Columbia University Associate Professor of Music Ana Maria Ochoa's lecture is titled “Musical Form, Forms of Life: The Political Conundrums of Acoustic Multinaturalism.” Her presentation explores some of the tensions that permeate the notion of musical form when thought of in conjunction with indigenous modes of valuation of life on earth. It takes the motive of "monotony," the privileged description of many so-called "primitive" Amerindian musics found in the colonial archive and rethinks its form and political implications in light of the notion of acoustic multinaturalism. What is the significance of our categories of analysis (in this case the notion of musical form) in a music of repetition, extreme acoustic economy and an overt cultivation of a principle of restriction of audibility to "outside" listeners? Moreover, at a time when the politics of the decolonial is increasingly deployed through the production of film and recording by indigenous groups, what are the tensions that emerge between, on the one hand, the need to denounce political oppression and announce modes of belonging as a central practice of political struggle and, on the other, historical ontologies of music and life that privilege a politics of restriction of audibility?
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