|
Edwards Awarded 2011 Martin Hatch Prize |
| Print | |
|
Published: January 6, 2012
 |
|
The cover of studio album Dolphin
Sonar (2008), by Japanese noise
musician Akita Masami. The text
reads "Against Dolphin Hunting."
|
|
|
|
Ph.D. student James Rhys Edwards recently won the 2011 Martin Hatch Prize awarded by the Society for Asian Music. This prize recognizes the most distinguished student paper on Asian music presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He was awarded the prize for his paper "Silence by my noise: An ecocritical aesthetic of noise in the sound art of Akita Masami," which he presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting in Los Angeles.
Edwards conducted most of his research for the paper in the National Diet Library in Tokyo, Japan, during the summer of 2009. His research was made possible by the UCLA Paul I. and Hisoko Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. An expanded version of the paper was recently published in the UK journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism vol. 15: Ecomusicology (Autumn 2011).
This year Edwards is conducting fieldwork in Okinawa, Japan for a dissertation on colonial and postcolonial performing arts, also with the support of the Terasaki Center. Edwards would like to thank the Terasaki Center, as well as Professor Mitchell Morris in the UCLA Department of Musicology for his guidance during the research and writing of his paper.
Paper abstract:
|
Western modernist musicological discourse is flush with talk of “the musical material,” a rhetorical figure which imbues sound with enigmatically self-inherent tendencies or even desires, while simultaneously adumbrating the subjugation of these tendencies to the rational ends of musical form through compositional technique. This trope echoes the broader Western “utopian vision" of the mastery of nature's unruly energies through art and science. The noise compositions of Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow, challenge such conceptions of meaningful musical experience as mastery over sound. Twisting the normally unwanted ambient hum of electronic instruments into self-oscillating feedback loops which overload their processing capabilities, Merzbow can be heard as unbinding the inherent momentum of sounds, forestalling their subsumption into mere compositional material. This aesthetic stance takes on a political resonance in works such as “Dolphin Sonar” (2008), the rhythmic pulsing of which makes reference to Japanese fishermen's practice of herding dolphins by pounding metal rods submerged in the water, and “13 Japanese Birds” (2009), which likewise references ultrasound devices used to repel birds from building in Japanese cities. In pieces such as these, Merzbow not only protests specific instances of violence against nature, but advances a general critique of the inability of Western modernist conceptions of music to address the ballooning potential of humanly-generated sound to do violence against human and non-human life, provoking a reassessment of the responsibilities of cultural works toward what had previously been considered mere “material.” |
|