Soojin Kim
Soojin is interested in westernization, globalization, and diaspora in music cutures and how it effects on identity construction. Her major research focuses on p'ungmul, Korean purcussion band, in the U.S. P'ungmul performance by Korean Americans shows multi- layered identity issues. Korean American p'ungmul performers maintain intimate relations with their motherland while at the same time sharing in the current innovative and yet global aesthetics of performance. Her research concerns partly about identify formation, and in part about a dialectic of performance practice and cultural identity.
Kristen L. Holland
EEG Study on Cognitive Processing of Music and Speech Sounds
Studies on the influence of specific language and music on cognitive processing (Tsunoda 1985; Kikuchi 1983, 1985) suggest that the hemispheric lateralization for verbal sounds, non-verbal sounds, and music are different in native Japanese speakers and non-native Japanese speakers. These differences in lateralization are thought to be due to a pre-cortical switching mechanism that directs harmonic sounds (such as the sound of Western musical instruments) to the right hemisphere and inharmonic sounds (such as verbal sounds and the sounds of Japanese musical instruments) to the left hemisphere. The switching pattern is influenced by the verbal environment of the subject, the mother tongue of the subject being foremost among these influences. Tsunoda and Kikuchi have shown that subjects for whom Japanese is the first language show different lateralization patterns from those for whom English and other Western languages is the first language.
The present study aims to re-examine certain aspects of Kikuchi's 1983 EEG experiment on brain lateralization and to explore further the respective influences of native language and second language on hemispheric specialization for musical sounds. Specifically, the study is designed to identify and then compare brain activation patterns of native Japanese speakers and native English speakers (see Davies, 2003 for the concept of native speakers) for processing of various harmonic and inharmonic sounds, including (a) Western musical instruments, b) Japanese musical instruments, c) verbal sounds (vowels, consonants), d) pure tones, and e) white noise.
Hans Utter
Nicholas Poss
Hmong-Laotian immigrants to the United States brought with them a fascinating musical tradition in which almost all instrumental music transmits verbal content. Music, in fact, is another way of speaking. Of all the instrumental forms, it is flute music that remains most poorly understood. In a culture that values humility and respect, the flute was used by boys and girls to convey messages of love and desire requiring emotional distance. In America, this context for courtship has been replaced by internet chat rooms and text messaging, but elders preserve the remembered tradition of speaking through flutes. His research investigates the process of encoding and decoding verbal content in traditional Hmong flute music as well as its current place in the practice of Hmong music.
http://www.poss.ws/ A website about the study of Hmong music
Beth Szczepanski
Comparative study of musical instruments appearing in Mahayana Buddhist art, particularly Pure Land sculptures and paintings, from various regions in Asia.
While the earliest examples of such art appear in northern India in the first century BCE and in Gandhara in the first and second centuries CE, Pure Land art reached a high level of complexity in China in the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Chinese paintings of Buddhist paradises are based primarily on descriptions of the Buddha Amitabha's Sukhavati paradise in the Sutra on the Visualization of the Buddha of Infinite Light, translated into Chinese from Sanskrit in the second century CE. Many examples of Chinese Pure Land art depict instrumental musicians arranged into ensembles, usually sitting in front of a central Buddha or Bodhisattva. Other musical instruments are played by supernatural beings, such as the half-man, half-bird Kimnara, or appear flying through the air above the scene without a player; such instruments are described in the sutra as means of proclaiming the dharma. The appearance of musical instruments in Buddhist art relates only to the descriptions of paradises in the sutra, since the use of purely instrumental music inside Chinese Buddhist temples is in most cases not allowed. Paintings based more or less on the Chinese model appear in Korea and Japan from the twelfth century to the present, and in Tibet from the sixteenth century to the present.
Similarities and differences in instrumentation andensemble arrangement among these paintings reveal much about the extent of the influence of foreign musical instruments and the importance of native instruments in these iconographic traditions, and doubtless speak as well about the actual practice of instrumental music in these regions, if not in actual Buddhist ritual practice, than at least in the secular realm.
PhD Project
For her PhD project, Beth is going to undertake field research regarding instrumental music practices at Wutaishan, an area in China’s Shanxi Province considered holy to Buddhists. In particular, she is interested in the ensemble called sheng guan, consisting of sheng (mouth organ), guanzi (double-reed pipe), dizi (transverse flute), and a variety of percussion instruments that is traditionally used in a variety of Buddhist ceremonies. Her primarily research goal will be to determine how sheng guan music at Wutaishan has adapted to maintain its relevance in the rapidly changing environment of Chinese Buddhist practice.
Ken Archer
In his Masters Thesis, "Twentieth Practice In the Music of Ulysses Kay", Ken examined three of Kay’s works and showed how they incorporated, in different ways and to varying degrees, 20th-Century Western art music traditions. In that analysis he demonstrated, drawing primarily on core concepts in traditional musicology, Kay’s twelve-tone, serial, rhythmic, metrical and other ieads that can be clearly posited among the “canons” of twentieth-century music composition. Except for a brief reference to jazz influence, Ken did not consider Kay’s heritage as an African American. In another paper it was his aim to reexamine Kay’s “First Nocturne” for piano in the context of his African American heritage. Ken drew on Olly Wilson's assertion that the African American composer “fits the bill” of W.E. Du Bois’ concept of "double consciousness" as it relates to the dual European (American) and African identities that permeate the African American reality, and aimed to contribute to the discourse on the development of critical criteria for the analysis of black music; a discourse initiated by Samuel Floyd Jr. in his book "The Power of Black Music" and developed in the article "Ring Shout! Literary studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry"(and others). In the process Ken aimed to reveal "The First Nocturne" as a hybrid, an embodiment of “double/multiple consciousness” that integrates the western art and African American traditions.
The term ‘jab molasie” is derived from the traditional carnival character of the same name and literally means “molasses devil”. It has been customary for this ‘mas’ to be portrayed in the j’ouvert celebrations that take in the morning of Carnival Monday in Trinidad and Tobago. It has also been associated with its traditional musical accompaniment. Scholars such as Joycelyne Guilbault (2005) and Gordon Rohlehr (1998) have observed that the rhythms of ‘jab molassie’ have been infused into the soca songs of carnival. Others, for instance Selwyn Ahyoung (1981) and Shannon Dudley (1996), have focused on the influence of East Indian derived music, North American ‘soul’, ‘rap’ and ‘hiphop’, and Jamaican ‘reggae’ and ‘dud’ – Ken proposes to investigate the prominence and significance of the jab molassie beat in the soca music of the last twenty-five years. This paper looks at some perspectives in cultural theory – elements of Marxist critical theory and semiotics - that may be of significance to such an investigation.