Please join us at the Ethnoise! workshop this Thursday, April 12th at 4:30, in Goodspeed Hall room 205.  We will welcome Gregor Kokorz (Mellon Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago) as he presents “Listening to Difference: Reflections on how to write a history of ethnomusicology”.

Abstract:  The history of science continues to follow still too often an engrained yet highly problematic model of progress, and the history of ethnomusicology does not represent an exception. But what are the alternatives? My talk will focus on several 19^th century discourses that contributed to the rise of ethnomusicology adopting a model of conflict centered on the question of difference.  Offering a reading of ethnomusicology as a challenge to Western musical thought not only allows a different approach to the history of science, but enables also to interpret the ethnomusicological discourse as a truly modern one that contributes to the experience of destabilization in the era of modernity.

Dr. Gregor Kokorz holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the Karl-Franzens University, Graz, Austria with a doctoral thesis titled “In Search for Difference. Ethnomusicology in the Mirror of Modernity” (2008). He has been a member of the interdisciplinary research project “Modernity. Vienna and Central Europe around 1900” at the University of Graz and a research assistant at the Center for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, CA. Since 2011, he has been engaged in the research project “Music – Identity – Space” at the Austrian Academy of Science, working on a series of essays on music and national identities titled “Musical Space, Trieste around 1848.” Presently he is a Visiting Mellon Scholar at the University of Chicago. His research focuses particularly on the issues of modernism, the history of science, and cultural transfer.