Department of Music Lecture: Graduate Student Conference Lectures
Kimia Fakharinia, PhD student in Musicology, Washington University in St. Louis
Title:
From Silence to Sound: Iranian Women Musicking under Suppression and after Migration
Abstract:
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, women’s public performances throughout Iran have faced severe restrictions, with solo female singing banned in mixed-gender settings due to conservative interpretations of Islamic law. As a result, women are only allowed to sing in choirs with male voices or as backing vocalists. Those who do not obey the law face imprisonment. A recent example of this occurred in July 2024, when singer Zara Esmaili was arrested for performing in parks and metro stations in Tehran.
This paper examines the artistic journeys of three Iranian female performers from different generations—one grew up before the 1979 revolution, and the other two came of age after, but all three eventually emigrated to the United States. To understand their musical lives in the diaspora, this study first explores the personal and artistic challenges these women faced as performers in Iran, including restrictions imposed by the government and, in some cases, their families. While such restrictions are often attributed to post-revolutionary policies, my findings reveal that social norms and cultural expectations also constrained women’s artistic freedom before the revolution. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation at musicking gatherings in the Iranian diaspora of St. Louis, this study explores how their post-migration experiences have led to substantial changes in the way they navigate their identities as performers in the diaspora.
This paper builds upon existing scholarship on Iranian female performers (Khaksar and Rahimi 2024; Ahmadian 2023) and extends it by examining post-migration experiences, particularly the role of nostalgia as a catalyst for artistic expression. Building on musicological studies of nostalgia (Garrido and Davidson 2019), I argue that for these performers, music becomes a vehicle for reconnecting with their roots, expressing their culture, and reinforcing community bonds. For the Iranian diaspora, music not only evokes memories but also actively reshapes identity and strengthens cultural connections. By bringing forth these diverse stories, this research enriches our understanding of how Iranian women navigate the complex intersection of artistic expression, societal constraints, and immigration. Ultimately, this study highlights broader themes of cultural continuity and transformation in the Iranian diaspora.
Biography
Kimia is a second-year PhD student in musicology. Her research centers on women in music across diverse cultural and historical contexts, from the challenges faced by Iranian female performers in the contemporary era to the gendered reception of Cécile Chaminade, a French composer active in the late nineteenth century. She is particularly interested in how social and economic conditions shaped Chaminade’s career and the reception of her works. Her other interest lies in the works of Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu, especially how traditional Japanese aesthetics and cultural concepts are reflected in his twentieth-century compositions that engage deeply with Western modernist influences. Prior to graduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Kimia earned her master’s in piano performance at the University of Tehran.
Bryce Noe, PhD student in Musicology, Washington University in St. Louis
Title
“Keeping Freestyle Dead”: The “Dark” Dimensions of Grey Space in Freestyle Skateboarding
Abstract
Related to death, diabolism, deviancy, and absence (Koslofsky, 2011), darkness is a chromatic frame already operative across academic and public discourse. This paper specifically develops dark discourse vis-à-vis freestyle skateboarding—an understudied subdiscipline whereby practitioners perform choreographed routines to self-selected music on open, flat terrain—to illuminate ways in which dominant skateboard circles commonly and erroneously represent freestyle as an effeminate and primitive or old-school form of skateboarding that died and vanished into eternal darkness. This study’s employment of darkness as an epistemological framework to examine freestyle draws on, develops, and problematizes recent chromatic theories of skateboarding as “grey” and occupying “grey space” (O’Connor et al., 2023). “Greyness” offers theorists a way to unsettle simplified dichotomies commonly used in skateboard studies and, thus, capture hybridity within the sport (O’Connor, 2024). Nevertheless, greyness also suggests neutrality and in-betweenness, which fail to reflect freestyle’s subordinated positionality in relation to the hegemonic and hypermasculine culture known as street skating that I contend renders freestyle a true subculture. The hypermasculinity of street skateboarding and its homophobia in the late 1980s contributed to the supposed death of freestyle due to its “emphasis on grace and technique contrasting with the overt risk-taking of much transition and street-skating” (Borden, 2019). Freestylers refer to 1992–2000 as a “dark age” when brands stopped manufacturing and selling freestyle boards, no one organized freestyle contests, and many practitioners quit. Many practitioners resuscitated their sport in 2000 by hosting contests, establishing governing bodies, and creating online forums—all of which culminated in its current tight-knit and thriving contest-driven subculture. To prevent a second “death” and maintain the camaraderie that their small subcommunity’s small size affords, freestylers have developed an insular subculture that aims to remain “dead” in the eyes of the hegemonic skateboarding industry.
Biography
Bryce studies choreography and sound in sport settings. In particular, he examines sporting spaces and events as sites whereby knowledge—both semantic and somatic—is transmitted sonically. Additional research interests include disability studies, popular music, and urban musicology. Prior to graduate study at Washington University in St. Louis, Bryce earned his Master of Music degree in Musicology at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. His master’s thesis, “Freestyle Soundscapes: An Acoustemology of Freestyle Skateboarding Contests,” is an exploration of freestyle skateboarders’ engagement with music and sound during contests as well as the (sub)cultural and gender politics embedded within such sporting spaces.