Public seminar: Nina Sun Eidsheim (UCLA)

Free entry, no registration required

Abstract

I am concerned with surfacing naturalized metaphorical underpinnings of music discourse, performance, and listening practice and how they contribute to naturalizing music and those musicking. Just as we draw upon our embodied experience of the world to invent metaphors, metaphors also contribute to framing our perception, and thus our embodied experience, of the world. This messy, sometimes ungovernable process is ultimately at the heart of how we make sense of music and everything else that surrounds us. At the same time, the sense we make of metaphors inevitably influences the actions we take to shape the material worlds we create. One important step toward a music studies that better reflect those musicking is to develop methodologies and practices that help us become aware of naturalized metaphors, giving way for both rejection and play.

Biography

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Nina Sun Eidsheim is an artist, vocalist, and writer who works in and through voice, race, words/concepts, listening, and materiality. Some of this work is done through the UCLA Practice-based Experimental Epistemology Research (PEER) Lab, an experimental research Lab Nina founded and directs, dedicated to decolonializing data, methodology, and analysis, in and through multisensory creative practices. The author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music; and co-editor of Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies; Co-editor of the Refiguring American Music, she co-edits the Refiguring American Music book series for Duke University Press. Nina has co-authored a forthcoming book with and about the composer and trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith and co-editing a volume on music and metaphor and the worlds they make. She is Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles and Associate Director CSW|Streisand Center.