Organise and moderate guest lecture "Kala-OK Nights: Voice, Embodiment and Society at Indigenous Bunun Karaoke in Southeast Taiwan"

Description

Speaker: Jonathan Stock is Professor of Music and former Head of Music and Theatre at University College Cork, Ireland. In this talk, I focus on the regularly recurring social and musical practice of karaoke singing in an Indigenous Bunun village in southeastern Taiwan. These occasions, which take several contrasting formats, engage many villagers, involving them in the development, display, and appreciation of skill in performance, the use of diverse repertories and languages, and the building of musical an​d emotional co-presence. Music contributes to the sustaining of several kinds of cultural inheritance and personal gift, yet is also part of situations involving loss, conflict, and pain. Movement turns out to play a key role, too: karaoke events are far from being oriented around sound alone. In this presentation, I explore how sounds and actions embody the traces of others, past, present, and occasionally even future for Bunun singers and their audiences.

Period	15 Oct 2021
Event type	Seminar
Degree of Recognition	International