Rethinking the Dynamics of Music and Nationalism

Rethinking the Dynamics of Music and Nationalism

SPIN organizes the international conference, Rethinking the Dynamics of Music and Nationalism. The conference is set on 26-29 September 2017 at De Rode Hoed, Cultureel Centrum (Amsterdam). The full program can be found here.  I’ll be presenting my research on the Philippine Military Band within my proposed framework of The Anthropology of Sound. Here’s the abstract:

 

The volatile sonus of the nation: Listening to three shifting “Philippine” regimes in the Philippine Constabulary Band
Fin de siècle Manila was a nexus in the re-imagining of the collapsing archaic Spanish Empire, the American experiment on imperialism, and the embryonic Filipino modern nation-state. In this paper, the three different stages in the history of the military in the Philippines will be analyzed:  its entanglements with the archaic Spanish empire, its role in the assertion of the first Philippine nation-state, and its part in the US imperialist agenda. Within these historical contexts, I will investigate the Filipino military musicians whose soni and embodiment of modernities became the very juncture where simultaneous claims and contestations of national, imperial, and global imaginings of modernity were silenced and resounded. In investigating these sonic assertions of empire and nations, I propose the framework of “Anthropology of Sound” which I synaesthetically draw from Hans Belting’s (2001, 2005) iconology theory to map the relationship of the sound medium, the body, and the sonus. In this methodology, I tune-in to the sonic investigation of the act of embodied and mediated listening and performance of sound to analyze the movements of ideas between bodies and music as media.