Michael B. Bakan

The Abduction of the Signifying Monkey Chant: Schizophonic Transmogrifications of Balinese Kecak in Fellini's Satyricon and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple

This article examines the de- and re-contextualisation of 1960s audio recordings of Balinese kecak performances in two landmark films, Federico Fellinis Satyricon (1969) and Joel and Ethan Coens Blood Simple (1984). It begins with a historical overview that situates kecaks own history as a Balinese cultural phenomenon within broader frameworks of hybridity, schizophonic and appropriative processes, and international filmmaking, devoting special attention to the contributions of Walter Spies. It then proceeds to close studies of kecaks use in the soundtracks of Satyricon and Blood Simple from a theoretical position of schizophonic transmogrification, which is defined as the rematerialisation and thorough reinvention of people and places whose voices and sounds, as inscribed on sound recordings, have been separated from their original sources of identity and meaning and resituated in entirely alien contexts—real or imaginary or somewhere in between—for purposes that serve especially to evoke the strange, and often the grotesque and sinister as well.

Music and Autism, Representation and Re-presentation: An Ethnomusicological Perspective

This chapter offers an ethnomusicological exploration of the relationship between music and autistic lived experience. The work as a whole builds toward—and is indeed largely defined by—a separate piece of writing contained within it: an autobiographical memoir by an American musician and musicologist who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome in his mid-40s. The memoir emerged from a series of online dialogues with the chapter’s author, in which ethnomusicology was defined as the study of how people make and experience music, and of why it matters to them that they do. It addresses and problematizes the questions inherent in that definition in nuanced and multidimensional ways, offering an account that is deeply personal while speaking to larger issues of autistic musical perception, cognition, performativity, and ontology. In so doing, it becomes a generative mechanism for a listening-based, re-presentational (as opposed to representational) way of thinking about and researching autism. Understanding autism ought rightly to begin with listening to, communicating with, and learning from autistic people—through their words and utterances, their actions and performances; on their terms, according to their values. This chapter draws from and builds upon such premises.

War of the Worlds: Music and Cosmological Battles in the Balinese Cremation Procession

Follow this and additional works at: http://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr Part of the Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Ethnomusicology Commons, Folklore Commons, Hindu Studies Commons, Multicultural Psychology Commons, Musicology Commons, Music Practice Commons, Music Theory Commons, Pacific Islands Languages and Societies Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons