Mini-Hartley Residency with Professor Nina Eidsheim (UCLA) Seminar

This public online event will take place on Microsoft Teams. If you are not a staff or student at University of Southampton and would like to attend, please contact Hettie Malcomson at h.malcomson@soton.ac.uk

Event details

4–5pm - talk: "The Body as Music’s Terroir"

If music and sound are “thick events” that necessarily exceed our ability to grasp them fully, what resources do we have to make (at least) partial sense of them? Metaphorical language works as one of these resources, not only shaping the ways in which we perceive and understand music, but also one another and the world. 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 play with a metaphor that has not been much used related to music. 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.