American Music Review
Vol. XLVII, Issue 2, Spring 2018
Our Music in Polycultural America speaker series entered its fifteenth season this year. With the help of the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, we are delighted to continue contributing to the intellectual life of the Conservatory of Music and Brooklyn College at large. On 19 March Brooklyn College professor Elaine Sandoval presented “Venezuelan Música Llanera, through Crisis and Migration” discuss ing the dire situations facing many musicians in that South American country, and their attempts to make a new life in New York. Matthew D. Morrison’s “Blackface, Blacksound, and (Mis)Appropriation in Early American Popular Music” on 17 April traced new theories of the development of black expressiv e culture in America, and fostered a lively discussion with students from a variety of departments. Finally, Marc Hannaford’s timely “Beyond Category: Muhal Richard Abrams’s Creative Universes” on 24 April offered a music theorist’s insights into the late musician’s style, and was also followed by an insightful discussion.
HISAM’s Graduate Assistant Lindsey Eckenroth presented a paper titled “Cars and Guitars: The Sounds of Liberation?” at the 2018 Music and the Moving Ima ge conference. This paper, which was excerpted from her larger dissertation chapter on rockumentaries situated in cities, explored the audiovisual representations of the MC5 and Detroit’s automotive industry in the 2002 rockumentary MC5: A True Testimonial. And our College Assistant Whitney George has earned commissions from a variety of ensembles and artists, including the Naked Eye Ensemble, trumpe ter Ashley Hedlund, oboist and vocalist Kristin Leitterman, and Fresh Squeezed Opera. Kudos to both!
