Conference Review/compte Rendu De Congrès: Toronto 2000

Charity Marsh The primary goal of the Toronto 2000 conference was to congregate the members of fourteen societies allowing for complementary overlap and the intersection of both scholars and musical scholarship from the various disciplines of music academia. Indeed, the Mega 2000 conference promised to be a handful of both splendid and questionable performances. As a scholar studying in the field of popular music and ethnomusicology with a background in historical musicology and theory, I was enthusiastic about participating in such a highly orchestrated production as both presenter and spectator. Coming to any conference with such high expectations should often be enough to send warning bells, but I wanted it to be good. I needed it to inspire me in that crazy way that conferences full of exciting and cutting edge research can and often do. Why else would we spend so much time preparing, organizing, and exhausting ourselves for these types of events? Is it not about demonstrating our knowledge concerning a particular topic and exploring interesting questions, thus inspiring others, and being inspired by our colleagues? For me a conference is about momentum, discovering new energies, and ultimately about networking. Nevertheless, I came to the conference with specific expectations or at least with a desired design of how the conference should play out intellectually and artistically (as well as socially and politically). With representation from so many different music disciplines I was optimistic that there would be musical intersections, that move beyond the acknowledgement of surface parallels and common interests. I was also hoping for some alternative or unconventional research, perhaps even conventional research being done using unconventional methods. Although some of these needs, desires and expectations were fulfilled, at the conclusion of the conference I was left feeling somewhat disappointed. I continue to be discouraged in part by the marginalization of scholars whose research addresses the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, culture and sexuality. The privileging of specific streams of knowledge as well as conventional theories and methodologies perpetuate an exclusive environment that can manifest in/through both subtle and overt means. Yes, we can certainly argue that First Nations music and musical culture has been studied within musicology. However, it is important to question the conditions or terms under which First Nations music is brought into mainstream western academic scholarship. We must ask ourselves, is First Nations music accepted as a legitimate area of study only when it is made intelligible within a dominant methodological framework? And although the centrality of this ethnocentric ideology has been significantly challenged by many, scholarship based on First Nations music and musical culture is often relegated to particular spaces based on the need for unconventional methodologies which are often viewed as less theoretical and thus, less valued. Or in some instances western methodologies and theoretical approaches are unproblematically mapped onto non-Western musical cultures. During the conference the majority of panels addressing issues of First Nations music, identity, and culture were held consecutively on one day. Although the program may have been constructed this way based on logistics it seems to me that setting up this type of space disables the larger theme of looking for intersections and preserves First Nations music scholarship as contained categories. A more subtle type of marginalization manifests itself through what some may interpret as an act of inclusion. For example, as it becomes increasingly avant garde to research the intersections of music with gender theory, and theories of race and queer theory, conceptual and structural spaces are broadened to include these peripheral knowledges. This tolerance of difference may lead to a surface inclusion but it does little to alter the dichotomy between high and low theory and high and low culture. …

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