Sarah Politz
December 6, 2022
Music Building 101
5:10 PM
The recent emergence of the subfield of ecomusicology has raised provocative questions about theory and method in music studies, as well as relationships between sound, humans, and the environment. This presentation responds to these questions through an examination of two albums by the Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke. This analysis explores connections between the albums and concepts of sacred sound and interdependence in the Nichiren Buddhist practice that Loueke has adopted, and in vodun ancestral practices in Benin. I propose a concept of relational listening, building on Edouard Glissant’s La Relation and Steven Feld’s acoustemology, which embraces humans’ interdependence with the environment while respecting the radical alterity of other beings, including human, non-human, and more-than-human. Loueke’s music suggests that this relational listening necessarily leads to relational sounding: interactive improvisation.
This event is free and open to the public.
About the Speaker
Sarah Politz is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the University of Florida School of Music. Her research and teaching focus on creative practice in African and Afro-diasporic music, particularly in the context of popular music and new African diasporas in Europe and North America. Her publications have explored a wide range of topics, from phenomenology, semiotics, and history in music analysis, to culturally grounded definitions of musical genre and style, the aesthetics of jazz, and Afro-modernism. She is currently working on a book project about sound, spirituality, and migration in the lives of brass band and jazz musicians from Republic of Benin, West Africa, where she has been conducting fieldwork since 2007.
“Ecomusicology and Relational Listening in the Music of Lionel Loueke of Benin” is sponsored by Imagining Climate Change and the University of Florida School of Music, College of the Arts.