Practicum
Music in the Asian American Art Museum
Abstract
When viewing art in a museum setting, visitors are only experiencing a curated taste of any given culture. Each object can only provide a glimpse into the complexities of cultural and aesthetic mores, and the framing of the objects on display can vastly alter the narrative around an artist, an object, or a culture. It becomes the role of each institution and each curator to decide how to approach this conundrum, and the recent past has seen institutions trying more innovative techniques for communicating a more comprehensive understanding of the objects and culture they are displaying. Through collaboration with two local Asian American musicians, the Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas has been working to bring new music into the refurbished and reorganized Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM). The opportunity to create this project was made possible due to the renovation of the SAAM and the concurrent reorganization of the permanent collection. This collaborative project brings two musicians of South Asian heritage into the SAAM and asks them to respond to objects in the permanent collection through music. Musicians Ganesh Rajagopalan (Carnatic violin) and Barry Alavi (Persian ney) both present unique views into the artwork of South Asia, mediating transnational boundaries and cultural exchange. Through new music recorded for the museum’s reopening and public discussions with the musicians, we begin to understand key concepts about the art museum’s intended audience and how western hierarchies have stripped art objects from a multi-sensory experience. These musical pieces were recorded at a professional recording studio and will be distributed to the public through the SAAM’s smartphone tour app which is currently in development. This smartphone functionality will also include contextual information about the collaborating musicians as well as their own words about the project. By using the experiences of the collaborating musicians as a case study we can bring ethnomusicological expertise to the art museum, causing us to question the types of information that art history prioritizes as a discipline.
Committee
- Haicheng Wang (Art History)
- Christina Sunardi (Ethnomusicology)
- Sarah Loudon (Project Supervisor, Gardner Center)
Bio
Emma McIntosh is an art historian from Seattle, Washington, United States. She received her master’s degree in art history from the University of Washington’s School of Art + Art History + Design in August 2019. Previous scholarship on the intersections of music and art history has included an article and a conference presentation on Piet Mondrian’s record collection and what it reveals about utopian visions of the future, which she developed into an interactive VR game, and a conference paper about the representation of music in an early Winslow Homer engraving for which she won a Young Scholar award from the Association Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale.
Publications
“Songs of the War: Homer’s Print, National Identity, and Musical Gallantry” at 19th International Conference of Association Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale: “Belonging and Detachment: Representing Musical Identity inVisual Culture,” University of Tasmania (13-15 November 2019). Read more.
“Worried Notes and Troubled Light: Music and Hegel in Mondrian’s Aesthetic Philosophy,” presented at GPSS 2019 Graduate and Professional Academic Conference: “Inter(connected),” University of Washington (19 April 2019). Read more.
“Worried Notes and Troubled Light: Music and Hegel in Mondrian’s Aesthetic Philosophy,” MONDAY, Volume 3, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, Washington (February-March 2019). Read more.
Education
- Master of Arts, Art History, University of Washington, 2019
- Bachelor of Arts, Art History with minor in Music, University of Washington, 2018
