33,455 research outputs found
13 December 2023 - Este niño quiere: Sounding Advent Calendar
No full textPiece: Este niño quiere
The song is a Christmas song from the southern Pacific region of Colombia. I played it first in bundle rhythm then juga rhythm, following an arrangement by Grupo Canalón de Timbiquí. The lyrics imagine a scene of someone (Mary) with a crying baby (Jesus), trying to figure out what the child wants to stop its crying. The song says “This child wants happy songs, to dance, and to play, to celebrate Christmas.
Performer: Michael Birenbaum Quinter
Michael Rodriguez interviews fiction writer Michael Kimball
No full textAuthor Michael Kimball talks about moving away from Michigan to become a successful writer, his education, the fiction reading series he has started in Baltimore, the life-story-on-postcard project, and his book "Dear everybody." Kimball is interviewed by Michigan State University Librarian Michael Rodriguez for the Michigan State University Libraries' Michigan Writers Series
Ohio State House of Representatives tribute certificate to the Sofia Quintero Art and Cultural Center, 2016
No full textThis tribute certificate from the Ohio House of Representatives, congratulates the Sofia Quintero Art and Cultural Center in Toledo, Ohio, as recipients of the 2016 Distinguished Hispanic Ohioan Award from the Ohio Latino Affairs Commission and the Latino Empowerment Outreach Network. The certificate was issued under the sponsorship of Representative MIchael P. Sheehy
Toujou radyo: the digital extensions of Haitian music broadcasting
No full text“Radio” is a hard word to pin down. It refers to a physical device with certain properties— perhaps a dial and antenna—but also to a whole world of sonic communication: newscasts, call- in shows, police dispatches, music streaming services— media that can be transmitted in any number of ways, on any number of devices. This dissertation focuses on Haitian music broadcasting as a social practice, meaning the programming formats, aesthetic conventions and listener experiences that make this particular medium function. I then trace those practices from Haiti’s terrestrial airwaves, out to the many digital media platforms that are ubiquitous in Haiti and Haitian-American communities today, arguing that there is a clear line of continuity across these various forms of radio. In doing so, this research offers a possible model for understanding the so-called 'digital revolution' of which we are all part, with the distinction that this model is rooted in media practices of the Global South. The four case studies that form the body of this dissertation are each framed around the specificity of Haitian radio—for both its producers and listeners—and progress outwards from the medium’s terrestrial roots, to its farthest digital extensions. Chapter One introduces some of the program formats and hosting techniques heard commonly on Haiti’s airwaves, with a special focus on the art of ‘animation,’ by which broadcasters bring music to life through verbal commentary. Chapter Two provides a deeper history of broadcasting in Haiti and the Caribbean, arguing that radio in the region has been transnational in scope from its earliest applications. In Chapter Three the focus shifts to the United States, and to the specific regulatory, social and geographic dynamics that have informed the development of radio broadcasting among Haitian immigrants here. Finally, Chapter Four tells the stories of two musicians who have themselves taken on many of the roles and practices of broadcasters, as an opportunity for comparative analysis. Each case study considers how a diverse range of practices and technologies can be understood as still radio—toujou radyo—while investigating the musical consequences and social impact of these digital extensions
Music, real abstraction, and growth in the Black Atlantic
No full text2024This dissertation argues that reconsidering the history of music and modernity from the point of view of Africa and its diaspora calls for a new approach to the music concept. Breaking with the ethno/musicological orthodoxy that “there is no such thing as music,” it instead draws on recent critical theory to argue that, under global modernity, “Music” exists as a “real abstraction”—one that has exhibited a startling tendency toward ceaseless growth. The argument unfolds through four case studies that show how this Music’s growth has been sustained by repeated accumulation of African and Black musics, which have been framed paradoxically as both its quintessence and antithesis. Chapter One considers the emergence of Music through early modern globalization; looking in particular at the circulation of African musics to the Iberian Peninsula, it draws on the work of Sylvia Wynter to demonstrate how the encounter of European and African musics gave rise to an abstract Music that was implicated in questions of the similarly new abstraction of the Human. Chapter Two offers an examination of Music’s growth by tracing how mixed-race musicians in the nineteenth-century Spanish Caribbean developed new forms of racially hybrid, “creolized” dance music through abstraction and how the pressures of racialization incorporated these new forms into Music. Chapter Three studies the work of Nigerian musical intellectuals in the decades around Nigeria’s political independence in 1960 as they reckoned with Music as a colonial legacy; these thinkers became champions of Music’s growth as they argued that postcolonial Nigeria could assume a leading position in the musical world by offering its traditional musics as a means for Music’s progress and expansion. Finally, Chapter Four listens to the hyper-referential sound of contemporary Afrobeats and observes the integration of its producers into the global music industry to ask if Music’s growth may be approaching—even exceeding—its limits
Michael Rodriguez interviews author Paul Clemens
No full textAuthor Paul Clemens talks about his book "Made in Detroit," the genre of memoir, and writing about race. Clemens is interviewed by Michigan State University Librarian Michael Rodriguez for the MSU Libraries' Michigan Writers Series. Held in the MSU Main Library
Sounding and musicking in the Carnaval de Barranquilla: perpetuating and challenging gender and sexuality normativities through performance
No full text2025This dissertation explores the mutual influence between gender and sexuality, music-making and sonic practices in the Carnaval de Barranquilla, the Carnaval Gay de Barranquilla, and the feminist collective Raras no tan Raras. I show that heteronormativity, macho attitudes, and homophobia are reified in music-making and sonic practices in Barranquilla and its carnival expressions. Nevertheless, I also argue that music-making and sonic practices can alter how gender and sexuality are experienced. Through ethnographical observations, I show how exclusion and gender roles can be transferred into music and sonic practices and how music and sound have helped women and LGTBIQ+ people in Barranquilla fight against these systems of oppression. In this way, this dissertation studies how gender and sexuality intersect one of the most important genres in the Carnaval de Barranquilla, Cumbia. Carnaval Gay de Barranquilla practitioners dance to cumbia by playing it in stereos or hiring millo ensembles. Contrarily, Raras no tan Raras play and compose their own music despite not being experienced musicians. In these two cases, I suggest that both forms of musicality can serve to reshape gender and sexuality relationality. To understand the interrelationality between music and sound, and gender and sexuality, I analyze three aspects of Barranquilla and its Carnival expressions: the normativities that govern gender and sexuality, the pre-subjective and subjective effects of music and sound, and the spontaneous and ephemeral relationships that emerge during performances. For this reason, the theoretical perspectives that serve to analyze such aspects are homonormativity (a recurring concept that offers some critical lenses to uncover the adaptations with which heteronormativity is perpetuated), music affect theory (the notion that sound and music are affective forces that have pre-subjective effects on people) and the social production of space (space not as a physical void waiting to be filled but as the product of relations between social entities).Ultimately, this dissertation posits that analyzing the interrelationality between gender and sexuality and music and sound offers different insights into how systems of oppression are perpetuated and how they can be challenged
Michael Rodriguez interviews author Tom Springer
No full textAuthor Tom Springer is interviewed about his writing career and his newest book "Looking for hickories". Springer talks about his career following after earning an Environmental Journalism degree from Michigan State University. He calls his genre "creative non-fiction" and explains how he weaves his memories into his books about life in rural and wild Michigan. Part of the Michigan State University Libraries' Michigan Writers Series. Springer is interviewed by Librarian Michael Rodriguez
Michael Rodriguez interviews author Gary Gildner
No full textAuthor Gary Gildner explains why he left his tenured teaching position to move to Idaho to became a full-time writer of poetry. Gildner talks about donating his personal papers to Michigan State University Libraries' Special Collections, his writing style and how he approaches writing. Gildner is interviewed by MSU Librarian Michael Rodriguez for the MSU Libraries' Michigan Writer Series. Held at the MSU Main Library
Sounding the dead in Cambodia: cultivating ethics, generating wellbeing, and living with history through music and sound
No full textThis dissertation rethinks the ethics of history and trauma in post-genocide Cambodia by examining how Cambodians use a broad repertoire of sounded practices to form relations of mutual care with ancestors, dead teachers, deities, and other predecessors. At its root, the dissertation is the study of an ethical-religious-aesthetic system by which Cambodians recall predecessors’ legacies, care for the dead, and engage ancestors and deities as supportive co-presences. Traditional and popular musics, Buddhist chants and incantations, whispers, and the non-acoustic practice of “speaking in the heart” (niyāy knung citt) are among the primary sounded practices that Cambodians use to engage the dead. Parts One and Two detail those sounded practices and their social implications. I discuss how previous approaches have misinterpreted the nature and capacities of Cambodian music and other ritualized sounds through historicist, colonialist, and secular epistemologies, which cast those sounds as “culture” or “performance” and ignore their capacities as modes of ethics and exchange with the dead. Instead, by rethinking those sounded practices as Cambodian-Buddhist ethics and exchange, I examine how Cambodians fulfill an obligation to care for the ancestors who have supported themselves. I suggest fulfilling that obligation generates personal wellbeing and provides a new model for what living with history can sound like and feel like. Taken together, in Parts One and Two, I detail the non-linear temporalities, types of personhood, ethics, exchange with the dead, and the intergenerational mode of living with history that Cambodians bring into being through music and sound.
Part Three zooms further out to discuss how sounded relations with the dead have consequences for national and international politics, which leads to larger critiques of the Cambodian government’s politicization of Khmer Rouge remembrance and international humanitarian efforts that attempt to help Cambodians heal from trauma. Since at least the mid-1990s, a plurality of international activists, scholars, volunteers, and development workers have concluded that Cambodians perpetuate a silence about the Khmer Rouge era that furthers their traumatization. Most observers suggest that Cambodians need to provide public testimony about that violent past in order to heal. This dissertation contests those conclusions, following work in anthropology and trauma studies that problematizes the universalization of the Western psychotherapeutic notion of biomedical trauma and its treatments. I suggest that those calls for a testimonial voice presuppose historicist modes of remembrance and knowledge production that naturalize liberal Western models of personhood, citizenship, justice, wellness, and political agency. To move away from those models, I argue that Cambodian sounded and ritual practices generate what I term “modes of being historical” and “ways of living with history” that are intimate, familial, intergenerational, engage national pasts, and can be a mode of political action. Those “modes of being historical” include but are not limited to telling stories of others’ struggles and deaths. I illustrate how Cambodians have long used a multitude of sounded practices to engage the past, grapple with life’s difficulties, and care for themselves and their ancestors.
This dissertation posits that sound studies and ethnomusicology can further the emerging scholarly shifts toward the culturally specific ways people cope with difficult pasts. I propose a new approach to post-violence ethics and history by arguing for the decolonizing possibilities of emphasizing the modes of being historical, ethical relations of mutual care, and ontological entanglements with the dead that Cambodians generate through music and sound
- …
