paper explores the social and musical characteristics of doo wop in the public spaces of lat... more This paper explores the social and musical characteristics of doo wop in the public spaces of late 1950s Jacksonville, Florida. Based on the experiences of Lavell Kamma, a former soul performer from the 1960s whose origins lie in doo wop in Jacksonville, this paper challenges conventional consideration of late 1950s doo wop. Compared to other forms of African American musics -blues, gospel, jazz -doo-wop is often overlooked, viewed as commercialized and less authentic in its creative expression. Closer examination, however, reveals doo wop as a complex, uniquely urban music, expressive of a distinctly urban social and cultural context. In Jacksonville -also known as the "Harlem of the South," public spaces served as the stage and rehearsal space for young, local doo-wop artists. On Street corners and alleyways, in segregated public pool areas, doo wop groups sang for black and white audiences. This urban audience actively shaped and sharpened the doo wop aesthetic through participatory consumption, explicitly rejecting and/or rewarding the artists' expressive efforts. Doo-wop was therefore a distinctly urban and communal music, performed by a group for a community. I emphasize the social aspect of doo wop in this paper, and I contend that the interactive quality of social relations among singers and listeners influences directly the contestation of ethical and aesthetic values in song. Singers and listeners chide, challenge, and cooperate in the creation of a musical community that resonates and articulates with a distinctly urban African American consciousness.

November 2013 - Doo Wop: Black Urban Consciousness and the Limits of Communitas in Digitally Mediated Performance

Based on anecdotal evidence from oral history and supporting research, this paper proffers two ch... more Based on anecdotal evidence from oral history and supporting research, this paper proffers two challenges. First, this paper challenges conventional consideration of 1950s "doo wop" music as a primarily commercial phenomenon exemplifying the exploitive, commodifying interests of the recording industry. Second, this paper, using doo wop as an example, exposes the limits of mediated performance in the digital diaspora to create a sense of communitas in listeners/consumers. This paper posits that the physical co-presence of performer and audience is a necessary condition for the sense of communitas offered by Roberto Espisito, contra Edith Turner et al. Physical co-presence in performance thickens and activates local social and moral assets across a rhizomatic network of performer/audience interactions in a way not possible across the digital diaspora. African American doo wop groups from the 1950s receive scant scholarly consideration as an expression of black urban consciousness. Compared to more "authentic" African American musical expressions, doo-wop is viewed as a manipulated commercialized product. This focus belies the generative social, moral, and cultural assets activated in the urban African American community. The urban audience actively shaped and sharpened the doo wop aesthetic through participatory consumption. Doo-wop was a distinctly urban and communal music, performed by a group for a community. The research-supported anecdotes of Lavell Kamma, a former soul recording artist in the 1960s and 1970s, demand reconsideration of doo wop as an expressive chronotope, and doo wop also challenges th

Busking in the London Underground: Liminal Performance in Liminal Space

Busking in the London Underground exemplifies liminal performance in liminal space. Performing ou... more Busking in the London Underground exemplifies liminal performance in liminal space. Performing outside the normative standards of the "musician-as-professional," buskers in the labyrinthine London Tubes are structurally invisible to the thousands of daily commuters and tourists, who themselves contribute to the buskers' structural invisibility through their transience. While constitutive of the London Underground soundscape, buskers -by virtue of their strategic invisibility -fall into the interstitial cracks between musicians and beggars: "not-beggars" performing as "not-musicians." The lack of a physical structure for performance (i.e. stage or platform) reinforces the busker's structural invisibility and liminal status as "non-musician," primarily because their space does not conform to normative expectations prescribed for "legitimate" music performance. Buskers in the London Underground must create temporary structure in an unstructured space through itinerant performance. In the same way that a beggar works a street corner, the Underground busker carves out a performance venue in the hopes of catching the ear and coin from the stream of passersby in liminal transit between their own structured spaces. But the busking lifestyle in the London Underground is often a lifestyle of choice, not necessity. Through that choice, the busker constructs a professional and a personal identity that is itself liminal and structurally invisible. Exemplified through photographic essay, this paper draws attention to the nuanced complexity of busking as liminal performance in the London Underground. I invite conversation about identity formation through liminal performance, as well as the importance of structurally invisible music in the creation of a soundscape.

Peer Review: “Speech and song: investigating the borderland,” Anastasia Karlsson, Håkan Lundström, Jan-Olof, Svantesson, Siri Tuttle. Jahrbuch des Phonogrammarchivs der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 4, edited by Gerda Lechleitner and Christian Liebl.

Peer Review: "Speech and song: investigating the borderland," Anastasia Karlsson, Håkan Lundström... more

Review in "Ethnomusicology," 57(2), 2013: "Gong Mong Suung: Sword Dances and Courting Songs of Chiang Mai, Thailand,1969," Directed by Robert Morton and Gerald Dyck. DVD/CD.