Wine & Nibbles Talk
Dr Aaron Corn is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Australian National University, and currently holds a Future Fellowship funded by the Australian Research Council. His research is built upon long-term collaborations with Indigenous Australians in Arnhem Land, and spans traditional music and dance, song composition, cultural heritage collections, information technologies and digital repositories, intercultural exchange, and comparative epistemologies. His recent book, Reflections and Voices, explores the cultural and political legacy of the celebrated Australian band, Yothu Yindi, and its influential founder, Mandawuy Yunupiŋu. He has produced numerous shows and tours involving traditional performers from Arnhem Land, and most recently, Crossing Roper Bar by the Australian Art Orchestra. He currently serves as President of the Musicological Society of Australia, and alongside the Indigenous educationalist, Dr Payi-Linda Ford, is Co-Director of the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia, which convenes the annual Symposium on Indigenous Music and Dance.
‘Nations of Song’
‘Eye-witness testimony is the lowest form of evidence.’ ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, 2008
‘Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.’ ~ William Faulkner, author, 1957
Whether we evoke them willingly or whether they manifest in our minds unannounced, songs travel with us constantly. At the crossroads of memory and fancy, in the twilight between experience and imagination, songs frequently hold for us fluid, negotiated meanings that would mystify their composers. This presentation explores the varying degrees to which song, and music more generally, are accepted as media capable of bearing fact. If external cultural expressions are but artifacts of our inner perceptions, which media do we reify and canonise as evidential records of our history? Which media do we entrust with that elusive commodity truth? Could it possibly be a song? To illustrate this argument, I will draw on my fifteen years of experience in working artistically and intellectually with the Yolŋu of northeast Arnhem Land, who are among the many Indigenous peoples whose sovereignty in Australia predates the British occupation of 1788. As owners of song and dance traditions that formally document their law and are performed to conduct legal processes, the Yolŋu case has been a focus of prolonged political contestation over such nations of song. It also raises salient questions about perceived relations between music and knowledge within the academy, where meaning and evidence are conventionally rendered in text.
Cost $20 / $15 for members.** (includes wine and nibbles).
Bookings essential – please RSVP to Jenny by phone on 6295 1808 or email.
