Ethnomusicology Lecture: "An Ear for the Tropics?: Sonic Transcripts of Touristic Encounter in the Bahamas," Friday, September 26, 4:00 pm

Leah Smith Lecture HallRoom 2200 Clarice Performing Arts Center

University of Maryland, College Park
Music Scholars Lecture Series – Fall 2014
School of Music presents Timothy Rommen
Professor of Music and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania
“An Ear for the Tropics?: Sonic Transcripts of Touristic Encounter in the Bahamas”

Repurposing a wonderful phrase from Krista Thompson, whose An Eye for the Tropics (2006) is a landmark exploration of the ways that the visual has been used to frame the Caribbean picturesque for tourists, this paper explores the extent to which the ear might be used to understand encounters between musicians and tourists throughout the region. There can be no doubt that the gaze remains a significant, even crucial, element within tourist encounters (and the impressive growth of literature on this topic seems to confirm its continued relevance). But I maintain that focusing only (or primarily) on the gaze in such touristic contexts has led to a concomitant silencing of these tourist encounters. What I mean here is that a focus on the tourist gaze might well tell us a great deal about a given encounter. But what it cannot do—what such a focus in fact cannot attend to at all—are the sounds that permeate that encounter. I am convinced that any analysis that focuses on the register of the gaze while failing also to address the sonic dimensions of the situation at hand misses a crucially important opportunity to understand not only the nuances of the power relationships at hand but also the varied forms of negotiation at stake in such encounters. Developing an “ear for the tropics” is, as I suggest with reference to case studies drawn from the Bahamas, crucial to “seeing” the tropics with analytical nuance.

Timothy Rommen (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2002) specializes in the music of the Caribbean with research interests that include folk and popular sacred music, popular music, critical theory, ethics, tourism, diaspora, and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. His first book, entitled “Mek Some Noise": Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad (University of California Press, 2007), was awarded the Alan P. Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2008. His is also the author of “Funky Nassau”: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music (University of California Press, 2011). He is contributing author to and co-editor, along with Daniel Neely, of Sun, Sea, and Sound: Music and Tourism in the Circum-Caribbean (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is co-editor of the Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology book series (University of Chicago Press), and editor of and contributing author to Excursions in World Music (Pearson). He is a contributor to the Cambridge History of World Music, and his articles and reviews appear in Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, the Black Music Research Journal, the Latin American Music Review, the Journal of Musicology (forthcoming), The World of Music, The New West Indian Guide, the Journal of Religion, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, The Yearbook for Traditional Music, the Journal of Anthropological Research, the International Dictionary of Black Composers, and the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. His current projects include a musical ethnography of Dominica and a second volume on music and tourism in the circum-Caribbean.