News & Thoughts

I’m happy to see this meeting taking place, and equally happy that people will be able to participate anonymously. I raised the possibility of using Twitter during the session for those of us who can’t make it, and to facilitate real-time responses to the conversation. Here’s my original email and the AMS’s reply, via George Lewis. If anyone can assist in live-tweeting the session, please contact him at gl2140 [at] columbia [dot] edu.

My emil to the CRE, 2016-10-20:

Hi—I’m delighted to read that there’s live-streaming for the meeting. I’m wondering, though, if there could be a designated Twitterer at the meeting who could take and communicate comments and questions for the meeting in real-time. Email is slow, and if people want to participate during the meeting (rather than preparing comments and questions beforehand), Twitter might be a very useful tool for enabling them to do so. 

The response from Lewis, 2016-10-21:

Dear Dr. Leonard—

I am the co-chair of the planning committee for the forthcoming AMS Committee on the Status of Race and Ethnicity (working title), and yours was the very first email received at the planning committee’s address. 

I very much appreciate your support of the plans for the special session, as well as your suggestions regarding the use of Twitter for the session.  

As we have stated, the main purpose of the session is to gather information that can help the planning committee and its successor, the permanent committee, in its work.  Thus, all comments will be archived for study and reference.  Also, people can express their views before, during, or after the session.  

A number of people have expressed the need for anonymous commenting, which is easier to implement with the AMS website setup than with either Twitter or email:

•           Remote participants may send in comments or suggestions via email during the session: CRE@ams-net.org.  These comments will not be anonymized.

•           Anonymous comments may be sent to the regular AMS suggestion site, with the subject line “CRE Session”: https://www.suggestionox.com/response/HhkWQr  

For example, you submitted your comment via the email address. Emails received at this address are not anonymized, and are forwarded to me and to the planning committee co-chaor, Judy Tsou.  

>>Email is slow, and if people want to participate during the meeting (rather than preparing comments and questions beforehand),

I have to say that I was having a hard time imagining an impediment to writing an email or using the website form and sending it in, before, during or after the session.  The nominal 140-character Twitter text limit, and its one-to-many broadcast model, are major factors in the speed of responses, but there are no plans to broadcast a live video comment feed in the session space; thus, the need for speed seems less crucial, and some of the comments will certainly exceed 140 characters.   

Also, from my perspective, participation in the session involves listening as well as commenting.

 >>if there could be a designated Twitterer at the meeting 

Indeed, someone will need to monitor and moderate any comment lines (if you know of a potential volunteer, that would be great), since there is no possibility of reading every remote query or comment to the session, or responding to everyone who wishes to comment in person.  Decisions will be made by a moderator as to which remote comments will be read at the session to the live and streamed participants.  

I hope the foregoing is helpful.   

Again, if you will be at the meeting and can help live-Tweet it or serve as a volunteer moderator for Tweeted comments, please let George know!

Paula Bishop and I will edit this collection. Please share widely.

The dominant narratives of women in music have neglected, obscured, or minimized the successes and importance of countless female musicians who became the driving forces in the development and success of their genres. Instead, such narratives emphasize the rarity of the female musician or attribute her success to a male mentor, especially in the period before second-wave feminism. While recent research has uncovered the histories of forgotten women in art music, little work has been done on the careers of women in vernacular musics. For instance, Ruth Alice “Ronnie” Gilbert was a founding member of the Weavers, a long-time activist in social issues, and a highly influential singer-songwriter who is often overshadowed by Pete Seeger. Similarly, Carol Kaye of the California-based studio group known as the Wrecking Crew is responsible for some of the most iconic bass lines of the 1960s and ‘70s and is heard in more than 10,000 recordings. But she too has not received scholarly attention for her musical labor.  Women have also made significant contributions to other roles in music creation; during World War II, women worked in the Gibson factory, producing more than 9,000 “Banner” Gibson guitars, some of the most valued instruments the company ever produced. However, the work of these women in developing and creating these iconic instruments went unnoticed until 2013, when scholar John Thomas uncovered the story. All of these cases remind us that there are numerous such hidden histories of women in music. This project seeks to demonstrate how recovering erased narratives can enrich our understanding of music and music historiography. We invite work that challenges the accepted historiographical model and examines the musical labor of women in vernacular musics of all types. We also welcome work that explores other facets of women in the music industry such as session work, engineering, administrative and support roles, and similar activities, as well as the role of female fans and audience culture.

Please send an abstract of 350-500 words to paulajbishop@gmail.com by December 31, 2016. The deadline for full essays is July 1, 2017.

From my upcoming Duke talk:

In her novel Wolf Hall, Hillary Mantel writes, “Beneath every history, another history.” Beneath: under, below, buried, submerged, hidden. And also deep, profound, rooted, from below. Today I want to talk about the narratives beneath our histories and historiographies, how we can exhume these narratives, how we can raise them up from being beneath, how we can make sure they aren’t being put under other narratives, how when things are beneath they often have deep things to tell us. And I want to talk about how we, as scholars, can be made to be beneath, made to be hidden, and how we might address that, so that we are not beneath or drowned, but rooted and profound.

Want more? Come to my talk “On Hidden Narratives,” Musicology Lecture Series, Duke University, 13 January 2017.