2009-2010

News Release

REF NO.: 112

SUBJECT: PSA: MMaP Lecture series continues

DATE: November 3, 2009

The Centre for Music, Media and Place will hold its latest lecture offering featuring Dr. Martin Lussier’s Musiques émergentes: a community without identity at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 12, at the MMaP Gallery on the second floor of the Arts and Culture Centre.
Dr. Lussier, a postdoctoral fellow at MMaP, is interested in the categorization processes in popular music, particularly in Montréal, Québec. Located at the intersection of cultural studies and of a conceptual framework articulating media-culture-power, his research questions new forms of belonging and identity distinct from more familiar ways of categorizing cultural productions, such as through genre, style, subculture or community. He’s completing a book based on his doctoral thesis, about a fluid and diffused musical category that Montrealers label “les musiques émergente".
“Les musiques émergentes” are part of a movement that has grown fast and has gained a strong foothold in the cultural landscape of Montréal over the last ten years. It is surfacing as a fluid and diffused musical category that holds together and makes it possible for heterogeneous elements – sounds, genres, scenes, organizations, artists, artisans, venues or events – to act collectively. Given that they cannot define their practice as a genre or identifiable musical category, the diverse actors are often asked to articulate what they have in common. 
However, as the artists and artisans concerned say about themselves, they don’t have any characteristic that they all share; they have nothing in common. How is it possible to understand their regrouping through the very fluidity of the practices that weave them together and organize them as a coherent collective?
The Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology, in conjunction with the School of Music and the Department of Folklore, inaugurated this interdisciplinary lecture series in 2002-03.
Distinguished scholars from the academic community are featured in a series of presentations regarding historical and contemporary musical practices. Members of the general public, as well as the university community, are cordially invited.

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