SP27 Herrmann Lecture: Catrina Kim

Catrina S. Kim (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A recipient of the Society for Music Theory’s Outstanding Student Paper (2019) and Emerging Scholar (2023) Awards, Catrina writes and teaches across a range of topics, including formal procedures in the music of Fanny Hensel and Joseph Bologne, the raced and gendered politics of music academic labor, and the analysis of popular music and culture. She is writing her first book, Hearing the Marathon.

 

Hearing the Marathon Story

 

How do socially circulating narratives about the marathon convey its values and a broader "marathon story"? How do these social narratives relate to musical ones, or how are they already sonic or musical? And how do runners themselves engage these stories? That is, do they reproduce them, critique them, or use them as resources for their own purposes?

 

Hearing the Marathon stems from my embodied knowledge that aurality powerfully shapes my experiences as a recreational marathoner, and what and how I hear are in turn conditioned by my physical state, surroundings, and interpretive frames. Within these enmeshed physical, aural, and interpretive processes, I attend especially to the sonic norms at the boundaries of the U.S. marathon––such as musical genres, specific songs, and kinds of cheering––and persistent narratives about distance running, which tend to valorize grit and charity. The book’s central argument is that these sonic norms and social narratives work in tandem to tell and sell an appealing marathon story; in so doing, they articulate and perpetuate an American form of neoliberal subjecthood. In this talk, I describe the contours of the marathon story, as it appears in the news, on film, and in song.