Dr Toltz presents at the Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference

The 60th Anniversary meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology was held in Austin, Texas, from December 3-6, 2016.  I was part of a three-paper panel in a session entitled “What We Feel When We Hear it Again: Emotional and Historical Engagements”.  The first co-panelist Cesar Colon-Montijo (Columbia) presented “Ecuajei: Traces of the Sacred in Ismael Rivera’s Salsa”, and the panel concluded with Benjamin DuPriest (UPenn) presenting “Listening to Lomax: New Auditory Engagements with Parchment Farm and the Black Southern Folk.”

My paper, “Listen/Music/Testimony: Revisiting an Ethnographic Holocaust Musical Testimony Project through Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘Listening’” has been reworked for an upcoming chapter in a collection, “Music’s Immanent Future: The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies” (Routledge, May 2016).

As well as presenting, I attended the Jewish Special Interest Group, and advertised the exciting upcoming activities of Performing the Jewish Archive project.  One of my personal highlights of the conference was attending the Seeger Lecture, “Life on the Musical Edges”, presented by Professor Philip J. Deloria of the University of Michigan. Other highlights included catching up with Phil Bohlman, and hearing papers by brilliant scholars such as Phil Alexander, Alec MacIntyre, Claudia Carrera, Joe Maurer, Mili Leitner, Nana Kaneko, Rebecca Dirksen, Anna Schultz and Stephan Pennington.

The SEM is always an inspiring and engaging conference, with wonderful performances as well as papers, and this was no exception.