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More award-winning music titles from Wesleyan!

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We are pleased to announce that Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form, by Katherine In-Young Lee, is the recipient of The Béla Bartók Award for Outstanding Ethnomusicology from ASCAP.

From the judging committee citation:

“Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form by Katherine In-Young Lee, published by Wesleyan University Press, received The Béla Bartók Award for Outstanding Ethnomusicology. The book explores how a percussion genre from South Korea (samul nori) became a global music genre. In it, Lee contends that rhythm-based forms serve as a critical site for cross-cultural musical encounters.”

About the book:

The South Korean percussion genre, samul nori, is a world phenomenon whose powerful rhythmic form is its key to its international popularity and mobility. Similar to other music genres that have become truly global—hip-hop, Indonesian gamelan, Japanese taiko—samul nori’s rhythmic forms are experienced on a somatic level, making the movement between cultures easier. Based on both ethnographic research and close formal analysis, author Katherine In-Young Lee focuses on the kinetic experience of samul nori, drawing on the concept of dynamism to explain how qualities of movement and energy shifts in its rhythmic form appeals to audiences and practitioners worldwide. Lee explores the historical, philosophical, and pedagogical dimensions of the percussive form while breaking with traditional approaches to the study of world music that privilege political, economic, institutional, or ideological analytical frameworks. Lee argues that because samul nori is experienced on a somatic level, the form easily moves beyond national boundaries and provides sites for cross-cultural interaction. Her work provides a study of how a national cultural form goes transnational, based on ethnographic interviews with samul nori ensembles in South Korea, the United States, Switzerland, Mexico, and Japan

Katherine In-Young Lee is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA and her work has appeared in Journal of Korean Studies, Ethnomusicology, and Journal of Korean Traditional Performing Arts.

Also of interest:

Citizen Azmari: Making Ethiopian Music in Tel Aviv, by Ilana Webster-Kogen, published by the Wesleyan University Press, received the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2019 Publication Prize given by the Special Interest Group of Jewish Music. The books sheds light on Ethiopian-Israeli music, and in it, Webster-Kogen challenges notions of Jewishness, of Israeli-ness, and of global blackness, showing how Ethiopian-Israelis move within all of these groups and create complex webs of belonging through musical performance.

“Deeply skilled and forcefully honed…” Kerri Webster’s The Trailhead

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The following is an excerpt from the review “Forging a Place: Love, Violence, and Identity in Four New Poetry Collections,” by Robert Peake, in Poetry Salzburg Review, no. 34. Summer 2019.

The Trailhead by Kerrie Webster will be available in paperback in March 2020. 

Kerri Webster’s accomplished The Trailhead takes readers on a journey through landscapes of desire, isolation, and fear. In the eponymous novella by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway “always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.” So too is it danger-ous to inhabit the world Webster portrays.

In these poems violence is gendered, sexual, and ubiquitous. Its pervasiveness is signaled by casual but constant reference. “Hill Walk” (4) begins, “Come let us poison all the honeybees” and in “The Night Grove” (10) “The torturer wants to know / how one minute blood, one minute / snow. She wants the windows / closed. The draft. Light breaks / across his back.”

Here the typical association of torturer as male is pulled abruptly from under foot. The poem continues to recognise and subvert the gendered nature of sexual violence, ascribing traits to “the torturer” of that more familiar incarnation of pain-inflicting female: the dominatrix. Once again couched in casualness, “She says, some boys on the news shot a swan.” (11) This sparks a philosophie dans le boudoir, examining the nature of the human impulse to harm as well as comfort. In an artful collision of maternal and sadistic instinct, “She says, I want to hold those boys / close, and then / I want to shatter their finger bones.”

The appearance of “Officer Cocksure” (“Conversion Narrative”, 23-28) offers another gendered narrative of violence, sexuality, and authority. The name says it all. In “Toward an Ethical Religiosity” the boys who shot the swan recur, and again the overt violence is covered over with a kind of mythical turning of the tables, as it concludes, “Over lunch we discussed the loneliness / of men. I ate / the killed animal / among the leaves.”

The work succeeds through a mix of razor-sharp enjambment – reminis-cent of a poet like Louise Glück – and the pairing of startling imagery and con-fident, declarative philosophical state-ment. Regarding the danger and painful-ness inherent in living, Webster plunges us in media res into a birth scene: “I re-member a girl screaming on the clinic floor – water feature out front aping beauty – her shrieks shattering the follicles of my right ear – the koi gaping – I wanted to kneel beside her on the stained carpet and say Yes. Exactly. All of us.” (“Conversion Narrative”, 23)

In “Skins” (45-47) the image of the “blue-tinged” wings of the recurrent dead swan are compared to how “The trees slough off blue skins.” (45) Couched between these two images the speaker declares, “When people call a woman / ‘shy’ they generally mean / ‘afraid’, translating quiet / to a comfortable thing.” (45) So the declared language of gender and implied violence recurs in checkerboard with deftly-honed imagery, creating a pattern. In “One Eye Dilated” (42-43), in what could stand for a poet’s motto, she follows a series of confessions that include worrying that “the condom got lost inside me or something blotted out the sun” [156] with the revelation: “It has taken me forever to be obedient to the beautiful, rather than the easy, things.” (43)

Webster packs the same effective techniques into the territory of sensuality and smarts. In the character of “Spinster” (“The Spinster Project”, 32-35) the reimagined bluestocking weaves threads of a life at once deeply sensual and mundane: “Spinster wants to literalize your desire inside her mouth.” and “Spinster kills what botanists say even a monkey could water.” (34) In “Of Deborah” (29-30), her Cassandra stand-in grapples with terrible knowledge unacknowledged, drawing out a pristine metaphor for the highly-educated woman in a world rife with mansplaining. Yet for all her power, in the end she is reduced to small acts and parlour tricks as she “reaches out to catch the bowl of plums / before it begins falling.” (30) Deeply skilled and forcefully honed, The Trailhead offers to take us deep into the back country of the human psyche, continuously pointing out the beautiful-but-uneasy territory, line by staggering line.

Each of these four collections – whether sparkling debuts or the capstone of an accomplished career – hammer out a place for them-selves and their author’s concerns amidst the complexities of the past, the sensuality of the present, and the anxiety of a self deeply aware of its connection to a brutal, beautiful world.

ROBERT PEAKE is a British-American poet living near London. He studied poetry at U.C. Berkeley and in the MFA in Writing program at Pacific University, Oregon. His poems appeared in Iota, Magma, North American Review, Poetry International, and Rattle. Poetry Salzburg published his pamphlet The Silence Teacher in 2013. He has published two full-length collections, The Knowledge (2015) and Cyclone (2018, both Nine Arches).  

KERRI WEBSTER is the author of the poetry collections We Do Not Eat Our Heats Alone (University of Georgia Press, 2015) and Grand & Arsenal (University of Iowa Press, 2012), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize.

 

More about Poetry Salzburg Review

 

 

 

Award-winning music titles from Wesleyan!

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We are pleased to announce that Citizen Azmari: Making Ethiopian Music in Tel Aviv, by Ilana Webster-Kogen is the recipient of Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2019 Publication Prize given by the Special Interest Group of Jewish Music.

From the judging committee citation:
“Citizen Azmari shines new light on a Jewish people who exist at many margins: the margins of Israeli society, the margins of Ethiopian society, and, frankly, the margins of many people’s awareness of the Jewish world. Webster-Kogen challenges notions of Jewishness, of Israeli-ness, and of global blackness, showing how Ethiopian-Israelis move within all of these groups and create complex webs of belonging through musical performance.  In addition to its contents, the committee also appreciated the writing. Simply put, we all found it highly readable, and in fact enjoyable to read.”

About the book:
In the thirty years since their immigration from Ethiopia to the State of Israel, Ethiopian-Israelis have put music at the center of communal and public life, using it alternatingly as a mechanism of protest and as appeal for integration. Ethiopian music develops in quiet corners of urban Israel as the most prominent advocate for equality, and the Israeli-born generation is creating new musical styles that negotiate the terms of blackness outside of Africa. For the first time, this book examines in detail those new genres of Ethiopian-Israeli music, including Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop, Ethio-soul performed across Europe, and eskesta dance projects at the center of national festivals. This book argues that in a climate where Ethiopian-Israelis fight for recognition of their contribution to society, musical style often takes the place of political speech, and musicians take on outsize roles as cultural critics. From their perch in Tel Aviv, Ethiopian-Israeli musicians use musical style to critique a social hierarchy that affects life for everyone in Israel/Palestine.

Ilana Webster-Kogen is the Joe Loss Lecturer (assistant professor) in the department of music at SOAS, University of London. She received her PhD in ethnomusicology there in 2011. Her work has appeared in African and Black Diaspora, Ethnomusicology Forum, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies.

Also of interest:

Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form by Katherine In-Young Lee, published by Wesleyan University Press, received The Béla Bartók Award for Outstanding Ethnomusicology from ASCAP. The book explores how a percussion genre from South Korea (samul nori) became a global music genre. In it, Lee contends that rhythm-based forms serve as a critical site for cross-cultural musical encounters.

Celebrating Aboriginal Veterans Day

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Today is Canadian Aboriginal Veterans Day. As is true of the First Nations people of Canada, Native Americans enlist in the United States military at a higher rate than their white counterparts. At least 12,000 Native Americans enlisted to fight in WWI, at at time when they did not qualify for United States citizenship.

Novelist Gerald Vizenor’s trilogy of novels from Wesleyan University Press follow the story of the Beaulieu brothers, Basile and Aloysius. In Blue Ravens they come of age and leave the White Earth Reservation to fight on European battlefields during WWI. Native Tributes follows the brothers as they participate in the Bonus Army March on Washington DC. In his forthcoming novel, Satie on the Seine, Vizenor brings the brothers back to Europe. They seek lives as artists in Paris—only to witness the Nazi occupation of the city.

 

Blue Ravens

Native Tributes

Surprise by Rick Bartow (Wiyot, 1946–2016). Cover art for Satie on the Seine.

Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade
A Historical Novel by Gerald Vizenor
Publication Date:  September 8, 2020
Trade Paper, $17.95 / 978-0-8195-7934-8; Ebook, $14.99 / 978-0-8195-7935-5

Basile Hudon Beaulieu wrote fifty letters to the heirs of the fur trade between October 1932 and January 1945. The messages were circulated on the White Earth Reservation. At the end of the war the letters were translated as native chronicles in a six volume roman fleuve, narrative sequence, published by Nathan Crémieux at the Galerie Ghost Dance in Paris, France.

The letters convey the mercy of liberté, the torment and solidarity of Le Front Populaire, the Popular Front, an alliance of political leftists, and the contest of ethos and governance in the French Third Republic. Basile relates the massacres of Native Americans, and the misery of federal policies on reservations to the savage strategies of royalists, fascists, communists, and antisemites during the eight years before war was declared against Germany, and to the end of the Nazi Occupation of Paris.

The letters to the heirs of the fur trade during the war reveal the cruelty and deprivations of the Nazi Occupation, the fearsome Prefécture de Police, persecution of Jews, and the eternal shame of the Vélodrome d’Hiver Roundup. Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the Vichy Regime, and betrayal of résistance networks are condemned, and at the same time the littérature engagée of Romain Rolland and liberation of the French Third Republic are celebrated in the last emotive letters.

About the author
Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa) is a novelist, essayist, and interdisciplinary scholar of Native American culture and literature. He is professor emeritus of American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity (Nebraska, 2019), and three recent novels, Chair of Tears (Nebraska), Blue Ravens (Wesleyan), and Native Tributes (Wesleyan).

 

Announcing “Wild Music”

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“Beautifully written, this vital and sensitive ethnography documents the social, affective, and discursive energies that flow within contemporary Ukrainian music. Sonevytsky highlights the possibilities for imaginative agency that “wild musics” provide, without ignoring the very real constraints that hem in the Ukrainian subjects whose complex personhood is the real focus of this remarkable book.”
­—J. Martin Daughtry, author of Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq

What are the uses of musical exoticism? In Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine, Maria Sonevytsky tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of “wildness” as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture. As the rise of global populism forces us to confront the category of state sovereignty anew, Sonevytsky proposes innovative paradigms for thinking through the creative practices that constitute sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism.

MARIA SONEVYTSKY is an assistant professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley. She has performed widely, with several bands including The Debutante Hour, Anti-Social Music, and Zozulka, and produced an album called The Chornobyl Songs Project on Smithsonian Folkways in 2015 with Ensemble Hilka. She has also taught Ukrainian village songs, accordion, and more.

Announcing “Forever Seeing New Beauties”

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book cover

“From a forgotten box of letters Eve Kahn meticulously stitches together the life, travels, work, opinions, humor and travails of Mary Rogers Williams. Kahn’s zealous detective work begs the question, how many other women, erased to history, await discovery?” — Marcia Ely, Executive Vice President, Brooklyn Historical Society

“Eve Kahn evocatively reconstructs Impressionist painter Mary Rogers Williams’ life in a jaunty style fitting her upbeat, globe-trekking, paintbrush-wielding subject. A rare woman’s perspective on 19th century cosmopolitan life, it’s a must-read.”―Katherine Manthorne, art historian, CUNY Graduate Center

Revolutionary artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857−1907), a baker’s daughter from Hartford, Connecticut, biked and hiked from the Arctic Circle to Naples, exhibited from Paris to Indianapolis, trained at the Art Students League, chafed against art world rules that favored men, wrote thousands of pages about her travels and work, taught at Smith College for nearly two decades, but sadly ended up almost totally obscure. In 2012, her confessional letters and hundreds of her paintings and sketches turned up in storage at a Connecticut family’s home.


A Girl in Red, undated (pre-1901) oil on panel, 21 x 14 in. A work of that title was shown in Mary’s posthumous exhibitions. WFC (photo: Ted Hendrickson). 

c/o "Forever Seeing New Beauties"
Self Examination, undated sketch of a decapitated doll impassively gazing at its body parts. WFC.

Her first biography, Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857–1907, reveals her as funny, self-deprecating, caustically critical of mainstream art, and observant of everything from soldiers’ epaulettes to colorful produce layered on delivery trucks. She was determined to paint portraits and landscapes in her distinctive style. The book reproduces her unpublished artworks that capture pensive gowned women, Norwegian slopes reflected in icy waters, saw-tooth rooflines on French chateaus, and incense hazes in Italian chapels, and it offers a vivid portrayal of an adventurer, defying her era’s expectations on a tight budget.

EVE M. KAHN is an independent scholar specializing in art and architectural history, design and preservation, and was weekly Antiques columnist at the New York Times, 2008−2016. She contributes regularly to the Times, The Magazine Antiques, Apollo, and Atlas Obscura.

“a breastplate against weapons of enemies …”

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Atopia cover

“A friend told me poets are maladjusted souls. Whatever! We have Sandra Simonds on our side, and this new book Atopia is something to give ourselves some proper maladjustments! Here is a poet I can easily imagine from the audience of Plato’s speeches about how great slavery is for the Republic, telling the old man how lousy his governing ideas are, having Plato threaten to exile her from the city limits. This book rules my bookshelf! This book is a breastplate against weapons of enemies of the beautiful truth of this breathtaking world!”

—CA Conrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

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Atopia grapples with the political climate of the United States manifested through our everyday lives. Sandra Simonds charts the formations and deformations of the social and political through the observations of the poem’s speakers, interspersed with the language of social media, news reports, political speech, and the dialogue of friends, children, strangers, and politicians. The Los Angeles Review of Books characterized Simonds’s work as “robust, energetic, fanciful, even baroque” and “a necessary counterforce to the structures of gender, power, and labor that impinge upon contemporary life.” These poems reflect on what it means to be human, what it means to build communities within a political structure it also opposes. The book pays particular attention to how the emergence of twenty-first century fascism stresses female-identified bodies.

SANDRA SIMONDS is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Orlando (Wave Books). Her poems have been included in the Best American Poetry 2015 and 2014 and have appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an associate professor of English and humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.

 

[from the book……]

Tallahassee. Tallahassee. Tallahassee.
Your mist today is incredible
as it settles on this rose garden!
When the largest rose shook off its dew
and looked at me like a cartoon, I smiled back
and promised not to break his neck.
And here we are together again, walking in a park
that honors dead children. A tree planted for each child
on such a mild day in December. And how the dead
children stream through me, scrolls of them:

Lily! Rose! Bobby!

Kierkegaard says anyone who follows through
on an idea becomes unpopular. And also
that a person needs a system, otherwise you
become mere personality. He must not have
known very many poets, so prone to tyrannical
shifts in mood. Change in the weather is equal to
don’t let me go crazy. In the car on the way
to school Charlotte says, “I like to be gentle
with nature because I like nature.”

But my mind wouldn’t rest, system-less,
as I drive through dread:

Lily! Rose! Bobby!

You’re dead, you’re dead.

Hari Krishnan’s “Celluloid Classicism”

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In his book Celluloid Classicism, Hari Krishnan focuses on the representation of Bharatanatyam dance in Tamil Cinema between the late 1920s and 1950s. Krishnan is the first scholar to explore this particular relationship between film and dance in depth.

At Wesleyan University’s 43rd Annual Navaratri Festival on October 12th, Krishnan moderated a Q&A with Dr. Yashoda Thakore, who during her presentation commented on the influence of cinema on pieces in her performance. Dr. Thakore, a highly accomplished Kuchipudi and Devadasi Nrityam artiste, presented an excerpt of Kuchipudi dance, a style explored in Krishnan’s book.

Yashoda Thakore 34

Photo by Wesleyan University Center for the Arts

Kuchipudi is one of eleven major Indian classical dances. Originating in the town of Kuchipudi, it has roots in religious art and the Hindu Sanskrit text of Natya Shastra. The style is known as a “drama-dance,” the drama expressed through different hand gestures and facial expressions. Krishnan’s book presents the various influences on Kuchipudi dance throughout its development, drawing on research that “examines how instantiations of dance in the cinema contributed to the formation of a regional or nationalized art form of Kuchipudi.” Telugu cinema in particular can be traced throughout Kuchipudi’s development. Thakore referenced the accompaniment of gongs in her Kuchipudi excerpt as having ties to representations in South Indian film.

 

Yashoda Thakore 69 Image result for dr yashoda thakore wesleyan

Photos by Wesleyan University Center for the Arts

Krishnan will present his work at the Annual Conference of South Asia at the University of Wisconsin in this weekend. His presentation will draw on research from Celluloid Classicism, focusing on the complex relationship that renowned South Indian dancer Rukmini Arundale had with Tamil Cinema.

Celluloid Classicisma: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam is out this month, from Wesleyan University Press. Join us to celebrate with Dr. Krishnan at RJ Julia Bookstore, located at 413 Main Street in Middletown, Connecticut, on December 3rd at 7 PM.

Announcing “Drawing the Surface of Dance”

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“Choreography—especially experimental choreography—is nearly impossible to describe before it happens or to capture once it’s over.  In this book, through drawings and charts and personalized text, Annie-B Parson somehow manages to do both. ” —David Lang, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion

Soloing on the page, choreographer Annie-B Parson rethinks choreography as dance on paper. Parson draws her dances into new graphic structures calling attention to the visual facts of the materiality of each dance work she has made. These drawings serve as both maps of her pieces in the aftermath of performance, and a consideration of the elements of dance itself. Within the duality of form and content, this book explores the meanings that form itself holds, and Parson’s visual maps of choreographic ideas inspire new thinking around the shared elements underneath all art making.

Check out Annie-B’s work at NYU’s Skirball Center on November 8 & 9! Meet Annie-B after the show and get your book signed! 

Get tickets to David Byrne’s American Utopia, choreographed by Annie-B Parson.

ANNIE-B PARSON is a choreographer and artistic director of Big Dance Theater. Parson has also made choreography for rock shows, marching bands, symphonies, movies, museums, objects, augmented reality, and people: David Byrne, David Bowie, St. Vincent, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Laurie Anderson, Nico Muhly, Jonathan Demme, and the Martha Graham Dance Co.

Announcing “Frayed Light”

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“Yonatan Berg’s poetry is fervent and relentless in its language, each poem moving forward in a series of proclamations that are as absolute as they are heartbreaking, ‘We told ourselves it would pass./We put everything in place, near/the couches, the armchairs. On the balcony, flowers/spiraled towards the sun.’ In the midst of this book’s almost unbearable traumas, its attention to that which is rapturous and romantic about the natural world asks us to rethink how our wars kill us and our ability to see the beauty of the planet on which we live. These are necessary translations. And these translations by Joanna Chen bring to light the fact that poetry travels beyond language. This is a beautiful book.” —Jericho Brown, author of The New Testament

This poetic collection is an honest and deeply reflective look at life overshadowed by disputed settlements and political upheaval in the Israeli−Palestinian conflict. Frayed Light brings together the best poems from Yonatan Berg’s three published collections in Hebrew, deftly translated by Joanna Chen. His poetry recounts his upbringing on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and service in a combat unit of the Israeli military, which left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He grapples with questions of religion and tradition, nationalism, war, and familial relationships. The book also explores his conceptual relationship with Biblical, historical, and literary characters from the history of civilization, set against a backdrop of the Mediterranean landscape. Berg shares an insider’s perspective on life in Israel today.

Read Yonatan Berg’s thoughtful statement on Israel, Palestine, and BDS here. 

Watch a video of Berg discussing the role of poetry and culture in preventing conflict. Source: Ukraine Today.

YONATAN BERG is a leading Hebrew poet. He is the youngest recipient of the Yehuda Amichai Prize and a number of other national awards. He has published three books of poetry, one memoir, and two novels. His latest book, Far from the Linden Trees, was published in 2018 and received excellent reviews. Yonatan Berg is a bibliotherapist and teaches creative writing in Jerusalem.

JOANNA CHEN is a British-born writer and translator whose work has been published with Poet Lore, Guernica and Narratively, among many others. She writes a column for The Los Angeles Review of Books. Chen’s translations make Hebrew and Arabic texts accessible to an English-speaking audience. As well as Frayed Light, she translated Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books 2016), a collection of poetry by Agi Mishol, and My WIld Garden (Shocken), a work of non-fiction by Meir Shalev, forthcoming in 2020. Her translations have appeared in Poetry International, Asymptote and Consequence, among many others. Read more at www.joannachen.com