Kevin D. Carignan 
The PEER Lab at the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA (USA) and the Department of Music at Durham University (UK) announce a free virtual interdisciplinary symposium focused on understanding and removing metaphors on music from an interdisciplinary perspective. Register for this symposium.
If music and sound are complex phenomena beyond our efforts to fully comprehend, what resources do we have to make sense of them?
Join the Practice-Based Experimental Epistemology Research Lab for a two-day symposium, hosted by the PEER Lab at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music and Durham University’s Department of Music on April 29-30, 2022. This event aims to spark a conversation about how metaphorical language shapes our understanding not only of music and sound, but also of each other and the world.
Keynote speakers include:
• Jessica Bissett Perea, Dena’ina (Native American Studies, UC Davis)
• Philip Ewell (music theory, Hunter College, CUNY)
• J. Martin Daughtry (Ethnomusicology, NYU)
• Katherine Hambridge (Music, University of Durham)
• Nicholas Harkness (Anthropology, Harvard U)
• Dorinne Kondo (American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology, USC)
• Shana L. Redmond (English and Comp. Lit., Columbia U.)
• Dylan Robinson, xwélméxw/Stó:lō/Skwah (Graduate Program in Cultural Studies, Queen’s University)
• Holly Watkins (musicology, Eastman School of Music)
View the full symposium program:
“We are proud to host this interdisciplinary symposium which will provide a welcoming educational space for this vital discourse on our current musical lexicon,” said inaugural Dean Eileen Strempel. “Examining the words and concepts we use to describe musical experiences is one way to begin to allow conflicting experiences to stand side by side and to hear valuable other perspectives. Nobody should have to “fit in a box” for their musical experiences to be valid.
Musicologists, theorists, Indigenous scholars, linguists, performers and playwrights, presenters will ponder the metaphors of music and examine how they work. In doing so, they suggest how we might practice identifying these metaphors as they occur, understanding their ramifications and effects in the world, and imagining new ways to articulate musical experiences and relationships.
The ultimate goal of this symposium is to shift the balance of power in terms of who needs to be named, whose experiences and practices are recognized, what relationships we have the ability to note, and what kinds of worlds we can create.
The PEER Lab is an experimental research lab at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music dedicated to decolonizing data, methodology, and analysis through creative practice.
The PEER Lab is led by UCLA musicologist and singer Nina Eidsheim, whose research focuses on the concept of music as an event rather than an object.
For more information contact us at [email protected]
Media Contact:
Brian Runt
(310) 206-4911
[email protected]
