Principles of Change
World Music and Autism: Creating Opportunities for Relationship Development and Dynamic Problem Solving through Music and Movement
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Shahriari
This paper focuses on world music as a catalyst for supporting people with various disabilities, such as autism spectrum disorder. World music listening and performance can act as a “safe space” where social interaction and dynamic thinking, two core challenges for people on the autism spectrum, can be encouraged and developed. The presentation highlights key principles associated with Relationship Development Intervention (RDI), a program developed by Steven Gutstein, Ph.D., with regards to issues of static versus dynamic thinking that can be applied to music and other arts contexts. Several other core areas of challenge, namely social referencing, co-regulatory interactions, flexible thinking, and episodic memory are also discussed along with several guiding strategies that will give attendees some practical means of improving competency in these areas through the arts.
Jazz Music as a Worldwide Political Resource
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peter Brewer
Music has been utilized as a tool to achieve social and political ends since humans recognized the deep emotional responses that can be aroused when we hear music. In modern history, American jazz music has likewise been utilized in myriad cultures across the globe as as tool towards achieving a range of political and social goals. This paper examines how various groups within different cultures have employed jazz in a wide range of contexts with varying objectives— including within both democratic and authoritarian societies - as a tool to affect sociopolitical perspectives of both domestic and foreign audiences. Particular attention is given to the polarity of the social and political goals within the examined cultures as they tend to either include calls for stimulating social and political change, reinforcing a pre-existing construct/perception, or occasionally, pursuit of seemingly contrary goals simultaneously.
The Development of Creative Written, Visual and Artistic Expression through Music
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Helena Caspurro, Pedro Almeida
Perhaps due to the complexity of our world, the issue of education has never been so emergent. Challenges brought by the exponential development of science, art, and technology, while being the result of the educational models that democratic societies have been building, are also a source of renewed perplexities. One is to look at knowledge as a system of complex skills combinations whose application enables people to better interpret the intricate world in which they live – thus increasing the idea of learning as a construction of multiple literacies; another is to understand how school can help to interact with the simultaneously particular and holistic nature of knowledge. Finally, the fact that children learn by solving problems in the concrete world and not only from what is confined to the school stage. Intervene collaboratively was the starting point of this action-research project, explaining the didactic model based on the music and CD-object Paluí, aimed to promote creative learning of the Portuguese language and the visual and plastic expression of 600 students of schools of Santa Maria da Feira and 50 of the degree in Design of Aveiro University.
Sound Art, Musique Concrète, and Their Authenticities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joseph Chaves
This paper investigates the way that sound art and musique concrète from the last quarter of the twentieth century represent, create, and play with a couple forms of authenticity: the representation of the natural world and the representation of exotic locales. I begin with Francisco López’s La Selva (1997), which culls acoustic phenomena from the Costa Rican rainforest in order, on the artist’s reading, to produce a perfectly acousmatic sound-world. Acousmatic sound, according to Michel Chion and Pierre Schaeffer, is "pure sound" in the sense that we listen to it without reference to the source that produced it. For López, the particular acoustic qualities of the rainforest—the multi-dimensional nature of its jungle canopy, its many reverberant and resonant surfaces, and the way its exuberant flora masks the provenances of sonic phenomena—divorce the rainforest’s sounds from any particular location. (“This is not la selva [the rainforest],” López pronounces in an auto-critical essay, echoing Magritte.) However, my interpretation of La Selva runs against the grain of the artist’s understanding of the piece. Far from categorically transcending "causal listening" in favor of acousmatic listening, I attempt to show, La Selva ultimately puts into question dichotomous understandings of these forms of sound perception, suggesting that they are not mutually exclusive but rather continuous and richly dynamic. The essay then marshals these insights in order to reflect on other, previous works, including François Bayle’s Tremblements de terre très doux (1978) and various versions of Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien (1977, 1989).
