Monday, May 19
11:00-12:30
3155 Vilas
This session will be an open forum to discuss topics raised by the workshop this year--no presentations, no readings, no formal structure.
Hope to see you there!
Please join us next Monday for the next meeting of the Audio Culture in the Visual Era Mellon Workshop. We are excited to welcome Martin Puchner from Columbia University who will speak with us on the interaction between the audio and the visual through a dialogue between philosophy (Kirkegaard) and theater (Mozart's opera).
Monday, April 14
Martin Puchner (Columbia University)
11:00-12:30
3155 Vilas Hall
Kierkegaard's Shadow Figures
In this talk, I will focus on the encounter between philosophy and the theater as it occurs in Kierkegaard's engagement with Mozart's opera Don Giovanni and other theatrical performances. Central to Kierkegaard's engagement with Mozart is the role of music, which Kierkegaard plays off against the opera's spectacular nature. The case study of Kierkegaard - Mozart is part of a larger project that seeks to redefine the relation between philosophy and the theater by going back to Plato, who invented philosophy as a particular form of drama.
Martin Puchner is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and author of Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) and Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
This program is a part of the A.W. Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Monday, March 10
11:00-12:30
3155 Vilas Hall
Timothy Murray (Cornell University)
Asia Accoustic: The Thought of Sound in the New Media Environment
Synthetic sound has been at the forefront of Asian experiments in new media art and installation. Rather than serving as a mere backdrop for visual installations, sound has stood at forefront of these works. How do various elements of sound--environmental, synthetic, narrative, mixed--impact the visually dominant paradigm of multimedia art? Does the display of sound alter conventions of installation and shift assumptions about "viewership." Finally, what do artistic practices in accoustic installation contribute to what Deleuze would call the "thought" of sound.
Timothy Murray is the Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University. Co-moderator of the new media listerv, -empyre- a soft-skinned space, he is co-curator of CTHEORY Multimedia and author of the forthcoming book, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008).
Monday, Feb. 11
11:00-12:30
3155 Vilas
Casey Lee (East Asian Languages and Literature)
Visual Apparitions and Sound Imagery in Chinese Avant-garde Fiction
Contemporary PRC writer Yu Hua’s 1980s short story, “World like Mist,” has been described by its translator Andrew F. Jones as “claustrophobic yet hauntingly sensuous.” Indeed, the text is crowded not only with characters living in close quarters, their suffocating preoccupations, and a series of disturbingly paced deaths; it is also a narrative called forth from the sensory perception of some of its main characters: a truck driver, a blind man, and a bedridden man known only as 7. While flat perception and contrasting textures/shades in the story’s visual imagery can depict at once disengagement and escape, rich and intricate descriptions of sound emerge to create a more deeply connected, contoured and “sensuous” world.
Ray Hsu (English)
Post-Carceral Audio Culture and the Ears of the Public
The production of prison radio shows is characterized by a tension between the acoustic density of lived environments and the rectilinear spaces of the prison that regulate the flow of bodies and knowledge. The prison space not only keeps people in as carceral subjects, but also keeps people out as non-carceral subjects. While these spaces are segregated from those that surround them, an inhuman recording device cuts an audio fragment out from the spatiotemporal continuum of prison spaces. The audio fragment speaks to a violence of governmental space, transforming a singular area within a prison into a mobile set of digital signals capable of being recomposed into an infinity of heterogeneous future contexts and formats, including multiply archived, disseminated, and interpreted radio shows and poetry readings. This work explores the unforeseen aesthetic and political possibilities presented by "post-carceral" spatial-information technologies. But who or what is the agent of these various cuts and what are the conditions of their public appearance?
Charles Hughes (History)
SOUNDING SOUTHERN: Radio Personalities And Interracial Southern Music
From the 1950s through the 1970s, the cities of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, played host to a series of revolutions in popular music. In the region, country, soul and rock-and-roll all developed, not only as singular genres, but also as an intersecting network of influence and collaboration that made the scenes as deeply eclectic (and interracial) as any in American musical history. Southern radio stations, and their iconoclastic deejays, were one of the most important contributing factors to this prodigious cultural economy. Not only did white and black music travel, un-segregated, into the houses of Southern listeners of both races, but station personalities like Dewey Phillips, John “John R.” Richbourg, and the staff of Memphis’ all-black WDIA provided their own representation of how a cross-racial Southern culture might sound. Through their use of distinctive on-air dialects, eclectic playlists, and a wide variety of in-studio guests, Southern radio personalities are an important – yet underappreciated – element in the creation of one of the most fascinating moments in American cultural history. This program is a part of the A.W. Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The Audio Culture in the Visual Era Mellon Workshop, with support from the School of Music graduate colloquium, the Film Studies colloquium, and the Media and Cultural Studies colloquium, hopes you'll join us for the following public lecture:
Thursday, January 31st
4070 Vilas Hall (the Cinematheque room)
4:00 pm
Emily Thompson (Professor of History, Princeton University) will present:
"Effecting Sound: The Production and Meaning of Incidental Sound in the American Film Industry, 1926-1933"
This talk will explore the creation of sound effects for films during the transition from silent to sound motion pictures. By considering the various configurations of who produced such sounds as well as how they did so, the meanings of both movie sound and movie-making labor will be elucidated.
Monday, Dec. 3
11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. (please feel free to bring a lunch)
3155 Vilas Hall
This meeting will consist of three short presentations, each followed by Q&A:
Andy Sutton (Music), "Music and Image in Indonesian music VCDs--Bricolage and Beyond"
After a period of nearly 30 years, during which audio cassettes were the primary means of dissemination for popular and traditional musics in Indonesia, the video compact disc (VCD) lept to fore in the late 1990s, delivering musical sound and visual images whose variety of connect and disconnect goes far beyond the content of earlier music films, televised music shows, and music videos. Illustrated with excerpts from a number of recent Indonesian music VCDs, this brief presentation surveys aspects of VCD production and posits several interpretations with respect to reception.
Shawn VanCour (Comm. Arts),“Pistol Shots, Door Slams, and Radio Kisses: Early American Radio Drama’s Aesthetic of Aural Realism”
This paper analyzes use of sound effects in radio drama during the first decade of American broadcasting. Developed to supplement initial speech-based modes of narration, radio sound effects were celebrated as important aesthetic innovations that promised to establish broadcasting’s value as a new and legitimate form of dramatic entertainment.
Steve Ridgely (East Asian Lang/Lit),"Experimental Stereo Radio Drama Circa 1965, Tokyo"
A radio drama collaboration between poet Terayama Shuji and documentarist Sasaki Shoichiro won the Prix Italia for stereo radio composition with an innovative mixture of a fictional narrative and recorded interviews with a 19 year old who had just discovered a new comet. The project, "Comet Ikeya," may be most significant, however, for its playful relationship to television and experiments with positioning and de-positioning its narrator within stereospace.
----------------------------------PAST MEETINGS----------------------------------------
Monday, November 5
11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. (please feel free to bring a lunch)
Memorial Union, check TITU
Discussion of:
Joseph Grigely, "Blindness and Deafness as Metaphors" (2006)
YEH Yueh-yu, "Historiography and Sinification: Music in Chinese Cinema" (2002) Christian Metz, "Aural Objects" (1975)
Rudolph Arnheim, "In Praise of Blindness" from RADIO: THE ART OF SOUND (1936)
"Perceptual Restraint, Transculture, and Disciplinary Borders"
Building off of issues raised in our first meeting, we'd like to push further by putting into conversation three spheres. One is an understanding of sound art, radio, and recorded sound as blind media--that these forms are constituted by their lack of visuality. Visual media seem less often conceived as deaf. In a culture where the use of deafness and blindness as pejorative metaphors is still pervasive (see Grigely), we may need to rethink both the critique and the celebration of perceptual restraint (as disability vs. as opportunity). The second sphere is cultural difference, and we've discussed problems in articulating alternative understandings of the audio due to a lack of equivalent vocabulary in English. Using Yeh's piece to look closely at early Chinese sound-film and problems with the indigenization model for understanding transcultural flows of new media should help us position "universal" ideas on sound as themselves culturally embedded constructs. The third sphere is that of our disciplines and the inter- or transdisciplinary project of a workshop like this one. Reading two film theorists writing on sound (Metz and Arnheim) might start us thinking through border-crossing methodologies as well as our implicit critique of single-disciplinary methods as limited (deaf? blind?). Do disciplines really deny, or violently chop up, our heterogeneous base-experience of everyday life? It may be dangerous to conceive interdisciplinarity as a "return" to a more authentic, all-encompassing realm that uses all five senses.
Monday, October 8, 4:00 p.m.
Room 313, The Pyle Center
We will be attending a public lecture.
"The Lyrical in Epic Time: The Music and Poetry of Jiang Wenye"
with David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University
Sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, the Dept. of East Asian
Languages and Literature, and the School of Music with support from the
University Lectures Committee at UW-Madison
_____________________________________________
Abstract
Jiang Wenye (1910-1983) was one of the most talented composers in modern
China and Japan. He was also known for his poetic works in both Chinese and
Japanese. Born in Taiwan and educated in China and Japan, Jiang belonged to
the generation of Taiwanese artists who struggled to negotiate their identities and respond to multiple challenges from colonialism to imperialism, and from nationalism to cosmopolitanism. Although inspired by such modernists as Debussy, Bartok, and Stravinsky, Jiang found in the Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977) a kindred spirit, and when the latter called for sonic representations of national style, he began a life-long endeavor to modernize Chinese music.
Jiang moved from Japan to China in 1938 and his career climaxed in the early
40's. With his symphony “Confucian Rites” and poetic pieces, Jiang sought to
redefine modern Chinese musicality in light of the ancient melodies which he
believed were crystallized in the Confucian practice of ritual and music. As
such Jiang's project appears to be an intriguing mixture of the past and the
present, a bold invention in a mode of imaginary nostalgia. But Jiang's
experiment took place at a time of war, revolution, and atrocity. This trumpeting of his lyrical reconstruction of Chinese civilization was so out of tune with the contemporary “call to arms” that he was doomed to pay an enormous price for his beliefs.
Using select musical pieces, poetic works, and theoretical treatises as
examples, this lecture explores the following issues: how Jiang's modernist
sensibility demonstrated his colonial and cosmopolitan bearings; how his
engagement with Confucian musicology brought about an unlikely dialogue
between Chinese cultural essentialism and Japanese pan-Asianism; and most
important, how his lyrical vision was occasioned by, and confined to,
historical contingencies. Because of the contested forces his works and life
brought into play, the essay concludes, Jiang Wenye dramatizes the
composition of Chinese modernity at its most treacherous.
Monday Sept. 17, 12-2 pm (feel free to bring a bag lunch)
On Wisconsin Room, Red Gym
At this session, the Workshop organizers (see below) will briefly give an overview of their own sound-related work, raising some of the issues the workshop will address over the course of two semesters. Those in the audience will be invited to do the same, in order to get an idea of the type and breadth of sound study being conducted at UW-Madison and to embark upon what we trust will be a productive dialogue and exploration.
The motivation behind this Mellon Workshop is to bring together those engaged in the study of sound arts and sound media from a variety of disciplines and departments, across campus and the community, to explore the emerging field of Sound Studies in dialogue with and historicized against Visual Culture. By examining radio, soundtracks, recorded sound, and audio-art in relationship to film, television, photography, and image-culture following the “visual turn,” we hope to theorize the way conceptions of sound shift in relation to emergent or existing visual media and a vision-centered modern culture. The Workshop will meet monthly on Mondays 12-2, and occasionally at a different time for special guest lecturers.
ORGANIZING GROUP
Lee Blasius (Associate Professor, Music)
Jill Casid (Associate Professor, Art History)
Michele Hilmes (Professor, Communication Arts)
Nicole Huang (Associate Professor, East Asian Languages and Literature)
Casey Lee (MA student, East Asian Languages and Literature)
Steven Ridgely (Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Literature)
Feel free to come without an RSVP, but if you know you will come please email Steven Ridgely.