Zoom: https://umac.zoom.us/j/96877800561

Abstract

The eighteenth century saw the beginning of a circle of cultural exchange that extended from Scotland and Ireland to the United States – and back again. Scots and Irish emigrants took with them a cultural inheritance of music and storytelling that would become filtered through the American experience and would produce new forms of cultural expression. Distinctive material artefacts, musical instruments such as the guitar and mandolin, functioned as the mechanism of transmission. Our wayfarers produced a cultural record ringing with sonically encoded narratives. With the figure of the wayfarer as heuristic, this paper will draw on the discourses of phenomenology and anthropology to explore the implications of the ‘dwelling perspective’ for developing an approach to ‘roots’ music heritage research.