NOTE. Dr. Lee will present this lecture at 4 p.m. due to a change in his schedule.
A virtual lecture entitled Alienation and Marginality in Music: Race, Gender, Sexuality will be presented via Zoom by Gavin Lee, Soochow University, China. This talk will be recorded. Co-sponsored by the Music and Dance Library, the EMIC Graduate Student Association and the Ethnomusicology program.
Alienation is a condition of life and especially the lives of the marginalized, but this topic has not been systematically explored in music studies. Breaking down the boundaries between the speaker's life experiences, musical research subjects, and pedagogical approaches to students, this presentation explores the ramifications of musical alienation from sonic reverberations to the dynamics of music education and sociality. Lee meditates on sounds drawn from across the past millennium, showing how dispersion, segregation or separation in music is intertwined with race, coloniality, gender and sexuality. Looking beyond Adornian takes on Schoenbergian alienation, Lee examines the claustrophobic cadences of A chantar, reined in by patriarchy; the rejected bachelor in Die schöne Müllerin who fails to achieve heteronormative union; global avant-gardist Joyce Koh’s retreat from her Chinese ethnic identity because of racist Chinese stereotypes; and the representation of the alleviation of alienation in Bach’s Mass in B minor. Lee draws ethical lessons from these case studies, exploring the vagaries of oppression, delusion, salvation and emancipation as they relate to alienation. Alienation is painful and is caused by marginalizing forces, yet it remains a form of subjective expression that either protects the subject or indicates a degree of protection. Rather than being compelled to be what oppressive forces command, alienated subjects distance themselves from stereotypes, from suffocating normativity, and from a reality too painful to face immediately. In the face of a violent world, alienation may be the only form of authentic existence and it can even become the foundation of resistance.
Gavin Lee is a scholar of music studies at the intersection of global musical modernisms, queer and decolonial theory, affect, posthumanism, and musical Asias. His work is published by the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Current Musicology, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, and Routledge. An assistant professor at Soochow University, China, Lee is the founding co-chair of the AMS Global East Asian Music Research study group and the SMT Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries group, and serves in the leadership of LGBTQ+ committees across the music societies.
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.
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 or offered virtually only. These events are free and open to the public.
Visit Musicology Events
