RESEARCH & CREATIVE ACTIVITIES

Siv B. Lie (ethnomusicology) delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Boston on November 1. The paper, titled "Django in Paris: Curating Patrimony, Acoustic Territory, and Ethnoracial Marginality," explored the racialization of Romanies in a museum exhibition and was part of a panel called "The Guitar in History." She also participated in a roundtable titled "Ambivalent Populisms: Musical Politics and Policy in Contemporary Europe" at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology on November 7. Her contribution, "Cultural Activism's Living Legacies," explored the musical and activist history of a pro-Romani nonprofit in France.

On October 3, The American Prize announced the award winners for 2018-19. Chris Gekker's (trumpet) CD "Ghost Dialogues" with Divine Art Records won 2nd place in the solo artist category. Also featured on the CD are Rita Sloan (piano) and Chris Vadala (tenor saxophone). Composers represented include Robert Gibson (composition) and alumnus Kevin McKee ’06 (M.M. trumpet).

Patrick Warfield (musicology) published Sounds to Establish a Corps: The Origins of the United States Marine Band, 1798-1804 in the journal Eighteenth-Century Music. This is the first in a series of articles exploring the history of the nation's oldest musical organization.

Based on the music of legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt, jazz manouche is a popular genre that emerged during the late twentieth century. This article examines the historical development of jazz manouche in relation to ideologies about ethnoracial identity in France. Jazz manouche is strongly associated with French Manouches, the subgroup of Romanies (“Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. In the decades following Reinhardt's death in 1953, some Manouches adopted his music as a community practice. Simultaneously, critics, promoters, and activists extolled the putative ethnoracial character of this music, giving rise to the “jazz manouche” label as a cornerstone of both socially conscious and profit-generating strategies. Drawing on analysis of published criticism, archival research, and interviews, I argue that ethnoracial and generic categories can develop symbiotically, each informing and reflecting ideologies about cultural identity and its sonic expressions. Jazz manouche grew out of essentializing notions about Manouche identity, while Manouches have been racialized through reductive narratives about jazz manouche. In this case, an investigation of genre formation can inform understandings of ethnoracial identity and national belonging.

Siv B. Lie and Benjamin Givan collaborated to create the entry on "Jazz Manouche" for Grove Music Online.  

Principal Investigator: Kenneth Elpus, associate professor of music education

Co-Principal Investigator: Stephanie Prichard, assistant professor of music education

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to explore the relation between rigorous, high quality arts education in high school and academic outcomes at the high school and postsecondary levels. Prior research on the association between arts education and academic outcomes has yielded mixed results, possibly due to wide variation in the definitions of arts education and the academic measures used by researchers. In this study, the research team will analyze a novel administrative dataset that overcomes those weaknesses to establish the relationship between arts education and academic achievement.

Project Activities: The research team will examine the academic achievement outcomes for students who chose to enroll in arts courses compared to those who did not for ten cohorts of American students who pursued courses from the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program, using data provided by the International Baccalaureate Organization. Additionally, they will link IB data to data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) to compare postsecondary outcomes for arts and non-arts IB students. Finally, they will see if their findings from the IB dataset replicate using data from the Maryland Longitudinal Data System (MLDS) Center for students in the public high schools of Maryland.

Products: The research team will produce preliminary evidence of the potential for arts education to improve high school and postsecondary academic outcomes. In addition, they will produce peer-reviewed publications in arts education and general education research journals, host in-service workshops for arts educators; participate in annual meetings for arts educators and policymakers; publish articles in education practitioner journals and magazines; publish blog posts and op-ed articles on platforms intended to reach the general public; and communicate about these products through various social media platforms.

In recent years, the estudiantina (a type of plucked-­‐string orchestra of Spanish origin) has become a topic of increased interest among music historians, including Latin Americanists. The Bolivian case, however, has not been the focus of detailed historical research, even though music scholars long have acknowledged that in the early-­‐to-­‐mid twentieth century the estudiantina represented one of Bolivia’s most popular ensembletypes and served as an important vehicle for the performance of typical criollo-­‐mestizo musical expressions. This article traces the trajectory of La Paz’s estudiantina tradition, from its emergence in the 1880s as an upper-­‐class criollo form of music making that centered on European repertoire, to its peak of popularity in the late 1930s and mid-­‐1940s, when working-­‐class mestizo musicians predominated in the milieu and most ensembles performed local genres (e.g., huayño, cueca) and indigenista (Indigenist) works. The principal goal of this essay is to document this major shift. In the pages that follow, I discuss various groups, but devote special attention to the Orquesta Típica La Paz. Founded in 1945, this estudiantina represents the earliest instance of a Bolivian state-­‐sponsored music group whose establishment formed part of a broader state attempt to court urban blue-­‐collar workers

In writings on the early history of mass-mediated Bolivian folkloric music, the La Paz-based female vocal duo Las Kantutas is almost invariably mentioned as one of the most pioneering acts. This recognition, however, rarely extends beyond the mere listing of the group and its members, alongside the names of contemporaneous artists. This essay fills this void in the historical literature on Bolivian music, not only by providing many details on the career of Las Kantutas in their heyday of the late 1930s and 1940s, but also by exploring the ways in which the group’s musical activities intersected with the tumultuous political developments of the populist Villarroel-MNR period (December 1943–July 1946) and conservative-reactionary sexenio era (July 1946–April 1952). I also examine the western highland fashion for eastern lowland folkloric genres (known as música oriental), a trend that reached new heights in La Paz city in the Villarroel-MNR years, and represented an important countercurrent to Bolivian musical indigenismo. As leading folkloric-popular music artists of the 1940s, Las Kantutas, ever present on nationally broadcast La Paz radio shows, played a critical role in establishing lowland genres as mainstays for highland criollo-mestizo musicians, although this aspect of their legacy has long been forgotten.

The Bolivian perception that foreigners often misrepresent the true national origin of many local folkloric musical expressions has long been prevalent. This article examines the conditions within which that perception initially became widespread, by discussing the uproar that ensued in 1973 in response to Jaime Torres's performance in the film Argentinísima. I argue that this Bolivian reaction was linked not only to local nationalist apprehensions over Argentine musical folklorists' Andean-inspired repertoire but also to urban Bolivian musicians' assimilation of Argentine folkloric-popular music practices. My goals are to offer a critical analysis of the Argentinísima controversy and to illuminate the historical context within which Bolivia's presently ubiquitous nationalist discourse concerning transnational musical appropriation arose.

The Andean conjunto and Bolivian sikureada are two vastly different folkloric representations of the Southern Andean tropa (indigenous wind consort). This article examines the extent to which these folkloric portrayals sonically resemble and have stylistically influenced rural indigenous community music-making in the Southern Andes. I argue that these case studies provide evidence that a folkloric musical representation's sonic resemblance to the rural genre or style it is said to be chiefly derived from can be conceptualized along a continuum and that this approach elucidates the feasibility of musical borrowings from a folkloric enactment back to its so-called root form. The final section compares the Andean conjunto and Bolivian sikureada to the Cuban ‘international’ rumba and ‘classic era’ son, respectively, to position my findings within a wider comparative perspective and to illustrate that the categories of ‘folkloric’ and ‘popular’ music frequently obfuscate similar stylistic modification and resignification processes.