 Okay, welcome everyone to our Conversations in Freedom, Art and Heritage. And today we are going to focus basically on interactive musical themes. And our first presenter is Highland Kim from South Korea and the UK. She just included her PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of London. And she's now also a teacher at that university. But also, more importantly, she's a taekwom player, a big flute. And basically she studies how music can be very interactive, using traditional South Korean music, paired with jazz. And our other presenter today is Deborah Withers from the UK. She's an independent researcher who is also a trustee of the feminist archive south in the UK. And currently she's writing a book called Accessing the Art in There, which focuses on feminine generations and transmissions along with digital culture. And her theme today we'll be talking about music-making and feminist generations. So today we're going to start off with Highland Kim with her presentation. Thank you. Thank you so much. Today I'm going to talk about interactive music-making between Korean traditional music and jazz. As a musician who plays traditional music, I realized that to use jazz and traditional music could be a useful way to increase relevance and the mainstream appeal of traditional music in contemporary world. Accepting jazz as an agent of globalization in the late 20th century, I began a project with jazz musician to explore aesthetic connections between Korean music and jazz. Before talking about this collaboration, I will give you a virtual introduction of my flute, the taekwom. During the Shinra Kingdom, one of the Korean kingdoms in the bay in 660 AD, the flute gained its current title, taekwom, which denotes a big taekwom flute. So basically it means a big flute. So the Samgoksae, the history of the three kingdoms, written in 1145, is the most significant indigenous source of this time. The legend of the sacred taekwom was documented in this book. The top of the island split into two in the morning and joined as one in the night. On the next day, the world shook, it rained and the wind blew, and the world was thrown into darkness for a week. When the king himself went to the island, a dragon appeared and told him that if the bamboo of the top of the island was cut down, made into flute and bloom, blown, the country will be peaceful. In the Jinca Dada Tree, the flute made from the bamboo was called Taekwom. So flute to calm 10,000 waves. So the origin meat of this flute is non-plastic. So flute to calm 10,000 waves. So I've told you very briefly about the history of taekwom. The next thing to do, I'll just briefly introduce my taekwom. There's basically two kinds of taekwom, long one and short one. This one is for chord music. So usually played in the royal palaces. So it's quite stable and meditative, and it's got big emotions, which creates various kinds of articulation or tone qualities. And six finger holes. And one of the characteristics of this flute is that it has an overshadow of both memory. So if I just play normally, just wooden flute sounds and normal sounds, but if I overglow it, it buzzes, it makes some kind of buzzing sound. And as you can see, there's another one which is shorter than the big one, chord flute, chord piano. This is for folk music. So this has shorter body, which creates brighter tone colors. So it's more suitable for outdoor activities, which is appreciated by some public people. So, okay, I'll just give you little examples of the sounds. As I told you, this is using the royal families, so it's more stable and quieter. I think this can remember works for the color of the timbre, color of the sound. Okay, let's move on. This is a micro tegum. The tegum is considered one of the most representative of Korea's traditional instrument. This paper explores how an instrument of full of history can be accepted as a tool for creating new music in the present era. Although it's a sound word, the techniques associated with it can be developed. More specifically, I will show, present one aspect of fusion jazz, focusing on the interaction between jazz and Korean traditional music from the perspective of both an ethnomusicologist and a tegum player. Okay, let's start with the history of Korean jazz. During from the instance of African American traditional music, the blues and European popular and classical traditions, the reinvention of African music occurred in the 1920s in New Orleans in the form of what we today know as a Dixieland jazz. Since that time, jazz has continued to evolve in many ways, such as bebop, free jazz, fusion jazz and others. But it was only in the last decade of the 20th century that it facilitated and exhalated by the process of globalization. Jazz most notably began to evolve in a way that took it beyond its African American identity. Therefore, throughout its history, the particular practice of emigration occurs various sources from different cultures while maintaining its identity. Jazz has been used as a tool by local jazz musicians outside the United States to interpret and reshape the conservative values preserved in their countries. Roses argued that in the process of its fusion with local music jazz has become too international to be characteristically national. However, Taylor Atkins notes that the drift of jazz has provided a basis in which people can participate in a cultural movement and historical trajectory that has transcended national boundaries. And Belliner also argues that in the process they are also enriching their own nationality within the global context. I'm here talking about Korea, of course, on its way around the globe. The deterioralization of jazz explains the Korean jazz scene that gave birth to a kind of a hybrid jazz by fusion with the diverse kinds of music already existing in the country. I'm going to present this interaction but as it has happened between jazz and Korean traditional music. The history of Korean jazz, the first stage of the history of jazz in Korea was launched under Japanese colonization. During this competition, the Korean musicians had been increasingly affected by western influences. China, the third, Japan. And the local scene was concurrently affected by the growth of foreign labels such as Victor and Columbia and their local branches in Korea. There was a tendency for songs with a western flavor to be called jazz songs, jazz songs. So us, oh sorry, yuhengga, songs in fashion. Among yuhengga pieces, jazz songs, jazz songs was the term used to describe songs from the 1920s to the 30s which deliberately utilized foreign languages and conjured up a sentiment of a civilized urban culture. Jazz songs encompassed not only those having jazz elements but also ones with any characteristics representing their origin in the West. American popular song, French song, Italian canzone, leader, semi-classics, tango, rumba are all included. And the term jazz came to be considered as an equivalent to the later term of pop. Namu Habitabo, written by Hye Song Kim in 1939, who is regarded as one of the most famous jazz song composers at the time, is an example. Its style resembles early jazz but the lyrics used in this piece are drawn from Korean Buddhist channels. What you can see is that it sounds like the style of the swing jazz, but actually these old lyrics are from Korean Buddhist channels. Namu Habitabo is a part of Korean channels. It's quite true. The second stage of Korean jazz opened when the dominance of Korean culture shifted from Japan to the US. Within a few years of liberation from Japan at the end of the Pacific War, the radio station American forces Korea Network of AFKM began to function as a medium bringing American culture to Korea. Its contents became a symbol identified with local peoples' disposition to cutting-edge elitist cultures. Korean musicians were employed under personal contracts with individual American clubs, but only when substituted to jazz musicians from America were needed. Actually bringing Americans to perform in Korea were quite expensive. Accordingly, from 1957, professional management companies named Yong-yuk Bul-sui-bap-tae started to handle the conflict with Korean musicians who, given the poverty surrounding them in the Korean society, as the country began its long recovery from the civil war, were eager to work in the shows. The Western culture, which emanated from the army camps, or was called G.I. Inna, which is US army culture, but in the wake of the perception by some musicians that these jazz had little originality, attempts to return to more original spirit of jazz and to identify Korean jazz began to be made in the 1970s and 80s in Korea. These attempts gained a foothold with culture-flat forms such as the space diet, and with the development of local recording companies such as what was later known as sound space. From now on, I'm going to explore interactive music-making of Korean jazz and Korean traditional music between the late 1970s and today through three different perspectives. Korean jazz musicians living in Korea, Korean musicians who are trained and educated in traditional music, and transnational musicians living and working outside of Korea, including me. One of the representative groups leading the trend on the jazz side, representing the first perspective during the 1980s, is Kang Trio. Consisting of Taewon Kang, saxophone, Taewon Kim, drum, and Sunbae Choi, trumpet, formed in 1978, the trio often gathered at the space theater and collaborated with diverse musicians, including the original members of the percussion quartet, Tama Roody. Tama Roody is a Korean traditional percussion quartet, I'll also introduce it properly later. So this space theater is quite important to places in terms of the development of Korean music. The space theater is one of the most significant platforms for experimentation in performance. It is built by a prominent architect and cultural activist, Su-Gun Kim. It provided a variety of artists with a chance to meet and create experiments, outcomes, yielding flourishing encounters between artists in a very variety of concerts, cutting across genres from free jazz to pan music festivals that mix contemporary music and traditional music. In fact, Tama Roody, the Korean percussion band, gave their first performance ever in 1978 in this venue, just as the Kang Trio was formed. So let's return to the Kang Trio. This is Tama Roody. Let's go back to the Kang Trio. Kang Trio leader, Kang Taewon, was born in Incheon in 1944. His first instrument was a pianist, studied while a student in Seoul Arts High School, and he turned to saxophone when he decided to focus on jazz. He was a brilliant technique. He has brilliant techniques such as diverse intonation, numb breath, circular breathing, rotophonic and explicit turning. Because of this, he is acknowledged among jazz maniacs and critics as one of the three best free jazz saxophonists among jazz in the world, together with Evan Parker in England and Nat Rodenberg in the US. The trio's early performances at the space theater were compiled in a single track, so free music trio on the album, Korean Free Music Live Improvisation. This album also features British saxophone player Evan Parker and a duo recorded with the Japanese musicians Takata Midori. Kang's reputation is particularly significant in Japan, where he founded a free improvisation group DONGKUNAMI with the Midori Takata percussion and sato masiyoki piano in 1982. They produced the two albums, PARANGOK and ANCIES BRITS. At the same time, Kang continued to work with Korean traditional musicians, including the original SAMELORI group and the composer and double-grade flute player, PD player. The album DONGKUNAMI was released as a result of collaborations between Kang and the Korean East Coast Shaman and Shroom specialist Kim Yong-taek, and his nephew and tango double-headed drum. You will see later tonight, I'm going to perform tonight, Kim Yong-taek. It was co-produced by the Victor record company in Japan and the Korean label SAMSKI SPACE. Let's have a listen to an excerpt of the top debut. You can hear the sound of the shon, this is traditional shon. This is super-imposed by Kang's saxophone. This is an articulation of a practice on location and an expressive vibrato. This is quite short, but anyway. At the time, the approach to music-making of Kang and his collaborators strongly influenced a number of young musicians working in both Korean traditional music and jazz circles. One percussionist, Park Tae-chun, is notable among them. Kang and Park formed the Kang duo in 1996. Park Tae-chun was born in 1961 and graduated from Chungang University in 1986 with a degree in competition. He invented a new drum set that consisted of a mix of Korean and Western percussion set up on the floor in the way as Korean percussion would be routinely placed for Samuluri performances. In addition to the Kang duo, Park Tae-chun has developed a series of projects with a jazz pianist, Miyeon. Dreams from Ancestor is one of the Miyeon and Tae-chun's albums, which won the Best Album Award for Jazz, Cresce Over, and The World for Best Performance at the 6th Korean Popular Music Competition in 2009. In the last piece on the album, The Dream Forgotten, the Korean traditional rhythm and pattern, which is also known as a chik-chik, provides a pivotal structure for improvisation. At first, it follows a 62-bit pattern that is progressively cut down to 48, 36, 12, 6, 4, 2, and 1-bit pattern. Interestingly, this cutting-down process is executed in a low logical way, heavily dependent on mathematical calculation but without regard for rhythm. The geocosit, a structured improvisation, contrasting the rhythmic part, a linear melody drawn from the Korean folk song, Se-ya-se-ya, runs through the entire piece in a deep, early harmony. The celebration of a tradition in this piece is achieved by creating something new, mixing it with the old pure jazz. The duo's innovation creates a new complex rhythmic structure that still can be heard to the descent from Korean traditional music. Okay, let's move on to the Korean traditional musicians who attempt to combine jazz and Korean traditional music. Among the few groups who attempt to combine jazz and Korean traditional music with their foundation on the traditional side, Tamarul, the Korean percussion quartet, first and foremost gave them both national and international reputation. There was a group of jazz musicians called Red Soul. Of the inspiration this percussion quartet made, the project band SXL, consisting of a well-known jazz musician including Bill Russell and Shanker, played a number of shows in Japan. The collaboration resulted in two recordings, live in Japan and SXL, into the island, outlands. Later, Loweswell turned sound engineer for our further experimental album by Tamarul alone, Record of Changes. As international interest in Tamarul grew, the group came to the attention of major recording companies, and among them, Polygram published what has become one of the most notable fusion mass pieces, Red Sun's Tamarul in 1989. A joint project of the Tamarul in Sambo with the German jazz group Red Sun. This became something of a global hit, selling 70,000 copies and led to additional interest from the more avant-garde jazz label ECM, run by Manfred Ahena. ECM published the album, then comes the White Tiber. Moreover, Red Sun and Tamarul have been invited to various kind of jazz festivals and have played with internationally acclaimed musicians such as Street Korea, Harvey Henko, the Miles Davis group and Steve Get. As you may hear, the fusion sounds pretty good, but you also notice that through the tendency remains, the tendency still remains in which Tamarul remains Korean jazz, remains a rather contemporary jazz. My second example of a traditional musician is Wonhyun. Wonhyun is a composer and Korean oboe, a P.B. player and percussionist based on his rich experiment of studying Korean traditional music, shaman music, samyulori and P.B. oboe. Wonhyun has actively composed new music for dance, stage and screen. Won received the Goldinbell oboe for his film score, Gwonil, a Petrol, in 1996. A film about the citizen uprising in Gwangju in 1980 and its violent suppression by the military and has received the SING award on three further occasions. He has been a member of various groups focusing on creative Korean traditional music, contemporary development of tradition. Seulgi-dong formed in 1985 is one of the longest-lived and most popular ombos of this sort. They aim to create new folk songs touching the Korean ethos through the use of traditional elements. Seulgi-dong, a creative traditional percussion ombos founded in 1993, and the group Parangot-cape of wind, an instrumental ombos, specializing in the development of music, dramas and composed of Taedong-flit, P.D. oboe, Kayagum and Kamungo-zitters are two other groups, one has been associated with. He is currently a professor at the Korean National University of Arts. When the 15th scholar in ethnomusicology at UCLA for a year, one made his first solo album, Asura. This is the cover of Asura. In the album, a number of American jazz musicians participated in the music albums, such as Avalgar, Trento, Lirith, Smith, Pianist, Art, Hiragaya, and Bassist, Toast, Asipa, and the first track, Moonlight Sailing, which we are going to hear now. The story of the music is quite... Actually, it takes the Korean folk song, Mongu for Taeyang, and modifies it, transforming it into a standard jazz song, with obvious harmony changes and rhythmic sections. So let's move outside of Korea to my third segment. Jin-hee Kim is a Kamungo, Korean sixth string visitor, as you can see on the screen, who is based in the United States, born in Incheon in 1957. Kim was trained at the National Traditional Music High School, and as a composer at Seoul National University. However, unlike other traditional musicians, she decided that Korean traditional music was so unappreciated in Korea itself, that she felt unable to explore her creative passion for it fully, passion fully in the country, and so set out for the United States. There, she started MFA in Electronic Music and Composition in Mille's College. Following her graduation in 1985, Kim has had many reputable commissions. Her first composition, Yoon Se-hee, commissioned by the Cornus Quartet, was performed in 1986. An opportunity which led to further commissioning piece, Noon Rock, first performed in 1992 at the Lincoln Center by the same Ong Seong-po. She also has established the reputation as a contemporary composer, regularly commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by the Asian Society in New York. Her composition style is characterized as, as she can say, living tones. She explains these as follows. The conceptual basis for living tones, which is the essential element in Korean traditional music, is that each tone is alive, embodying its own individual-shape, sound, texture, vibrato, glissando, express nuances and dynamics. Living tones can take on a dramatic weight that makes music rich. This notion is well demonstrated on an electric combo, which she invented and for which she is a well-known. The instrument has eight strings, rather than six, as in the original Korean instrument, each of which is attached to electric pickups. The electric inputs are processed by a M-A-F-P program and modulate through her electric computer, normally synchronized with moving images projected on the screen. She normally uses a traditional one and an electric one at the same time. As a performer, she hasn't worked with prominent jazz musicians such as James Newton, Bill Frissel, Guitare, Eric Bailey, Guitare, and Eva Parker, tenor saxophone. The wide range of her experimentation with free jazz is to date, collected on eight albums. She is concerned in her improvisation to consciously about the differences of a multicultural environment. One key project was her No World Improvisation collaboration in 1989 with avant-garde overplayers and then-boyfriend Joseph, her boyfriend Joseph Selle. The ensemble subsequently toured Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Euro, Argentina, Peru, and Russia. The recording round the world contains work music tryouts. With the Senegalese and Mortian, the Indian guitar player Rahul Sariputura and a Japanese go-to player. Taking down Gini Kim's path has helped inspire my own project. Three years ago, I embarked on a project schedule and rhythm with jazz drummer Simon Barker, which resulted in a concert held in 2011 at the Korean Culture Center in London. Barker is a pioneer jazz musician who was the first recipient of the PhD in jazz at the University of Sydney. He developed a project band, The Powerland, which has a solo singer, Korean sync-style Passo-ri-singer Ito Bae and percussionist Tomon Kim, which was a film by Emma France and turned into a documentary movie Intensable Asset No. 82 in 1908. Winning various prizes, including best documentary at 2009, Durban International Film Festival, an official selection at the Durban International Film Festival, this film became something of a hit. According to my memory of when I tried to try to make a recording with him, he did not give me a clear sign where I'm supposed to start or stop. Corresponding to the groove in jazz, the pulse is a general description referring to the specific measuring standard of the Changdan, the metric patterns of the Korean tradition rhythm in Changdan, in which triple divisions occasionally multiple bits are prominent. The breath, also referred as a grouping, is the general description referring to the specific measuring standard of the Korean rhythm, which can be equivalent to the groove in jazz. I soon found that there was some abstract span in the spinning, which has a similar structure to the one Korean rhythmic structures have. The circle is not the division of a fixed circle, rather it is constantly changing but contains emotional pulse, too quiet. Sorry, I wouldn't be able to hear the drum sound. Anyway, something like that. Recently I have some quite interesting projects with some barrel-based jazz pianist Nils Brown and London-based producer-slash-hip-hop musician Go support, as part of a BBC radio project, Late Junction. I think it's one of the very interesting examples of my projects, because I performed with not only jazz musicians, but also hip-hop musicians, so I've collaborated with different kinds of musicians from different musical cultures. Actually, in the morning we just met without any discussion. We just straight on performed together and recorded some two-hour tricks, which is amazing. I think we didn't use any other kind of a methodology apart from improvisation. I think the methodology drawn from jazz can be used to create some kind of an innovate, the heritage I just inherited from... Do you know me? Okay, conclusion. It is an ongoing project for me to collaborate with jazz musicians and to apply my findings to future ventures. What I have found from the analysis so far is that there are different and layered definitions of both musical genres depending on the perspectives taken by each musician or group. These depend on a conceptualization of different abstract ideologies based on different subject positions and also on the technical medium used to deliver the abstract ideas themselves such as musical drama. Elements are wrapped with political and sociological messages on the part of the performance as well as audiences. I have discovered three perspectives that I have been taken. First, Korean traditional musicians living in Korea such as Ha-Mil-Rori, a performer in One Hill defined their music making as representing Koreanness. This in turn contains a number of musical signals representing nationalistic values. But jazz is used as a symbol of Korean modernity. A parallel case to this might be in Nepalese red as discussed by Paul Green. However, the presentation of jazz in the context of the creative Korean traditional music mainly relies on the generic types of standard jazz. Harmony, rhythm, orchestration more than the use of jazz standards. That functions as a contemporary element in the total composition. And second, however, Korean jazz musicians living in Korea understand jazz in a different way. Taking from the development of beyond the GI shows that occurred from the late 1970s onward, they are keen on abstract concepts of jazz that occurred from the late 1970s. They are keen on abstract concepts of jazz defined as individual freedom and expression. The adaptation of this provides a conceptual platform for more individually unique, adventurous and distinctive performances. So when they incorporate elements from Korean blues, they treat them as another kind of individual languages within the framework of jazz projected for environment. So the Korean legacy only serves to expand their larger, more individual improvisation language. It is not surprising that among the layers of components within new fusion Korean music jazz musicians are most often keen on exploring discrete musical stylistic components such as scales, motifs, rhythmic structures and gestures. Finally, for transnational Korean musicians in the diasporas living outside of Korea, philosophies, rather than musical forms behind Korean music become the nexus of musical representation. These include, for example, releasing and the philosophical underpinings of separate traditional music styles such as a cork, ritual, shaman and folk. Jazz, however, is more likely to be used as a methodology rather than a discrete or symbolic content. The stylistic incorporation of Korean philosophical elements within structural methods provided by jazz is used to fuse the two different musical cultures. It is interesting to see that jazz is now served as a container for holding Korean logic, allowing musicians to solidify their positions as representing the diversity of the transnational cultures. Jazz becomes a medium to convey the idealized and depositizized authenticity of Korea reflected in the diasporic networks. Where I am now. I am a traditional musician based in London at the moment. I've collaborated with many musicians including jazz musicians but the most difficult thing for me is to channel through the layers of just myself to new cultural forms. Recognize that this is difficult within Korea due to my instrument being so closely tied to the first position I have discussed here. I'm trying my research to find alternative positions in order to move creativity in valuing Korean tradition using instrument form. Thank you. So maybe we just can open up if anyone has a question. What's the impact of how you feel about playing or how you actually do play with other traditional musicians? Quite difficult just myself depending on what contest I'm playing. So I think I'm just trying to develop a kind of ability to be flexible and I need to change my cognitive systems to kind of a very complex cognitive elements involved because you've got to change the kind of even very fundamental elements such as a tuning system or how to rehearse or how to kind of collaborate or communicate. So this whole system has to be changed and I think I'm moving more spontaneous and to be more flexible which is almost impossible because I'm just a my dominant system is Korean tradition music because I've just trained as a tradition music from a young age. So it's quite difficult but it's not impossible I believe. So I'm trying to gradually develop the kind of skills. Thank you. Are you always playing or is it always more of a surprise fusion contemporary jazz scene? First of all I'm just performing with different kinds of different genres not only jazz like other Asian musicians or classical sort of things. So I just focus on each aspect of interest in this whenever I'm just performing in different genres of music and in terms of jazz I'm performing with different kinds of jazz styles of jazz as well sometimes it's quite free improvisation style of jazz sometimes it's a big band sometimes it's standard jazz band but I'm more interested in some more freer structured less structured jazz because that really allows the incorporation of genres instead of anyone else? We can welcome Deborah here for her presentation. Cool. So yeah this is something not completely different it's actually different compared to yeah so my presentation is about archiving the cultural heritage of the women's liberation movement and it's based on practice based research that I've conducted on cultural activism of the UK women's liberation movement which has been conducted from about 2007 until now so broadly grassroots or unofficial heritage the practice based research has resulted in the creation of archives both digital and physical exhibition curation and basically just actually creating the material artifacts of women's cultural memory and disseminating them so and this is just an example it's been predominantly based on blogs so I've used blogs as a means of disseminating cultural heritage which is quite low budget so the first one is the feminist archive south which I'm a trustee of and we just have a website it's not so much a platform for dissemination and the women's liberation music archive which I'll talk more about because this presentation is about music making of the women's movement but that basically documents the history of music making from 1970 to 1989 in the UK and Sister Shelley visited was a local history project about feminism in Bristol where I live from 1973 to 1975 so very much using these tools that are readily available so why this is doubly important for heritage or why I think it's important to look at feminism and the history of feminism through a heritage lens is because I argue that feminism is defined by generational thinking as such so I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with the kind of narrative tropes that are passed around about feminism but I'll just summarize them for you there's a strong reliance on these narrative tropes of the waves so there's the first wave, the second wave the third wave and now we're talking about the fourth wave of feminism so this is very these kind of generational based narratives have the effect of containing our relationship to feminist history and feminist knowledge production so they frame what we know already about generations so we don't need to sort of revisit what happened at a particular time in feminist history this is an argument made by the feminist theorist Claire Hemings so even though there's this reliance on these narrative tropes I would suggest that generation remains largely unthought within feminism and I say largely because there's a article Kate Eichhorn who's written a recent book called The Archival Turn of Feminism which begins to unpick some of these ideas but because it remains largely unthought we need to pay attention to the processes of transmission of how knowledge and heritage is transmitted across generations so I've got a quote there which is kind of disappearing from the bottom of the PowerPoint it's okay I can just say what it is yeah so tradition is one name for knowledge tradition raises the question of the transmission of knowledge and that's a quote from Bernice Stiegler so really what I'm interested in doing within my work currently in this project that I'm writing up is to look at politics politics and tradition and what it means to kind of develop a political standpoint towards the question of tradition and transmission of knowledge which lends itself to the question of heritage so not so much innovation but the kind of the political questions that are invested in traditional anyway yeah tradition so I should go on so the UK Women's Liberation Movement when is it? it's a period that's also often referred to as Second Wave Feminism but I tend to not refer to it as Second Wave Feminism because I don't want to fall back upon these trade-like narratives and I've rarely seen women in the archival work that I've done I've rarely seen women describe themselves as Second Wave feminists at the time they've only ever described themselves as being involved in the women's liberation movement so I think it's very important to acknowledge that archival specificity and obviously an extraordinarily diverse movement but broadly speaking from the late 1960s to the late 1980s if you want to know more about it I suggest going to the recently launched sisterhood and after project which was made in collaboration with the British Library which is an oral history of the women's movement it's got thematically organized and curated very nicely as an access point which to understand and learn more about the UK Women's Liberation Movement so my work's been many concerned with the material and immaterial culture of the women's movement so not so much looking at I guess sometimes the way in which the Second Wave Feminism Liberation Movement is framed is in terms of a search for equality which of course was part of it but I'm actually more interested in the kind of world making cultural aspects of the women's movement so my work has been oriented towards the cultural production which obviously necessitates and invites questions of heritage because we encounter them as in archives and so this picture actually is from an exhibition that I curated and it's a picture it's a poster of the Feminist Improvising Group which is nicely ties in with your your presentation so yeah so wait a minute is that how you do it? there we go so Women's Liberation Movement was one of the reasons in which that I started to do research about it was because there was just an absolute dearth of material on music making in the women's movement and I was involved in music making myself as an activist and I kind of had this inkling that there was a lot of cultural forms made in the women's movement there was a lot of musical forms that didn't have the access to them so part of the so yeah the music making edge was anti-commercial and intangible rather than intangible and I used these terms even though in the keynote yesterday there was a really wonderful problematization of the terms of intangible heritage but I think it's quite useful the conceptualization of intangible cultural heritage is to think about ephemeral forms of cultural production and that they are even though they are mobilized and used in a similar way to use the Laura James Smith's description of heritage and how it's used I think there is a clear difference between intangible forms of monumental heritage and ephemeral forms of cultural production I think on a material level so I think it's worth and I'm going to come on and talk about the convention for intangible cultural heritage as a tool to think about heritage in a minute so it's not necessarily tied to a specific place that could be plaqueed so events took place in you know squats or temporary accommodation so it has this very ephemeral nature so in a way it's very it's very in opposition to how the popular music heritage is often heritageized in the sense of you know here's where this great event happened we'll put a plaque outside of it it doesn't have any of these kind of things and it doesn't actually have very many records either because music was often made it was made in the period of just before the explosion of DIY culture in the late 70s in Britain so studios were expensive to use and were often quite intimidating environments for women to go in and play in and record music in so there's actually not many recorded artifacts finished recorded artifacts so like an album it's quite hard to canonize popular music history if there isn't any albums any artifacts so what we do have is various different recorded remains of like practices like performances so forth so there are processual if you like remains of these histories but not the finished product but certainly not anything that you could necessarily sell again so so that's just a poster from one of the events that took place obviously says women only and yeah this is terrible because the this is the problem with open office the Libra open, try and use open software this is what happens but anyways a picture of Rachel House's feminist disco Rachel House is a London based artist and she did this thing with feminist disco which was a series of miniature islands and it was an island for the slits to live on an island for Jane County to live on and polystyrene who are obviously punk figures but are not actually part of this genealogy of women's liberation music making but nonetheless this idea and using this idea of the islands which you can't see so I'm just describing them to you as a way to think about the transmission of feminist musical memory and the kind of yeah the transmission of feminist musical memory in the sense that islands are stranded from each other and so you have this you know the islands are stranded from each other and from mainstream society so you have this always this reinsertion of women within musical heritage narratives or any kind of history narrative you know women's histories are never simply present in the way that men's histories are, it seems there's certainly that kind of orientation within feminist historical practices and you can say this for you know lots of different kinds of marginal histories as well so it's quite a nice motif thinking for sort of spatialising visualising the movement the difficulties in transmission because of you know they're just simply not connected to each other so these islands anyway you can't see them so I don't even know what the point of this power point is because it's anyway the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention I often use it more as a basic theorising rather than actually thinking about using it to recognise these forms of cultural heritage because it would be quite strange in a way to sort of demand for UNESCO recognition for these very oppositional forms of cultural history but what I'm interested in is how you can see the knowledge and skills objects, artefacts, cultural spaces associated with communities and groups and cultural heritage which is transmitted from generation to generation and how these forms of culture provide groups with interesting continuity I'm interested in this question of transmission so and the specific kinds of knowledge and skills and practices that were generated within music making within the women's movement so yeah Intangible Cultural Heritage slightly against the grain of how it's usually theorised so obviously it's often associated with non-industrial societies and traditional culture and not used as far as I know to protect the cultural heritage of radical political traditions but I think it's quite significant that there's this acknowledgement in the convention to the threat posed by globalisation and how that has a threat to the deterioration of cultural and economic diversity so I've added those two things so I think it's relevant as a tool for thinking about how other forms of culture, other forms of economic and cultural organisation outside of the dominant ones are threatened and you don't necessarily need to be protected and so it's quite I quite enjoy thinking with it as a tool but I say not necessarily something you practice but more something to think about how this can be applied to a context where you perhaps wouldn't expect it to be applied so anyway onto Intangible Cultural Heritage in the women's movement again you can't really you can't really see this but this is the Women's Liberation and Rock Band Northern Women's Liberation Rock Band Manifesto which was an artefact that was disseminated more widely than the music of the Northern Women's Liberation Rock Band so they were one of the first rock bands in the women's movement so that was the London Women's Liberation Rock Band and the Northern Women's Liberation Rock Band and they actually talk about this song is called Matriarchy and what you can't see on this PowerPoint is this notion of they talk about how we left very few traces and they were they talk about the cultural heritage of Matriarchy in this very Intangible way like you have to listen very carefully to be able to hear it so drawing on this thing about practices, knowledge, skills and techniques you can see here a picture of a music making workshop which took place in the women's liberation movement and I'm going to play you some clips from the film as well but I think maybe the sound might be a bit of a problem but actually I'll just play a thing that I'll click from a piece of music a little great an excerpt that you might be able to hopefully it will work it plays music or there are musicians drums and everything in the field they don't go around touring with their music something separate from their culture and I suppose I have some kind of fantasy that we could put music back there for for us I don't accept that performing because how else do you actually share the songs that you have on land or again in the trap because a soldier performing becomes a toxic project so I played that quote because I think it evidences this emphasis this attempt to recover women's cultural heritage in the women's liberation movement and they were all quite fixated on this idea of creating a specific women's culture that had its own different kind of values and how to get a slide in and I think they espoused this very this anti-commercial view of culture and music that wasn't separate and that wasn't commercialised and that was part of the community so it was I think it's interesting in that respect and they developed they had with these other kind of theories about what women's music was and its place and how you could escape the trap of commercialisation and the separation between the performer and the audience so it was a deeply a deeply cultural activity a deeply politically cultural activity in music making in the women's movement it wasn't just some kind of lardy-dar entertainment it was seen as this absolutely integral to the world making activities with the kind of political and economic and social transformations and it was often described as well why are we talking about music we're supposed to be using music to have fun but how can you have fun if there is sexist music playing at the disco we need to create our own representations and so forth so you get this whole thing for the relation to the UNESCO thing creating distinct representations that are distinct to the culture I don't know if the film is going to work so I'm just going to just talk a little bit about practice and then we can have a discussion because the way in which women's liberation music makers use their practice it was a combination of appropriating established forms in terms of I think one thing that's surprising when people look at the artifacts of women's liberation music making is the extent to which you can see women writing musical scores down so unlike the other radical musical traditions of the late 1970s mostly punk there wasn't this deconstruction necessarily of musical prowess it was very much about learning the techniques but appropriating it for women's advancement of this women's culture so you have this kind of score like recordings of the music but there's also this kind of more ephemeral documentation of lyrics and guitar chords it would be very difficult to really know how the melody went just by strumming the guitar so I say that musical scores are about tennis instructions but demonstrating the music is there to be reinterpreted and activated rather than simply consumed so I think that's also part of it part of the reason why they were so keen to write the music down in the way of scores because they wanted people to play it it wasn't there to be consumed in that way can you see that nice like women musical score and also guitar chords there was a simultaneous to this reappropriation of technique there was also the breaking down of technique so that's the one thing about music making in the women's movement it wasn't just one thing barely was it rock music or guitar based music it was free improvisation making up new genres taking existing forms jazz and blues and so forth so it was a very multiple thing but it was used to express this women's culture and empower women to find their voices that exit very bluntly demonstrated but I quite like it I feel very attached to these archives funny and in their kind of brutal earnestness it's very refreshing so that's another example of you can't really see it but it's deconstructing something you'd expect to find in a punk scene of the late 70s and I'll just finish with a quote from Eamonn and Jameson who wrote the Music and Social Movements who talked about the mobilization of tradition so how music remains as a way to inspire new waves of mobilization so really it's my core point in the context of this conference would be to think about how do the traditions of social movement and other kind of political traditions are the ways of living how are they kept alive, how are they transmitted within wider social and economic context it's just actually very hostile to actively attempting to contain alternative forms of social, economic and cultural relations other than capitalist ones so yeah sorry that was our put off bottom so I hope that was clear and how good your presentation was but yeah I thought how could I follow the flukes but that's it, so yeah anyway if anyone wants to ask a question feel free I have a beginning question of this aspect of intangible heritage a sort of following of the folk stuff that I'm writing to it sort of follows this I don't know maybe the discourse of intangible heritage is that it should be this very traditional non-Russianized countries and their very important traditions protection, would you argue that these more I don't remember any of you describing them as oppositional features of this music do you think that they should also be protected under the intangible heritage convention or that it's just using the discourse from the convention to bring them to life yeah it's more like I'm just using it as a theoretical means to think through how ephemeral forms of cultural production and communities of practice, communities of interest because obviously within heritage discourses there's a lot of emphasis on nationalism and I think it would be actually impossible to do this because the way in which the UNESCO processes work is that even indigenous cultural heritage end up having to be becomes assumed into the nationalist framework because the host nation so to speak has to apply for protection they have to become they have to apply through this very nationalist yeah framework so really what I'm attempting to say in the work I'm doing is that communities of interest span national and transcend national boundaries and it's perhaps an interesting way to think about heritage as something grouped around something more self identified and self chosen and maybe more around certain types of values rather than becoming assumed into a nationalist framework so yeah and also the fact that feminist political traditions it has reached a certain stage where there is enough of a tradition enough of a diverse archive and enough of a tradition of people picking up these the idea of feminism but also crucially modifying it in relation to their own you know this idea of like recreated by communities and groups in response to their environments and their interaction with nature and history and I think just taking those words nature and history within a feminist context it's really fascinating because the feminist context is about reconfiguring nature what has been defined as nature where women have been placed in a very particular role and I'm interested in this question of the mobility of intangible cultural heritage as well and how it's defined in the act of transmission or something and you know you've demonstrated that throughout your presentation of how how things change how the signal changes as something is modified and as it changes throughout space and through time and through infections with discourses through discourses which aren't necessarily anticipated like the US radio how that had this very active force in shaping the practice of Korean music and musicians so it's I think that's really fascinating how in relation to the women's movement you have women in the WSPU like giving each members like little hammers after they've smashed windows or you have the discourse of sisterhood in the women's liberation movement or you have riot girl in the 90s and how the feminist signal and the practices and the techniques of feminism change over time but nonetheless remain attached to the kind of political idea of women's emancipation and you know of course there's other kind of political traditions like you know we're starting to go about wing traditions as well 100 years ago this year you saw the members of the WSPU were aligning themselves with almost fascistic causes because they wanted to or fascistic politics because they thought that was the best way that women would get the vote in the UK so anyway yeah so I think it's this is the kind of way we can develop the politics of tradition which isn't necessarily about looking to a certain past which I don't ascribe to this notion of the past which is often about pastness but like looking at how tradition which you demonstrated is this very kind of active transmitted process in the now which is kind of exploring you know as you say all these different kind of temporal forms in the musical anyway yeah so I think that's the and do you feel like this because you're always talking about this transmission from the past to the present do you think that this off-the-grave movement of the 1970s and 70s is around do you think that this has been transmitted effectively today or that there's still very little awareness or that we've still sort of followed this dialogue of having sort of sexist music versus this underground off-the-grave music for me I feel like in the mainstream music it's still very not off-the-grave as you said yeah, yeah totally until we collected this collection of music making practices from the women's movement it was basically it was there I was talking to you about the already there before but it wasn't all, I mean the key thing about the transmission of cultural memory is to be focused and concentrated and it has to be put in circuits for it to become operationalised so you know, no I mean is the answer basically until we created it it was all there, it just needed to be organised and ordered, A to Z these are the acts and this is what they did and also once you have that organisation you can then interpret and disseminate them but yeah certainly within the field of feminist cultural memory and musical memory I'd say that you know Riot Go as a sonic imaginary and as an aesthetic has over determined the kind of yeah the sonic imaginaries of feminist music making which is interesting in itself because you know that's a predominant a specific kind of music making practices a punk practice oriented towards certain kinds of sounds and you know instruments so so yeah and yeah there's still massive inequality in music today definitely and stereotype roles if all women are involved in it you don't see half as many women musicians as you do men I mean it's great to see them influence yeah and that's like that point is a really good way into making this discussion open now the whole point of this seminar is now sort of open up to everyone to contribute any thought that they have regarding these two topics it's not really a lecture anymore so maybe I need to offer a few questions that people can answer however you want to just from what she just said and combining then what Tyler was talking about how can we combine musical tradition in a contemporary context with various themes and do you think that it's good or it's bad to do something like that because perhaps some people would argue that bringing traditional music into a contemporary context somehow damages its authenticity whereas on the other side maybe not bringing it into a contemporary context loses it completely so I think there's an interesting something interesting around the idea of tradition which probably is building on what you were saying earlier but it doesn't really exist in that it things exist and I think the search for the authenticity I don't know anything about music I want to say that in our country because of political expressions as you know I come from Iran we have a theoretical system regime and that's why music is not allowed I mean we have it in a very limited and defined by government defined form and in the last 10 years we have underground music and scenes and there are music issues who are active most of them are fusing the traditional European music with the other kind of European jazz rock and those different genres and I should say as as a consumer of music it is very pleasant for me because traditional music in Iran is a little bit sad for me it is not a pleasant music it is not a music which I I want to hear it every day and since it hasn't been developed for years I mean we don't have this development in our traditional music as the other countries may have so for me personally it is a progress it is seen as a progress just to hear something new in this fusion but there are people who are professionals I mean musicians they think this kind of music is just an imitation it has no identity it hasn't got any authenticity and that's why I myself for me it's important just to enjoy the music to hear something pleasant when I hear the music but for those who are professional they have something else and their position toward this new way of music and maybe that's also a nice way to perhaps in these countries where the political discourse doesn't really allow for any type of music if there's slowly some sort of combination of using the traditional like what she's doing using the traditional sounds and the traditional rhythms while slowly incorporating these newer themes and not just immediately abolishing all traditional music and just staying underground with new ways of sounds but some sort of compromise of the traditional music but we add a temporary twist on it can you stand up or in the background I don't think it's my role of conversation there's a huge audience but all sorts of things so I don't think we need to sort of decide whether we're going to do traditional stuff or contemporary stuff it's just as people do you feel like then you have more of an audience when you are playing just the traditional music or do you feel like you have more of an audience when you play with the fusion jazz or other it's a quite difficult question because I've only been around in London for only three years so I think when I do some kind of one-off concert it's a more like I can draw more of these when I just promote myself it's like a fusion traditional contemporary things because it's a more I can target more wider range of audiences but if I I think, I think for the long term I better stabilize some kind of specific group of people who appreciate the music then I might need to stabilize some kind of stylistic idea on the music I'm trying to do with my tradition then I might better just be more specific than a different kind of stuff and combining into something so for the long term I think a better to stick to one specific idea of a tradition then develop some more stylistic ideas Have you ever had a negative reaction that you've taken these traditional sounds and used it with western music or yeah of course there must be some negative ideas they are not openly saying that this is so bad or something like that they generally think this sounds very new to them so they try to open differences but I can see there is still a kind of limitations because the fundamentals systems that each of the music has is totally different as I told you before as a tuning system even I think all the stylistic elements contains some kind of more cultural broader meaning behind it so I think if you just put them together always cause some kind of problem so we need always an negotiation or need some kind of totally new approaches to deal with those kind of difference kind of new experiment so I think yeah but I just try to impress it and try to develop some kind of solution to sort them out I think it is an inevitable process we are exposed to so many cultures with the globalization and there is no other way where people are supposed to summon new things and they want just to experience new everything regarding arts, culture music so I think it is not a process which can be stopped it is a very natural thing I just want to ask people about what they think about reading intercultural culture heritage as I have done in terms of other kinds of traditions outside of nationalist traditions I am just wondering if anyone has come across any literature or perspectives that have moved close to the way I am talking about it in any way they can't seem to find any so I would appreciate it I have found that project really fascinating the ephemeral nature of the archive and the feminist movement that you are looking at in this particular concept was really interesting but it begs the question for me about improvisation which was kind of a link I am wondering about the role of improvisation within the music as opposed to within the kind of practices around the sort of music practices that you are looking at specifically within the music can you say something about the improvisation or whether there is some or isn't some because that implies an openness in the sense of the traditional Korean music with an openness to kind of jazz improvised so I just wanted to comment on that the feminist improvising group I don't know if any of you know Maggie Nichols but the feminist improvising group was one of the first women's feminist improvising groups they had people like Georgina Bourne Sally Potter the feminist filmmaker Lindsay Cooper who died last year and various other folks from the women's movement so they drew on so many different styles absolutely this kind of idea of improvisation as a social practice within the women's movement was definitely taken up by certainly Maggie's work and she went on to do this collective contradictions which was all about people being in their contradictory rhythms together so and about enabling other people to try different things because one of the other things that was important in the women's movement was the music making practices were broken down and made accessible which was the point of the workshop photo that I showed you so they were spaces of improvisation and indeed the whole project was a project in improvisation in an abstract sense because people were just making it up as they went along within certain structures within structural comings together but I think it really is an improvised larger action certainly not following an established script but trying to create the world in a different rhythm a different organisation a different structural relationships which improvisation allows to agree with its emphasis on becoming together and listening to each other in different elements so I was wondering could you talk as well about more about improvisation and your experience perhaps of doing the final example that you used with the ghost poet and the other person so yeah how was that for you I think it was possible because we all have a very solidified idea of our grounds so I'm from the Korean tradition and he's from jazz the other one is from hip-hop but that's why this kind of improvisation the concept of improvisation was actually working quite well so improvisation is not all about freedom unless you don't have any grounds it's impossible to do it I think so I think it was good to have some kind of a solid idea about your identity then that impossible possibility can be happening so that's why I was wondering actually what it comes to define the heritage I think it's all about the definition so have you thought about the stylistic ideas what is the music for a feminist movement to use the genre genre or you said you sometimes adopt borrowers of blues, genders it just was loads of different things it was like women's music was like no one knew exactly what it was but it was lots of different forms and different appropriated forms but also trying to create these new forms which are also drawing on other traditions so it was a multiplicity it wasn't a genre it was a practice there's a bunch of things so in a way that's what's made it hard to grasp for people over time it demands you to engage in it and its complexity which is music has a social and cultural practice which can't be necessarily sold as such but what it's formed and moved into is that absolutely intricate with the culture they were so so fixated on not being commercial and they had such a very nuanced critique of the culture industry and popular music what it did to relationships and what it did to what it did to representations of women that the image of women so it was all part of part of that so I find it absolutely fascinating for that reason as a body of cultural production which absolutely necessitates engaging with it as a form of heritage rather than something that can be necessarily reduced to heritage can be reduced to one thing but anyway it's however revolving and just start babbling doesn't matter I think from my experience I might have just drawn roles and started studying it from different genres I think it's quite difficult to eliminate this kind of cultural meaning that music originally contains for example some rap or jazz if you are just a music of a dose of jazz there are always like the inputs of jazz and the reason it has which I submitted to the collaboration I just do with jazz and jazz so I'm just for example when you're just drawing on some kind of English folk music have you just ever think about some kind of nationalistic ideas which is contradicted to the feminist movement have you experienced that kind of conflicts sorry can you say that what do you mean the in relation to the traditional music the nationalistic folk music I'm sure there's this very traditional in the highlands any kind of music does that conflict with the no I think it's it's really congruent actually with the English folk tradition and that certainly performs like Frankie Armstrong she's an amazing she's just the best so Frankie Armstrong is amazing she's a traditional singer of songs and she made this album called the female frolic in the late 60s which is one of the first albums of women's songs so drew on those traditions of the folk revival and I think considering the UK context it hasn't ratified the intangible the convention for intangible cultural heritage because apparently intangible cultural heritage doesn't exist in the UK it does but I think it's comparable I think the way in which people in the folk revival were talking about music and folk culture is probably the closest ally in terms of understanding and certainly in terms of my approach and orientation to it and how certainly how I've approached the archives and its remains are very very comparable to that traditional song again so I think it's a closer a closer ally and then I'm all like the English identity thing and that was the product of a specific kind of mobilization of the folk revival done by whatever his name is the blame for starting it but yeah, it's kind of it's how you put spin on it it didn't necessarily express anything essentially English it's just the way in which certain people adopt cultural forms and manipulate them essentially or use them to express ideas I think it's very I think it's a worthwhile comparison to my opinion it is also going along with what we discussed earlier about having this fusion between this I mean traditional music not so much like ancient but traditional music that's now playing to contemporary contemporary music and I also wanted to draw again on this concept that you talked about and no plaques I really like that statement because I think in with the introduction of UNESCO World Heritage sites and now with the intangible heritage convention there's some sort of necessity to have faiths defined and people argue against the intangible heritage convention because it is so hard to define what is good universally recognized art or music or language and just because something should be protected and preserved doesn't mean that another tradition which maybe isn't as well known such as this oppositional music and this immigration shouldn't be protected itself so I think that it's nice to bring up this discourse that this amazing tradition existed which is not even really well known in comparison to what has been plaqueed technically on the heritage sites so I don't think it's universally I don't think it's I don't think it's necessarily I think it's potentially universal but it's it's self-selecting in a way I mean it's not going to culture heritage isn't going to resonate with everyone but it's going to really resonate with some people who have those values and who want to have those kind of those ideas in their lives it's not necessarily universal significance even though it would probably help the world certain elements of feminist politics I mean not all of the music of the women's liberation movement is of that quality probably yeah so that's what I wanted a bit to open the conversation I was going to but UNESCO is resonating it's to kind of for me it's something that's used as a a way to it's one way to talk about something that's important to people and it wouldn't claim to be the only way of talking about it but it's and it's actually a political way of talking about it maybe isn't the one that's the relationship between UNESCO and geopolitics almost about to start looking at that yeah and there's also the memory of the world project which is kind of like it's the extension of the intentional list where it's like newy newy working to preserve media even more so so maybe that would be interesting to get into and you know it's not something where that's the only mechanism of safeguarding it but if there is some sort of hidden discourse as because it's associated with UNESCO that somehow there's this elitist group of things that have been said to be more important when we realistically to most people everyone has a different opinion of what should be safeguarded and and it's so still very European-ized in its direction absolutely there's just one way of talking about it anyone else have any other question but it is not very related to the discussion I wanted to ask you if if there are some external elements or national elements which have some impact on the development of music in a special area of country as you were playing the float I had the impression that it sounded like what it's called the sounds of the birds as you were playing the terms and melody was like you're hearing the birds is it possible that the music have been influenced by national elements national elements like natural natural nature yeah of course I think the nature the basis of the instrument is very close because the tuning system is based on that bamboo so I think all the tuning systems comes from that the length of the bamboo which means even though the tuning system is quite different from the western equal temperaments the reason why we use that bamboo the tree as a basis of the measurement of everything not only to the music but also other length weight social measurement so I think we show respect to the nature that might kind of relevant to the sound as well so I think it reflects the kind of basis of philosophy with the kind of intention to project through the sound I think basically in a concluding statement you can basically really understand even though we have two very diverse topics today it was really interesting to really understand this sort of off-the-grain conception of music and oppositional using traditional methods while transmitting this into contemporary themes is really prominent and especially even having a performer now this combination of fusion and tradition is really beautiful and I think that is really taking us into the next years we'll see a lot more of this theme which is just fantastic thank you this is quite rich on now still so break it down