John-Carlos Perea (SFSU)

Associate Professor of American Indian Studies, San Francisco University

John-Carlos Perea (Mescalero Apache, Irish, Chicano, German) is an ethnomusicologist and associate professor of American Indian Studies in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. His research interests include the politics of noise, urban American Indian lived experiences and cultural productions, data sonnification, recording and archiving practices, and Native and African American jazz cultures. Perea is the author of Intertribal Native American Music in the United States (2014, Oxford University Press). His most recent publication is “Recording Technology, Traditioning, and Urban American Indian Powwow Performance” published in Music, Digital Media, Indigeneity (2017, University of Rochester Press).

Picture credit for Headshot  © 2016 Genevieve Shiffrar

 

OVERVIEW

Improvising Home is a multi-movement composition utilizing creative improvised music to explore questions relating to identity and acoustic ecology in the San Francisco Bay Area. The work is grounded in urban American Indian lived experiences and cultural productions in dialogue with the intercultural musical lives of the ensemble members. Utilizing improvisation as a framework, a performance is not simply the presentation of an aesthetic object but a unique discussion conducted in the moment through sound.

 

PUBLICATIONS