Talk | Symposium
Thursday | 24 October 2024 6:30 p.m.

Experimentalism, Music, and Aurality: Bogotá as a place of listening

University of the Arts Bremen | Gallery (0.05)

By Diego Alberto Gomez Nieto + Concert by Christian Rosales Fonseca, organized by PhD candidate Icaro Lopez de Mesa Moyano

 

Conference  +  Concert by Christian Rosales Fonseca

24.10.2024, 18:30 Uhr

This conference illustrates and characterizes the experimental music made by the 'Circulo Colombiano de Música Contemporánea' (CCMC) and the musical collective 'La Distritofónica' from the city of Bogotá, Colombia from an aural perspective. From both cases I exemplifies an intrinsic link between a particular mode for listening and the experimental music made in Bogotá, Colombia, which leads to see them as a phenomena that critiques the political and sonic circumstances of an aural regime that leads the CCMC and the Distritofónica's musics as liminal and abject ones in the cultural musical policies of Colombia. Diego will bring into discussion the voices of the members of the community and mediatic information to exemplify also the nexus between the music of the CCMC and 'La Distritofónica' with Bogotá explaining the metaphor and the breakpoint between ontologies of jazz and experimental music in this context.

 

Listening session

26.10.2024. 15:00–17:00 Uhr

Listening is a disciplining social practice. From this point of view we will bring into discussion the existence of an aural regime in the West based on the idea of 'absolute music'. This regime has delimited the musical (and subsequently the sonorous) from an ontological and epistemic point of view in order to constitute a "correct" way of listening to sound in (post)modernity. We are particularly interested in reviewing how the concept has led to understand what remains outside itself as noise -from a pejorative perspective- in contemporaneity. From this perspective, We understand noise as delimiting and defining for that which is not musical and, ultimately, for what is sonically abject and subaltern. In this order, this status of aural subalternity comes into conflict with "purified" listeners who bring up the concept of noise, particularly to generate points of rupture that do not fully fit the musical norm established by the "absolutist" framework. From this perspective, the experimental music made by artist from Bogotá, Colombia is presented as a place of aural and political disobedience which clashes with the regime, revealing, consequently, resilience and politically "incorrect" aural resistances that speak about and from the subaltern in the context of Bogotá.

In this listening session we bring the theory into practice inviting the community from the HfK Bremen to enter in some of music examples of some composers from Bogotá Colombia which appeals to an "absolutist" aural regime inviting the auditors, consequently, to listen from a corporeized and differential way. This invitation is allied with other modes of perception of the aural, place, space and even territories we assume as common to our cotidianity leading to new modes of perception of our aural competence, our bodies and life itself.

 

Bios

Diego Alberto Gomez Nieto is research professor at the Fundación Universitaria Juan N. Corpas in Bogotá, Colombia, where he leads the research group 'Crearte' and directs the Musicology Department of the School of Music. Guitarist and master in musicology from the University of Chile. His research is related to the subject of experimental music in the city of Bogota and artistic research in Latin America from the studies of sound and musical semiotics. He is a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-AL).

Christian Rosales Fonseca is a composer, improviser and electric guitar player born in Bogotá, Colombia. He studied composition with Prof. Jörg Birkenkötter and electroacustic composition with Prof. Kilian Schwoon at the University of Arts Bremen. After finishing his Master’s degree he started his Meisterschüler studies with Prof. Markus Löffler and Prof. Andree Korpys. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Arts Bremen and the University of Groningen.

You can find more information about the event on the Artistic PhD website.

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Bright gallery at HfK Bremen with rows of empty chairs, a microphone stand, and modern lighting system.
Bright gallery at HfK Bremen with rows of empty chairs, a microphone stand, and modern lighting system. © Hochschule für Künste Bremen – Lukas Klose