Land and Equity

Please note: You will receive an email from Zoom within 24 hours of the session's start time. Please open this email and sign up to have a secure Zoom link sent to you. If you have added the session to your Sched schedule, you will be approved before the start of the session.

Social Practice Composition in the Choral Arts: Composer Reena Esmail’s Take What You Need in Skid Row, Los Angeles (Murray) - Every year since 2016, Street Symphony and the Urban Voices Project – two musical service organizations and ensembles based in Skid Row, Los Angeles – have given annual performances of composer Reena Esmail’s “Take What You Need.” A unique piece of contemporary choral-instrumental art music, “Take What You Need” requires the collaboration between two musical groups representing differing musical and socio-economic backgrounds: an ensemble and choir of professional musicians, and a second choir of singers and audience members who are currently experiencing or have previously experienced living in a condition of homelessness. Drawing on an analysis of Esmail’s score for the work, her pre-compositional notes, as well as fieldwork with the Urban Voices Project, I contend that Esmail’s work exemplifies an emerging “social turn” in contemporary choral art music composition, illuminated by a theoretical linkage between scholarship on facilitation and hospitality drawn from Community Music (Higgins 2012) and dialogue and performance in the social practice arts (Jacskon 2011; Kester 2013). I argue that Esmail employs her socio-musical compositional techniques towards an overarching goal of encouraging personal and social healing through community-based musical performance.

“In C”: Using Terry Riley’s masterpiece for operationalizing a social justice approach to music pedagogy with refugee children (Samson) - The compositional structure that Terry Riley uses in “In C” is ideal for reconstruction and experimentation when teaching music composition to children. In this session I will describe my work using “In C” as a point of entry for composition lessons with refugee students. I will also introduce a new framework for a social justice approach to music pedagogy that motivates these composition lessons.

The Songwork Catalogue (Ercin, Mendel, Spatz) - Members of the research project “Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork” (UK Arts and Humanities Research Council 2016-2018) will share and discuss the Songwork Catalogue, a webpage containing 308 short video clips selected from more than 500 hours of video created during the Judaica project lab. We will discuss a number of possible ways of accessing and using this rhizomatic archive and consider the ethical and political implications of audiovisual embodied research, especially how it reveals the inextricability of technique, identity, and place.