Nina Eidsheim: The Body as Music's Terroir

Online: https://duke.zoom.us/j/93859614593

Western musical thought has been shaped by several dominant metaphors. These metaphors not only influence the vocabulary we use to describe and analyze music, they also impact our musical imaginaries, performance practices, and sensory access to music. In this talk, I discuss "terroir" as the metaphorical underpinning that helped me to conceptualize singing and listening as intermaterial vibrational practices (2015), and to articulate how the cultural-political concept of the race of sound has material (and sonorous) consequences (2019). More broadly, I encourage those of us invested in decolonializing data, methodology and analysis to experiment with new metaphors.

Nina Eidsheim is the author of "Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice" (Duke UP, 2015) and "The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music" (Duke UP, 2019); co-editor of the "Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies" (2019); co-editor (with Josh Kun and Ronald Radano) of the "Refiguring American Music" book series for Duke University Press. She is Professor of Musicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and the founder and director of the UCLA Practice-based Experimental Epistemology (PEER) Lab, established to study experiential ways of knowing.