Mosaics Versus Collages in the Modern Taste for Musical Roots
A lecture by Professor Elizabeth Travassos, from the Universidade de Rio de Janeiro(UNIRIO), Brazil.
Friday, February 26, 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Schoenberg Music Building
Room B544
Los Angeles, CA 90095
The transnational circulation of music became a major topic in Ethnomusicology in the 1980s. The awareness of the legal and ethical dimensions of dealing with musicians from small-scale societies and dominated communities has grown considerably since then. Two questions, however, seem hard to answer: is there anything actually new in the way sounds are used to create, negotiate and blur borders between people? Are new formal procedures employed by musicians to show and, alternatively, to hide they are borrowing sounds from others? Professor Travassos will address these two questions through the analysis of some instances of musical circulation involving Brazilian music. Examples from three contexts will be presented: reactions to Milhaud’s Le boeuf sur le toit (1920s), the Brazilian protest song (1960s) and the contemporary “folk revival” (1990s).
Professor Elizabeth Travassos is the author of two books; Modernismo e música Brasileira [Modernism and Brazilian Music] (Jorge Zahar 1999) and Os mandarins milagrosos: arte e etnografia em Mário de Andrade e Béla Bartók [The Miraculous Mandarins: Art and Ethnography in Mário de Andrade and Béla Bartók] (Jorge Zahar 1997), many articles, and has several edited volumes.
Cost: Free and open to the public
Download File: mosaicsvscollages.pdf
Sponsor(s): Latin American Institute, Center for Brazilian Studies