José S. Buenconsejo
Jose Semblante Buenconsejo is Professor of Musicology at the University of the Philippines College of Music. He has researched on Agusan Manobo (spirit) possession ritual and looked at it from a particular historical point of view of the materiality of communication (Songs and Gifts at the Frontier: Person and Exchange, Routledge, 2002). He has published an essay on the cultural history of late 19th century ilustrado piano music in Philippine Modernities (UP Press, 2017) which won the Best Book in the Social Science in 2018 by the Philippine National Book Development Board. His interest in ethnographic research was what brought him to media representations, particularly producing, directing and writing documentary film projects, one of which “Seven Dances of Life,” was nominated in the Best Documentary Film category in 2018 Gawad Urian. An alumnus of the University of the Philippines (BM Musicology, 1988), University of Hawaii (MA Ethnomusicology, 1993), Dr. Buenconsejo earned his PhD in the anthropology of music from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. He is currently exploring the transformation of traditions within affordances of recording technology and continues a long-standing theoretical interest in memory and experience.
University of the Philippines
Session
This panel brings together four papers based on chapters in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Music History, which explores the potential for doing music history otherwise offered by a globally oriented perspective. There is no consensus on what the emerging trans-discipline of global music history comprises, what its main methodologies are, or even where its disciplinary boundaries lie. Yet it has become a significant, even transformative development in music studies. A critical mass of research is showing that some of the most important changes in how peoples have created and conceptualized music stemmed from large-scale connective processes that reconfigured their lived musical worlds.
In honor of the conference’s theme and location, each of this panel’s papers addresses cross-border music histories and present-day perspectives involving Asia or the Pacific in some significant respect. Sarah Finley analyzes scenes of indigenous Mexican festive music-making on a late-1600s Japanese-New Spanish folding screen from an oceanic perspective that yields a more nuanced understanding of creole elites’ cosmopolitanism. Turning to the eighteenth century, Olivia Bloechl discusses comparisons of Anishinaabe, Tahitian, and Chinese Indonesian recitational singing with French operatic recitative in Bougainville’s Atlantic and Pacific writings, and argues that comparative accounts like these can be critically and creatively interpreted as contested sound worlding. The last two papers center on music in present-day Southeast and East Asian contexts. Buenconsejo’s paper makes the case for renewed attention to shared dimensions of divergent, even incommensurable music cultures, discussing indigenous Philippine instruments as objects in which universals and cultural particularity converge. Finally, Hedy Law points to the agency of Cantonese music creators in facilitating connections among listeners within and outside Hong Kong and offering meaningful frameworks for making sense of the 2020 National Security Law’s global reach.