Music That Tears You Apart: Jazz Manouche and the Qualia of Ethnorace
ResearchArticle (authored, reviewed) School of MusicSiv B. Lie
Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology Siv B. Lie published an article in the journal Ethnomusicology.
Through talk and performance, participants in the genre of jazz manouche articulate Manouche (French Romani/“Gypsy”) ethnoracial identities. This article takes a semiotic approach to exploring how ethnoracial differences are perceived sonically and reified through language about jazz manouche guitar technique. By analyzing interlocutors' sensory descriptors such as power, rawness, and even the feeling of ethnoracial identity itself, this article reveals continuities between individual sonic perceptions of race and ethnicity and broader semiotic ideologies about race and ethnicity. These discourses can serve or compromise Manouche interests as they naturalize ideas about social difference.
https://www.jstor.o…83551University of Illinois Press