John-Carlos Perea: "Sounding Culture, Improvising Ethnomusicology in American Indian Studies"

In partnership with the Schulich School of Music, and in the context of the ethnomusicology search, AHCS is delighted to welcome Professor John-Carlos Perea to our campus.  All welcome!

 

 

MONDAY JUNE 4: 10 - 11 a.m., ROOM C-411 (4th floor of the Strathcoma Music Building, 555 Sherbrooke St. West)

 

My presentation will discuss my experiences as an ethnomusicologist and musician working in American Indian Studies in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. I will focus on four themes that best characterize my interdisciplinary interventions: musicking across powwow, Native American flute, and creative improvised music scenes, archiving media necessary to the transmission of those scenes, exploring the potential of improvisation as classroom and performance pedagogy, and the self-reflexive deployment of technology as a means through which to develop the previous themes in the present moment.

 

John-Carlos Perea is an ethnomusicologist and associate professor of American Indian Studies in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. His research interests include the politics of noise, urban American Indian lived experiences and cultural productions, music technologies, recording and archiving practices, Native and African American jazz cultures, and the Creek and Kaw saxophonist Jim Pepper. Perea is the author of Intertribal Native American Music in the United States (2014, Oxford University Press). His most recent scholarly work is “Recording Technology, Traditioning, and Urban American Indian Powwow Performance” published in Music, Digital Media, Indigeneity(2017, University of Rochester Press).

 

In addition to his scholarly activities, Perea maintains an active career as a GRAMMY® Award winning multi-instrumentalist and recording artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has recorded on eighteen albums as a sideman and two as a leader, First Dance (2001) and Creation Story (2014). His most recent creative work is Improvising Home (2016), a multi-movement work for Native American flute and large ensemble funded by grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at San Francisco State University.

 

Perea is the recipient of a 2018-2019 Sabbatical Leave from the Office of Faculty Affairs and Professional Development at San Francisco State University. The primary goal of his sabbatical project is to study the Max/MSP programming language in order to develop both creative and data-driven sonnifications of blood quantum for classroom use. The secondary goal of the sabbatical is to explore the potential of these new skills and research to form the basis for a culturally competent quantitative reasoning course syllabus.