The Evolution of Dance: How and when do new genres emerge in electronic dance music?

Colloquium Musicology
Alex van Venrooij, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Thursday 17 October 2019 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

In the thirty years since house music first emerged from the club scene of Chicago, this cultural form has transformed from a local subculture into a global field and in the process spawned a large number of new subgenres. How do these new subgenres develop? What is the process by which they emerge and are formed? And does the emergence of new genres perhaps show some underlying pattern? In this presentation, I will present some key findings from my research on the evolution of the electronic dance music field and provide a sociological analysis of the process of genre emergence.

Alex van Venrooij is assistant professor in cultural sociology at the department of sociology at the University of Amsterdam. His work has focused on the emergence, dynamics and effects of classification systems, such as genre categories, in cultural fields.

Steelband music and decolonial love

Colloquium Musicology
Charissa Granger, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Thursday 3 October 2019 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Discarded 55-gallon oil barrels were used for music-making in 1930s colonial Trinidad and Tobago – a period deeply shaped by discrimination of these performers. Often standing at the beginning of personal and political consciousness, music empowered participants, giving a sense of self-regard and -respect by mixing and transforming materials and musical structures, forming symphonic steelorchestras.

Many music-making practices throughout the Caribbean are tightly connected to discourses of resistance. Such attempts to understand music always depart from a conception of music in response to hegemony, marginalization, and colonial oppression. In this colloquium, Charissa Granger wants to delink from exclusively understanding music as resistance and to create alternatives that reflect a border practice (Mignolo & Tlostanova 2006) that embraces a love-ethic (hooks 2000; 2001) that is not solely in response to the colonial matrix of power, but moves beyond it through performance and music. She seeks to analyze musical performance as the epistemology of the exteriority. Such an exploration engages with self-knowledge, self-determination, self-critique and self-possession and how this takes place in the communion generated by performing together. Granger examines steelpan music and performance as a decolonial epistemology, asking:

What would an understanding of coloniality, decoloniality and border thinking contribute to understanding steelband music and performance? How can we take into account non-textual forms of knowledge, generated by marginalized people, in the distribution of intellectual and political labor?

Considering steelband as a decolonial practice and thereby examining the epistemology of the exterior necessarily entails understanding the creation of strategies in music not to simply respond to the colonial matrix of power, but to disengage from it, particularly through recomposing/arranging music.

Charissa Granger is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoc LEaDing Fellow at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. Charissa’s research foci are on how Caribbean and Afro-diaspora music-making practices generate knowledge, concentrating on music’s relationship to postcolonial and decolonial experiences.

Ethnomusicology and arts-based research: a case study by Horacio Curti

Colloquium Musicology
Horacio Curti, Catalonia College of Music in Barcelona


Thursday 12 September 2019 15:30-17:00 uur 
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

This presentation is centered on a currently ongoing research that combines ethnomusicology and arts-based research. It originates from the author’s own experience as professional shakuhachi player educated in Japan. The methodology is based on literature review of sources related to diverse Japanese Arts, fieldwork processes centered on interviews and a trans-disciplinary arts-based research process.

The findings of the ethnomusicological research that are going to be presented provide theoretical depth to the re-contextualized, practice-based research. These will include issues related to the characteristics of sound that are cultivated and valued inside the Japanese hōgaku,邦楽, identifying a series of significant concepts that include: ma, neiro, sawarior yūgen among many others. 

Beyond these significant elements the concept of ‘obstacle’ is proposed as a construct that could help to develop an understanding of sound production processes favored and at the same time the label of ‘un-pure’ is proposed to describe the general characteristics of it.

Finally, from the framework of arts-based research, the artistic creation processes in progress and their problematics will be discussed.