Why Should We Cry?

We will be posting resources and references throughout the process (and welcome your input as we compile a working bibliography and references list related to this project). 

For now, we want to bring attention to a book that is currently on our reading list: Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics. Edited by Olivier Urbain and published by I.B. Tauris and the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research (2008), this interdisciplinary collection of essays includes contributions by musicians and academics organized into four sections: Frameworks, Politics, Healing and Education, and Stories from the Field.

Why Should We Cry? Lamentations in a Winter Garden is inscribed in an ongoing reflection process about art in/for/with “public” space and community. Three of the issues that we have been grappling with related specifically to this project are outlined immediately below. We look forward to a lively discussion!

Community Performance: Process and Product(ion)

Ethics of participation

Amateur VS professional aesthetics (notions of quality and excellence)

The Form(s) of Musical Laments and other Songs of Mourning

Cognitive/Affective effects of musical laments and other songs of mourning

The Function of Music in the Dynamic (Re)Construction of Social Relationships

Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity

Cultural and political impacts

Intercultural exchange and the dangers of appropriation

Music as resistance, music for forgiveness, music to integrate and move past traumatic personal and social experience