Ethnomusicology Commons^™

Revolutionary Songs From Myanmar: Reconsidering Scholarly Perspectives On Protest Music, Heather Maclachlan

Department of Music Faculty Publications

Since the February 1, 2021 military coup in Myanmar, Burmese musicians have been creating and circulating anti- coup songs. This article describes a representative sample of these songs, explaining how the lyrics reference important tropes in Burmese life and history. Further, the article argues that these anti-coup songs, while they can be understood as protest music, do not fit precisely into categories previously delineated for protest songs. Nor do these songs provide a neat answer to the question that scholars so often pose of protest music, to wit: do these songs work to persuade listeners to take an anti-authoritarian position? …

Music And Incitement To Violence: Anti-Muslim Hate Music In Burma/Myanmar, Heather Maclachlan

Department of Music Faculty Publications

his article examines a corpus of Burmese-language anti-Muslim hate songs archived on YouTube. Burma/Myanmar is the site of recent genocidal violence perpetrated against Muslims, and these songs are part of the hate speech campaign that undergirds this violence. Using the definition of incitement articulated by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the article shows that the lyrics of these songs constitute incitement to violence. Further, the comments written by YouTube listeners provide evidence that the songs provoke additional dehumanizing speech. The songs and their creators are therefore complicit in the recent violent persecution of Muslims in Myanmar.

အနှစ်ခ ျုပ်။ ။ …

Singing Out: Gala Choruses And Social Change, Heather Maclachlan

Books and Book Chapters by University of Dayton Faculty

Can you change the world through song? This appealing idea has long been the professed aim of singers who are part of choruses affiliated with the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA). Theses choruses first emerged in the 1970s, and grew out of a very American tradition of (often gender-segregated) choral singing that explicitly presents itself as a community-based activity. By taking a close look at these choruses and their mission, Heather MacLachlan unpacks the fascinating historical and cultural dynamics behind groups that seek to change society for the better by encouraging acceptance of LGBT-identified people and promoting diversity …

Ancient Mesopotamian Music, The Politics Of Reconstruction, And Extreme Early Music, Samuel N. Dorf

Books and Book Chapters by University of Dayton Faculty

I write this piece primarily as a musicologist and amateur early music practitioner (viola da gamba player) who tries to understand the ways twentieth- and twenty-first century musicians and scholars have imagined and performed ancient music and dance. This essay emerged from my book project Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1935 and brings my training as a historical musicologist and dance historian to bear on issues typically of concern to archaeologists, classicists, and linguists.

While working on that book, I kept running across a number of individuals working now who are deeply engaged in …

The Strategies And Risks Of Performing Citizenship And Rights Through Music, Carolin Mueller

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

My work explores the capacity of cultural producers to perform “insurgent citizenship,” a term theorized by James Holsten (2008) to describe how the peripheries of social organization can propel alternative modes of civic participation, through music. I utilize Engin Isin’s performative dimension of citizenship (2017) to investigate such forms of insurgent citizenship as they evolve in social and cultural peripheries of the contemporary arts and culture industry in the city of Dresden, Germany to identify the pathways they open to socio-political participation and autonomy for refugees.

While Germany understands itself as a nation of culture, cultural policy unevenly addresses the …

Hate Music On Youtube: The Dark Side Of Advancing Digital Freedom In Myanmar, Heather Maclachlan

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

The International Fact-Finding Mission of the United Nations has condemned Myanmar’s treatment of Rohingya people as one of the world’s worst instances of ethnic cleansing, calling it “genocidal in intent.” The Rohingya are only one of many Muslim communities in Myanmar, a number of which have been subject to violent attacks by Buddhists in recent years (Wade 2017). This presentation explains the role that music plays in fostering anti-Muslim prejudice in the country’s majority Buddhist population. I present an analysis of the lyrics and accompanying videos of a corpus of recently recorded songs, all available on Youtube, and argue that …

Myanmar’S Pop Music Industry In Transition, Heather Maclachlan

Books and Book Chapters by University of Dayton Faculty

In the wake of the November 2010 elections, one important signal of the Myanmar government’s commitment to change was the cessation of the censorship of music recordings in October 2012.

1 Prior to that date, the country’s Press Scrutiny Board conducted rather rigorous censoring of so-called stereo series (albums), in cassette and later in compact disc formats. Producers wishing to sell their series in retail shops were required to submit a copy of the recording and ten copies of the song lyrics to the censors at the Press Security Board (MacLachlan 2011:148). Although the censoring was supposed to be provided …

The Don Dance: An Expression Of Karen Nationalism, Heather Maclachlan

Department of Music Faculty Publications

How do Karen people define themselves as Karen? This question has particular import for one community in New York State—the Karen of Utica. The two hundred members of this group affirm their distinctiveness in part by celebrating a day that is special to Karen people worldwide. Since their arrival in Utica in 1999, every January they dance the don dance, a dance created and practiced only by Karen people. This article will discuss the performance of the don dance in another context: in a refugee camp in Southeast Asia, the dance functions to create and reinforce a particular ideal of …

Fred Bartenstein: The Right Place At The Right Time, Kurt Mosser

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Fred Bartenstein has always seemed to find himself perfectly situated to pursue his life-long interest in bluegrass music – as he puts it, “I’ve always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.” This luck has allowed him to find bluegrass in the most surprising places, whether at a private day school in New Jersey, or at Harvard University in the late 1960s. It has also meant that, among other things, he found himself attending the first bluegrass festival in Fincastle, Va., becoming a bluegrass DJ at the age of 16, starting Muleskinner News magazine, and playing …