Gianpaolo Chiriacó
I have started out my path as a singer. Simultaneously I have studied music as cultural heritage at the University of Salento (Italy).
My bachelor thesis, on music, politics, and youth movements in 1970s Italy, with a focus on the band Area and its lead vocalist, Demetrio Stratos, made a huge impact on my future interests. I have become obsessed with investigations into notions of voice, relations between singing styles and cultural identites, and the role of traditional uses of voice in shaping contemporary techniques and approaches.
While working as a jazz journalist, and studying perceptions and representations of black Africans in Renaissance music for my PhD dissertation, I have grappled with broad questions of origins of black music. I have looked at the way music is intertwined with the construction of race and blackness, throughout the Atlantic diaspora.
In an age in which – as Noam Chomsky has recently described – greater worker insecurity found its way in universities of the socalled Western world, academic work requires a particular attention to dissemination and to the improvement of a dialogue among scholars, and between academia and all different social agents. This website is my attempt to comply with this idea.
I engage myself with writing, classes, presentations, performances, events, blogs, research groups, long conversations, video shooting, field recordings. Even though such an approach can be deemed as heterodox, and although it might raise issues of generalism, a multimedia, interdisciplinary, multifaceted work (and life, I guess one could say) is the challenge that a scholar and a researcher must face. A challenge that I am happy to accept.
Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow Researcher
Center for Black Music Research (Columbia College)
600 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605
Tel. (+1) 312-369-7981
afrovocality@gmail.com
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