ISAM Matters

This spring, the Institute presented the lecture series American Music at the Millennium: Transnational and Transcultural Perspectives. Four speakers explored the relationship between identity and contemporary American music. Guthrie Ramsey of the University of Pennsylvania opened the series by considering how hip hop mediates African American subjectivity in the films Do the Right Thing, Boyz N the Hood, and Love Jones. (A revised version of his paper appears in this issue of the Newsletter.) Continuing the work in her book Listening to Salsa, Frances Aparicio of the University of Michigan illustrated the ways in which women are depicted in the lyrics of salsa and examined the connections between gender and power in Latin popular music. My own lecture, “‘The American Dream’: Miss Saigon and the Politics of Memory,” argued that this musical’s widespread success over its ten-year run allows the United States to discard its uncomfortable history of military intervention by rewriting the tragedy of the Vietnam War into a simplistic cross-cultural love story. In “Gender and Sexuality, Absence and Presence in Acousmatic Space,” Linda Dusman of Clark University explored contemporary electronic compositions by Thomas DeLio and Ruth Anderson in relation to recent theoretical work on gender, sexuality, and performance.

We gratefully acknowledge the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College for underwriting the series, and thank Brooklyn College’s Programs in American Studies and Women's Studies, and its Departments of Africana Studies, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, and Film for their enthusiasm and support.

Ray Allen and I are pleased to announce ISAM’s next conference, scheduled for 9-10 March 2001. Local Music/Global Connections: New York City at the Millennium will focus on ethnic music cultures of New York City. The conference will preview the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife, an annual celebration on the Washington, D.C. Mall that will feature New York City urban folk culture in 2001. Co-sponsored by the Smithsonian, New York University, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Local Music/Global Connections will be the first ISAM event supported by the Baisley Powell Elebash Fund. This $1.5 million endowment supports conferences and concerts on the music of New York City as well as New York-related dissertation research by students in CUNY’s Ph.D. Program in Music. If you would like further information about Local Music/Global Connections and other upcoming events, please visit our website .

Congratulations to this year’s winner of the ISAM composition prize, Ben Bierman. A graduate student in the Conservatory’s composition program, Ben wrote his award-winning Four Preludes for Violin Solo while studying with Tania León.

Welcome to Kumiko Katoh as ISAM’s librarian and office assistant. A student in the master’s program in musicology at the Conservatory, she is researching the music of Meredith Monk, Bang on a Can, and Henry Cowell.

–Ellie M. Hisama

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