Sonia Seeman: Metaphoricity, Iconicity and Mimesis in Turkish Roma (Gypsy) Music

The Center for Ethnomusicology is pleased to present a public colloquium featuring  Sonia Seeman (Assistant Professor, Department of Music, University of Texas at Austin), entitled:

Metaphoricity, Iconicity and Mimesis: Towards a Musical Semantics of Social Identity in Turkish Roman (“Gypsy”) Music

The colloquium will be held from 4-6PM on Tuesday, November 6, 2009, in 701C Dodge.  It is free and open to the public. For more information, please click here.

One primary concern of musicology and ethnomusicology has been refining theoretical tools for analyzing the role of musical practices in constructing, maintaining and challenging social identity. This paper investigates the process by which social meanings are ascribed to sound through the example of a Turkish genre, Roman (“Gypsy”) dance tune (Roman oyun havas?). By focusing on emergent moments in which successful---and failed---linkages are formed between ideological referents and sound in varied contexts, this paper explores the semantic dimensions of metaphor theory for understanding the means by which representations of social identity are formed through engagement with music.