Dr. Jonathan Ritter to Deliver Lecture – “We Bear Witness With Our Song: Music, Memory, and the Shining Path in Peru”
Monday, April 25th at 4:00, Dr. Jonathan Ritter (UC Riverside) will visit UO as our Steven Larson Distinguished Lecture Series guest speaker in ethnomusicology. His presentation, entitled “We Bear Witness With Our Song: Music, Memory, and the Shining Path in Peru,” will be given in the Collier House living room. That evening at 7:00, professor Ritter will join our own Ed Wolf and his Andean Ensemble in an open rehearsal, in room 140 of the Frohnmayer music building. Feel free to stop in and witness Andean music in action!
(More information about professor Ritter’s presentation can be found here: https://calendar.uoregon.edu/
More than a decade after Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the publication of its final report in 2003, Peruvians continue to struggle over how the political violence that devastated their country in the 1980s and 90s should be remembered. Recent events, including controversies over the legitimacy and accuracy of public commemorations of the conflict’s victims, reinforce the consensus view that truth commissions mark the beginning, rather than the end, of processes of historical reflection, revision, and reconciliation.
In this talk Ritter will consider various musical interventions into these post-TRC processes and debates in Peru, focusing in particular on those that claim to represent the voices and perspectives of the conflict’s victims: predominantly rural, indigenous peasants from the southern Andean highlands. While some of these musical interventions arise directly within indigenous communities, including the composition and performance of testimonial songs, others draw upon anthropological research and the TRC report itself to craft fictionalized representations of indigenous music for recent “testimonial” films and novels.
Though such representations carry inherent risks, both of sensationalizing the violence and overemphasizing the alterity of indigenous responses to it, they also play a key role in mediating and transmitting traumatic memories of the war to what Marianne Hirsch (2008) has called the “postmemory generation,” those born or raised after the conflict whose lives are nonetheless shaped and haunted by it.
THEME is an interdisciplinary colloquium of faculty and student researchers in music theory (T), musicology/music history (H), ethnomusicology (E), and music education (ME). The Steve Larson Distinguished Lecture series, which honors the spirit of camaraderie and community evident in the career and life of UO music theorist, musicologist, and musician Steve Larson, is an academic lecture series coordinated by graduate students of the UO School of Music and Dance.