Music, Modernity, and Identity in the First Half of the 20th Century will be the topic of an Oct. 29 colloquium at the University of California, San Diego campus.
All events are free and open to the public.
The series will culminate with a symposium in May on Borders, Boundaries, and New Frontiers, which will include performances by guest musicians and lectures by musicologists and scholars. Beyond the tracing of African roots of blues, jazz, and other musical forms, we can identify recrossings in the contemporary collaborations of African and African diasporic musicians and performers around the world. For example, Malian musician Ali Farka TourJ was inspired by the Mississippi blues of John Lee Hooker, with whom he performed over two decades in Paris. A constant interaction of musical forms across borders creates the cultural exchanges and blendings of people in migrations and motion. Denis-Constant Martin, an ethnomusicologist and political scientist and the director of research at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris, will address how jazz was used in France in the 1920s and 1930s to discuss important social issues related to French identity, exoticism in French society, and the participation of France in a world of modernity.