Workshop: How Music makes us: An interactive workshop
Friday January 9; Monday January 12; Tuesday January 13; Wednesday January 14
Block 3: 11:30-12:45 pm (NY) / 6:30-7:45 pm (Kyiv) / 7:30-8:45 pm (St. P)
In this workshop, we will closely listen to popular music of the post-1989 world to make sense of and fall in love with the messy matters of this ‘globalized’ decade. Grounding in Roxane Gay’s take at messiness, we will try to figure out the 1990s as a decade of joys and anxieties, hopes and precarities—both for the ‘Rest’ and the ‘West.’ Addressing the words and sounds of the 1990s post-Soviet and American musical authors (i.e., musicians who created and performed their own songs), we will non-hierarchically explore their subject matter and creative ways for overlaps, discrepancies, and other findings that a reparative comparison can bring. We will contemplate why and how the 1990s offered abundant possibilities of authorial agency in popular music at all, in major, minor, and semi-peripheral popular cultures. In effect, we will become equipped with a scrapbook / mixtape of the 1990s which will allow us to better understand the meaning of this decade today.