Guest lecturer Benjamin Tausig, Stony Brook University, presents Bangkok After Dark: Maurice Rocco and Cold War Global Nightlife. This talk will be presented in hybrid format (in-person, with virtual option). Co-sponsored by the Music and Dance Library, the EMIC Graduate Student Association and the Ethnomusicology program.
In 1959, the Ohio-born Black American jazz pianist Maurice Rocco, briefly a major night-club and film star, left the United States forever. He toured Europe and Asia before settling finally in Bangkok, Thailand in 1964. Rocco's biography is a compelling story of queer, Black musical mobility during the Cold War. It meanwhile raises challenging questions about the very frameworks that we use in the scholarly study of music. For example, the jazz that Rocco played in Thailand was formally identical to what he played in the U.S. But it was received there within a different matrix of social and aesthetic meaning than had existed in Ohio, New York or Hollywood. In the tumultuous, strangely cosmopolitan spaces of Cold War global nightlife, jazz became a different genre. Similar genre upheavals were occurring simultaneously throughout Thailand, as international visitors congregated in radically new ways. Psychedelic rock, luk thung and mor lam ploen, for example, were each recast in the scene of circulation. For Rocco and others in this scene, the nature of their music shifted. Analyzing the history of music in these spaces compels historians to adopt methods that recombine and sometimes depart from conventional divisions and definitions of musicology/ethnomusicology/music theory. Tausig thus presents case studies in genre circulation from Cold War-era Thailand in order to explore some helpful interdisciplinary approaches for music studies in contexts of political change.
Registrants will receive an email with the Zoom meeting link.
If you require an accommodation to participate in this meeting, please email the event host, Dr. Ryan Skinner (skinner.176@osu.edu). Requests made two weeks before an event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet all requests.
In-Person Attendees
Effective March 11, masks are optional on campus. They remain required in health care settings and on campus transportation.
Benjamin Tausig teaches at Stony Brook University in the department of Music, with affiliations in Asian and Asian-American Studies and in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. His research focuses on sound, music and politics in Thailand. His first monograph, Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest and Constraint, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. His second monograph, Bangkok After Dark, a study of Thai-western musical engagements in Thailand during the American war in Vietnam, will be published by Duke University Press.
Lectures in Musicology is co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries.
Lectures are held Mondays at 4 p.m. in the 18th Avenue Library, 175 W. 18th Ave. (Music/Dance Library, second floor, room 205), unless otherwise noted. These events are free and open to the public. Campus visitors, please use either the Tuttle Park Place Garage or the Ohio Union South Garage. All other garages in the vicinity of the 18th Ave. Library are closed to visitors before 4 p.m.
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