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<h1 style="color: #000000; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px;
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margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding: 0;">Hearing
Voices in Contemporary Cuban Popular Song</h1>
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vertical-align: top;"><strong style="font-style: normal;
font-weight: bold;">Susan Thomas</strong>
<br>
Visiting Scholar
<br>
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies</p>
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vertical-align: top;">Moderator:
<br>
Deborah Pacini Hernández
<br>
Department of Anthropology
<br>
Tufts University</p>
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font-weight: bold;">Date:</strong> Monday, April 2, 12-2pm
<br>
<strong style="font-style: normal; font-weight: bold;">Location:</strong>
DRCLAS, CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S-216</p>
<p style="color: #3A352A; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;
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vertical-align: top;"><em style="font-style: italic; font-weight:
normal;">About the Seminar:</em>
<br>
A new sound of Cuban music developed in the economically turbulent
years of the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union roiled
the Cuban economy. Marked by an adventurous harmonic and rhythmic
sensibility and multi-layered and often topical and
culturally-specific lyrics, this music’s most marked
characteristic is its hybridity, drawing from Cuban dance music, <em
style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;">nueva trova</em>,
<em style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;">filin</em>,
and <em style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;">rumba</em>
as well as from international influences including U.S. funk, R
& B, and hip hop; Brazilian and North American jazz; and
Argentine, British and North American rock. Over the last two
decades, Cuban musicians have engaged in an international
performative dialogue that went beyond the appropriation of
instrumental stylistic features and included the widespread use of
vocal techniques, timbres, and articulations drawn from non-Cuban
artists and also, increasingly, iconic Cuban voices that had
previously only been heard from a distance, whether temporal or
geographic. In listening for the essences of well-known voices
such as Fito Páez, Ignacio Villa, Barry White, and Benny Moré in
Cuban popular song since the 1990s, Professor Thomas explores how
such ventriloquisms have become central to the “voluptuousness of
meaning” (Barthes 1997) of Cuban music making at a time when
Cubans’ geopolitical stability has been radically altered through
economic crisis, diaspora, and transnational ties. Borrowing from
Freya Jarman-Ivens’ discussing of queer vocal performance (2011),
Professor Thomas theorizes that Cuban musicians’ vocal
ventriloquisms participate in similar strategies with the aim to
correspondingly destabilize and render visible the constructed
nature of identity, in this case, <em style="font-style: italic;
font-weight: normal;">cubanidad</em>, or Cuban identity.</p>
<p style="color: #3A352A; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;
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vertical-align: top;"><em style="font-style: italic; font-weight:
normal;">About the Speaker:</em>
<br>
Susan Thomas holds an MA in Music from Tufts University, a MM in
Vocal Performance from New England Conservatory of Music and a
Ph.D. in musicology and MFA in Women’s Studies from Brandeis
University. At the University of Georgia she is an Associate
Professor of Musicology and Women’s Studies. Her publications
include the book <em style="font-style: italic; font-weight:
normal;">Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender in Havana’s
Lyric Stage</em>. She is currently a Santander Visiting Scholar
at DRCLAS for the academic year to work on her next book, <em
style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;">The Musical
Mangrove: The Transnationalization of Cuban Popular Song</em>. </p>
<p style="color: #3A352A; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;
line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1.3em; margin-left: 0;
margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding: 0; padding-top: 3px;
vertical-align: top;">Feel free to bring a bag lunch to this
seminar.</p>
For more information on upcoming events, visit: <a
href="http://go.madmimi.com/redirects/22ced82418d9103e5237e5a1799f5a5b?pa=8347609333"
target="_blank" style="color: #597BB7; text-decoration:
underline;">http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/cuba/events</a>.
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