Naming, Understanding, and Playing with Metaphors in Music

I am thrilled to be a part of this symposium, look at this lineup!

Check it out, and free registration.

From the original CFP:

“This symposium seeks to promote a conversation that maps the networks of metaphors that structure musical discourse while tracing their repercussions—musicological, social, and political. While we welcome work that builds on the rich body of cognitive, linguistic, and philosophical research, we are especially interested in projects that trace the covert power of naturalized metaphors. We invite personal reflections, ethnographic studies, and disciplinary critiques that focus on metaphor in order to dislodge the fixed, open the closed, and expand the delimited. Finally, through this process, we encourage play with language as well as sensory and conceptual practices. Our ultimate aim is to shift the power balance in terms of who gets to name, whose experiences and practices are recognized, which relationships we have the capacity to note, and what kinds of worlds we can create.”

April 29-30, 2022

UCLA PEER Lab & Durham U. Music Department

Itinerary

April 29 (all times in PST):

9-9:30a: Welcome (Nina Eidsheim & Daniel Walden)

9:30-10:15a: Figure & Sign

V. Kofi Agawu, Moderator

Nicholas Harkness: The Semiotic Hemiola (keynote)

Bethany Battafarano: Metaphor and Metonym in Cross-Cultural Considerations of Voice

Su Yin Mak: “Unhealthy,” “Drunk,” and “Squishy like a Sponge:” Embodied and Cross-Sensory Metaphors in the Discourse of Professional String Quartet Rehearsal

10:30-11:15a: Theorizing Music Theory

Jade Conlee, Moderator

Philip Ewell: Musical Metaphor as a Racialized Structure (keynote)

Tekla Babyak: Amputated Limbs and Breathless Lungs: Ableist Metaphors in A. B. Marx’s Theories of Modality

Siv Lie: Better Sense: Manouche Musicians, Aural Learning, and the Transformation of Racialized Metaphors

11:30a-12:15p: Through Sound & Silence

George Lipsitz, Moderator

Shana L. Redmond: The Sounds of No Knocking (keynote)

Ellen Waterman: Reorienting Audition through Bodily Listening in Place

Charles Eppley: Beyond Objects: Access Artistry & Nonbinary Methods for Sound Description

12:15 – 1:30p: Break (Lunch/Dinner)

1:30-2:15p: Tending Time

Jessica Swanston Baker, Moderator

Dylan Robinson: Details Details (keynote)

Sophie Zehetmayer: Counting Gestures. On Measure and Movement in Rhythm

Jason Robinson: “In the Room Together:” Telematics, Corporeality, and Ambivalence

2:30-3:15p: Pneuma

Diane Oliva, Moderator

J. Martin Daughtry: Airing Out the Vocal Metaphor (keynote)

Michael Davidson: An Interstitial Music: The Aeolian Harp

Mark Kligman: Music as Metaphor in Sacred Jewish Texts

April 30 (all times in PST):

9-9:45a: Casting the Voice

Stephan Pennington, Moderator

Katherine Hambridge: Writing the German Voice (keynote)

Iris Blake: Sympathetic Resonance: Activating More-than-human Affect, Voice, and Embodiment

Richard Beaudoin: Mars, Blemishes, and Indexed Taboos: Recasting Noise Metaphors in Recording Analysis

10-10:45a: Roundtable

“How do you hear Parkinson’s?”: Understanding Chronic Illness Experience through Sonic and Musical Metaphor

Ray Knapp, Moderator

Ross Brillhart

Daniel B. Reed

Deborah Wong, Respondent

11-11:45a: Narratives

Tomie Hahn, Moderator

Dorinne Kondo: Worldmaking: Gender, Race, Place (keynote)

Jann Pasler: Signifying Categories of the Other: Oriental vs. Arabic Music under Colonialism

Michelle Kisliuk: ethnography and its double(s)

11:45a-1p: Break (Lunch/Dinner)

1-1:45p: More-Than-Metaphors

Trevor Reed, Moderator

Jessica Bissett Perea (Dena’ina): More-Than-Metaphors: Toward the Generative Possibilities of Indigenous Languages (keynote)

John Clement Wood: Musical Cannibalism: A Case Study of Heuretic Intersemiology as a (Pr)axis for Crossmodal Dialogue

Erin Johnson-Williams: Musicology is not a Metaphor

2-2:45p: Concep_s

Alexander Rehding, Moderator

Holly Watkins: Turn and Return: The Music of Metaphor (keynote)

William Echard: Taking Metaphor Up a Notch: Two Ways of Being Literal

Jeff Kaiser: Arcana and Metaphor: Value, Poetry, Myth and Ideology

2:45-3:15p: Closing conversation (Nina Eidsheim & Daniel Walden)

This symposium is co-presented by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music (Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion), UCLA Music Library, Davise Fund and co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and the UCLA Chancellor’s Arts Initiative.