ACE at the Society for Ethnomusicology 60th Annual Meeting

January 12, 2016

Mark Davidson, University of California, Santa Cruz, organized and chaired the a fascinating session at SEM entitled Alan Lomax at 100: A Critical Re-evaluation of Lomax’s Legacy in the Twenty-First Century, sponsored by the Historical Ethnomusicology Section. Gage Averill, University of British Columbia gave a cogent summary of Lomax’s “metrics” (Canto, Choreo, etc.) and their relevance to ethnomusicology today. Rafael Velloso, Federal University of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil drew from his dissertation about the effect of Lomax’s radio work on Brazil’s cultural policies in the 1950s. Stephen Wade, Independent Scholar, spoke about Lomax’s influences on his collecting and writing and also his divergences from Lomax. Judith R. Cohen, University of York gave a guided tour of Lomax’s fieldwork in Spain and talked about the impact of his sojourn on the people he recorded, later interviewed by Cohen. Tanya Clement, University of Texas at Austin, described her work with HiPSTAS a sound analysis tool for creating metadata of digital audio collections, and its potential for use in the Lomax collections. Anna Lomax Wood of the Association for Cultural Equity, New York City gave a talk entitled “The Unravelling of an Archive,” summarizing the repatriation and multi-faceted repurposing of Lomax’s collections and research in the digital age.