Where: Online
Series: AMS President’s Endowed Plenary Lecture
In this year’s AMS President’s Endowed Plenary Lecture, Beverley Diamond will reflect on different ways of telling history as evidenced in the repertoires and performances of traditional Inuit and First Nations songs and musicians. She will first reference Inuit musicians whose drum dance song repertoire describes experiences on the land in the Canadian Arctic over the past century. Among this repertoire is a song that describes the (frightening) arrival of the first airplane in the singer/composer’s far north community. She will then briefly describe a very different mode of history (in Anishnabe communities) through inclusive perceptions of song/dance participants. And she will also share a Beothuk song, collected by Frank Speck, a song that challenges histories that claim Beothuk extinction; the song moves through several musical styles that almost certainly exhibit the composer/singer’s intercultural contact throughout her lifetime.
Beverley Diamond is Professor Emeritus in Ethnomusicology at Memorial University. Diamond is known for her research on gender issues, Canadian historiography, and indigenous music cultures. Her research on indigenous music has ranged from studies of traditional Inuit and First Nations song traditions and Saami joik, to indigenous audio recording, traditional protocols for access and ownership, and, most recently, expressive culture in relation to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools in Canada. Most recently she co-edited Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada. Echoes and Exchanges (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012) which received a Choice Academic Book award. Among her other publications are Native American Music in Eastern North America (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Music and Gender (co-edited, University of Illinois Press, 2000).