The UVA Department of Music is pleased to present Sonic Cartographies in Hawai‘i Exotica, a colloquium by Jade Conlee in 107 Old Cabell Hall on Friday, October 25th at 3:30 PM! This event is free and open to the public. (This was originally scheduled for 10/4/24)
In the years leading up to Hawai‘i statehood in 1959, small jazz ensembles in Honolulu invented an obscure genre of lounge music called “exotica.” Promoted by American record companies as sonic advertising for Hawaiian tourism, exotica featured birdcall vocalizations and timbral explorations of instruments from around the globe. Limited scholarship has treated exotica as meaningless kitsch, or worse, musical colonialism. However, I argue that exotica is a privileged site for examining some of the most pressing issues of the long twentieth century, including the entanglements of U.S. empire, sound technologies, the popular music industry, and climate change.
In this talk, I draw on archival and ethnographic research to position exotica as a “sonic cartography.” I consider exotica in relation to three Hawai‘i geographies: the resort, the plantation, and the forest. Exotica’s sonic depictions of Hawai‘i use similar spatial techniques as those used by colonial resort developers, I argue, who strove to merge Hawai‘i itself with the mediated versions of Hawai‘i tourists first encounter abroad. Yet exotica musicians such as Hawai‘i-Puerto Rican bongo player Augie Colón and Native Hawaiian vibraphonist Arthur Lyman subverted these touristic spatial imaginaries. Lyman’s and Colón’s exotica albums forged cartographic connections between contexts of racial subjection, plantation labor, and sonic innovation in the Pacific, the United States, and the Caribbean. I conclude by discussing how, beginning in the 1970s with the Hawaiian cultural renaissance, Native Hawaiian musicians introduced endemic Hawaiian birdcalls into exotica, reimagining the genre as a space for “sonic sovereignty” (Reed 2019).
To see all events in our colloquium series, visit https://music.virginia.edu/colloquia.
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Jade Conlee is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the Music Department at the University of Virginia. She specializes in antiracist and anticolonial approaches to the history of American popular music, jazz, and music theory. Her research works broadly across the music disciplines and engages with Black studies, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities to ask how music and sound mediate our relationships to race, place, and the natural world. Her current book project studies how background music facilitated the expansion of American empire in the Pacific from the 1950s to present. Drawing on archival and ethnographic methods, it explores how background musicians and listeners have used music to depict the feel of tropical space, and in doing so, forged and contested the spatial imaginaries of U.S. colonialism. Jade is also co-editor of the edited volume Insurgent Music Theory: Terminology and Critical Methods for Antiracist Music Studies, under contract with the University of Michigan Press’ “Music and Social Justice” series. Drawing on critiques of Enlightenment humanism from Black and Indigenous studies, the book reimagines music theory’s epistemic foundations by redefining and expanding the core terminology music scholars use to describe what music is and how it works. Trained as a pianist specializing in contemporary classical music, Conlee received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Music Studies from Yale University and holds a M.M. in Piano Performance from the University at Buffalo and a B.M. in Piano Performance from New York University. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and Yale University’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.
Old Cabell Hall is located on the south end of UVA’s historic lawn, directly opposite the Rotunda (map). Parking is available in the central grounds parking garage on Emmet Street, in the C1 parking lot off McCormick Rd, and in the parking lots at the UVA Corner.
All events are subject to change.
Please contact the UVA Music Department at 434.924.3052 or music@virginia.edu for more information.