Sonic Cartographies in Hawai‘i Exotica

The UVA Department of Music is pleased to present Sonic Cartographies in Hawai'i Exotica, a colloquium by Jade Conlee in 107 Old Cabell Hall on Friday, October 4th at 3:30 PM! This event is free and open to the public.

In the years leading up to Hawai'i statehood in 1959, small jazz ensembles in Honolulu invented an obscure genre of lounge music called "exotica." Promoted by American record companies as sonic advertising for Hawaiian tourism, exotica featured birdcall vocalizations and timbral explorations of instruments from around the globe. Limited scholarship has treated exotica as meaningless kitsch, or worse, musical colonialism. However, I argue that exotica is a privileged site for examining some of the most pressing issues of the long twentieth century, including the entanglements of U.S. empire, sound technologies, the popular music industry, and climate change.

In this talk, I draw on archival and ethnographic research to position exotica as a "sonic cartography." I consider exotica in relation to three Hawai'i geographies: the resort, the plantation, and the forest. Exotica's sonic depictions of Hawai'i use similar spatial techniques as those used by colonial resort developers, I argue, who strove to merge Hawai'i itself with the mediated versions of Hawai'i tourists first encounter abroad. Yet exotica musicians such as Hawai'i-Puerto Rican bongo player Augie Colón and Native Hawaiian vibraphonist Arthur Lyman subverted these touristic spatial imaginaries. Lyman's and Colón's exotica albums forged cartographic connections between contexts of racial subjection, plantation labor, and sonic innovation in the Pacific, the United States, and the Caribbean. I conclude by discussing how, beginning in the 1970s with the Hawaiian cultural renaissance, Native Hawaiian musicians introduced endemic Hawaiian birdcalls into exotica, reimagining the genre as a space for "sonic sovereignty" (Reed 2019).

For more information about this event, please visit https://music.virginia.edu/sonic-cartographies-hawai%E2%80%98i-exotica.

To see all events in our colloquium series, visit https://music.virginia.edu/colloquia.

Jade Conlee is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the Music Department at the University of Virginia. She specializes in antiracist and anticolonial approaches to the history of American popular music, jazz, and music theory.

Old Cabell Hall is located on the south end of UVA's historic lawn, directly opposite the Rotunda (map). Parking is available in the central grounds parking garage on Emmet Street, in the C1 parking lot off McCormick Rd, and in the parking lots at the UVA Corner.

All events are subject to change.

Please contact the UVA Music Department at 434.924.3052 or music@virginia.edu for more information.

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