4/24: Mark Lomanno: “Modulating Bodies and Intimate Incorporations: Trauma, Improvisation, and Belonging.”

Music Center rm. 131, 1:20 pm.

This colloquium is initiated and supported by Professor Nicol Hammond in partnership with Kira Dralle on behalf of Indexical and the Black Sound Symposium.

Click the link for more information about Indexical’s Black Sound Symposium

This presentation explores chronic pain as a disposition and delimiter of performance ethnography, specifically the critical and creative methodologies that result from an ethnographer-in-pain improvising a path toward productive performance at the piano bench and in "the field." Drawing on phenomenological interpretations of several performances in which I performed as a pianist during fieldwork in the Canary Islands, I highlight how the postures and collaborations of those with “flawed” bodies—particularly the tactics developed to deal with processual failure and the risks inherent for self-inflicting bodily harm in performance—can shed new light on critiquing ableist assumptions of embodied ethnomusicological and jazz studies. These tactics also provide valuable insight into how “acoustemologies of intimacy,” listening practices that draw on a spectrum of sensory and sensual perceptions, foster more inclusive communal bonds amid shared vulnerability and commitments to collective healing.

Dr. Mark Lomanno (they/he) is an ethnomusicologist and jazz pianist currently serving as director of applied music and assistant professor at Albright College, in Reading, Pennsylvania. A former Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow, Lomanno is co-founder of the Jazz Studies Collaborative, the current media editor for the journal Jazz Perspectives, and a former chair of the Society of Ethnomusicology’s Improvisation Section. His ethnographic, performance, and scholarly work is based in the Afro-Atlantic world, most especially on the Canary Islands. In addition to a forthcoming monograph on intercultural collaborations in global jazz, Lomanno is co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Improviser’s Classroom: Pedagogies for Cocreative Worldmaking (Temple University Press).

The Black Sound Symposium is a 4-day event full of concerts, talks, workshops, screenings, and interdisciplinary dialogue rooted in Black sound and Black sonic space. The symposium aims to create and sustain community; to celebrate curiosity, wonder, disobedience, collaboration, and play in artistic work; to expand anti-racist and activist pedagogy and methodologies in and outside of our institutions; and to honor the long and rich lineages of Black virtuosity that have been diminished and erased from artistic canons and social consciousness.