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- Convenors:
-
Birgit Abels
(Georg August University Göttingen)
Barbara Titus (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
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- Stream:
- Bodies, Affects, Senses, Emotions
- Location:
- VG 4.105
- Start time:
- 27 March, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Music imbues familiarization and comfort in specific places, and the meaningfulness of sound via the lived experience builds a sense of home—that is, until the music fades. Therefore, we will explore the various ways not only in which music allows us to dwell but in which we dwell in music.
Long Abstract:
Music is more than a representational practice; it is a mode of knowledge that helps people constitute places, especially as their own. Specific music-making practices do not simply endow a place with meaning. Rather, these places only come into existence as home through their meaningfulness, which resonates with belonging for as long as the music sounds. Music enables the fleeting experience of this meaningfulness. While we can dwell musically, we can also dwell in music. Because we actively make sense of time and space through music, both of these types of dwelling are facets of the complex experience we call home.
In this panel, we will bring together colleagues who are exploring different aspects of home-making practices through various musics around the world. What constitutes a musical home? How do we inhabit places musically? How does music carve out a sense of home from both time and space? Does it perhaps engender a time-space of its own? What concepts and tools are helping us to better understand these processes?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Birgit Abels (Georg August University Göttingen)
Paper short abstract:
Introduction to the panel
Paper long abstract:
Introduction to the panel
Marje Ermel (Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University)
Paper short abstract:
Accompanied by sound recordings, my presentation will explore how the meaning of home is constituted in this temporary time and space through the process of active listening and music-making among international Krishna devotees in Mayapur, India.
Paper long abstract:
"'[H]ome is where the heart is' needs to be taken quite literally. Yet the home is also where the ear is... " (Labelle 2010: 52). LaBelle's words resemble the view of Krishna devotees that we first get to know places through our ears, and that one should seek a sonic shelter in the music of the Lord's names.
Devotees refer to Mayapur as a Dham, a dwelling place of the Lord, where Krishna himself appeared in 1486 AD as a saint Caitanya Mahaprabhu and initiated sankirtan, the liberating practice of chanting and singing the God's holy names. Today, Mayapur is a growing 'Vedic city' which appears as a messy and noisy construction site. The sign "No mundane sound allowed" on the gate of the new temple and the main residential area refers to the complex spectrum of sound and silence in which one dwells and learns to sonically design one's place of safety and well-being. Devotees believe that singing and listening to the music of Kirtan protects from the materially contaminating sounds and purifies one's heart, enabling to feel at home in the ongoing pastimes of the Lord.
I will explore, accompanied with sound recordings, how this process of making home takes place in this sonically complex environment through music-making and active listening. I would suggest that through the music of Kirtan, devotees evoke and recreate certain realms, constituting the sense of home and the sacred mode of being in a place.
Reference:
LaBelle, B., 2010. Acoustic territories: Sound culture and everyday life. A&C Black.
Thibault Fontanari (UCLouvain University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper describes the singular spaces and times of singing and walking by which the inhabitants of a village in the Karakoram Range remember a herdsman’s exemplary actions and imagine their future.
Paper long abstract:
The paper attempts to understand how the herdsmen of a village in the Karakoram Range in northern Pakistan imagine and remember by walking and singing. Remembering is intimately related to their walk on the mountain paths towards the pastures. At the time of their construction, these paths are named after a deceased or an elder and become thereby prayer and remembrance places. The person for whom the path is built is sometimes praised in a song. These songs tell the story of a herdsman's journey and emphasize the exemplary actions he made such as facing a storm, leading a herd or crossing a cold river. The paper attempts to consider singing and walking as two related ways by which people remember the exemplary actions of a herdsman and by which they imagine their future in the world. Remembering and imagining are here rooted in the singular spaces and times of walking and singing by which people dwell in the world.
Barbara Titus (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which musical practices of inhabitation are appropriated as controlling cultural fixations. It also addresses the ways in which communities and individuals embrace, twist or queer such fixations, (re)creating their own spaces of dwelling and belonging.
Paper long abstract:
This paper engages with the tension between musical home-making and cultural domestication. In particular, it explores the ways in which musical practices of inhabitation are appropriated as controlling cultural fixations. Senses of home are employed to 'unhome' and disown people. The paper also addresses the ways in which communities and individuals simultaneously or subsequently embrace, confirm, twist or queer such fixations, (re)creating their own spaces of dwelling and belonging.
I focus on the South African music genre maskanda that functioned for decades as the aural equivalent of an apartheid 'homeland' - a musical reserve that was consciously tailored towards the containment of people through the dissemination of cultural stereotypes. I provide a close listening/viewing/reading of Shiyani Ngcobo's performance of his song 'Asina lutho' ('You see us with nothing') in the Tropentheater in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 2010. The maskanda song states in words, sounds, dance and dress South Africa's violent history of forced movement and restriction in geographical, cultural and social respects. Ngcobo's performance is a powerful personalization of public space demonstrating how South Africans manage to dwell in such enforcements and re-spell them, musically and culturally.
Through this act of close listening I further explore Sara Ahmed's notion of 'homing' (2003, 9), a reprocessing and regrounding of habits (singing techniques, tonal material), objects (riffs, songs), names, and histories that have been uprooted in decades of apartheid segregation, oppression and cultural isolation as well as her acknowledgement that 'diasporic or migratory homes can "queer" conventional conceptions of home' (2003, 8).
Petra Garberding (Södertörn University)
Paper short abstract:
Music does not only create a home for human beings but we also create homes for music. In this paper, dwelling processes through music are studied through analysis of the discursive struggle about music within the decentralization processes in music life in Sweden and the GDR 1960–1980.
Paper long abstract:
From the 1960s up to the 1980s the musical exchange between Sweden and the GDR was organized to a large extent by two authorities, the Swedish State Concerts (Svenska Rikskonserter) and the East German Artist Office (Künstler-Agentur der DDR). Performances and tours from East German artists were normally planned and controlled by the GDR government, and the East German Artist Office established a regular exchange of musicians, groups, choirs, orchestras and others with the Swedish State Concert Office. This exchange started during the 1960s and continued until the the GDR dissolved in 1990. In both states there were similar political ideas about the impact of music on human beings: Music - especially classical music - was often interpreted as an important tool to educate people and to turn them into well-educated, active democratic citizens. An important task for the two organizations was to make music available in the whole country for everyone. A new human being and a good democratic citizen should be created through a decentralized music life: Everybody, even people in small cities and on the countryside, should be able to listen to "good" music. This paper gives an insight in different discourses on music, space and home making, how music moved out from the big concert halls and into barns, schools and hospitals in order to create new democratic human beings and reliable citizens. I also discuss the discursive struggle about "good" and "bad" music during this period and how these ideas were related to the political development.
Anna Lisa Ramella (University of Cologne)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the significance of the musical performance for musicians on the move. Based on fieldwork on tour with rock bands, I will discuss practices that constitute a home on the road and consider the notion of rhythm as an overarching element of both, making music and traveling together.
Paper long abstract:
While rock and folk music have a longstanding history of traveling, latest developments in the digitization of music have increased the need to tour to make a living for most professional musicians.
A music tour involves a rhythmic structuring of time and space not only on stage, but also throughout the long days of travel. Permanent dwelling in alternating environments challenges concepts of home or place, inscribing categories of stillness in the very experience of travel and movement. Particular "prescribed rhythms" (Edensor 2010) on tour ensure a smooth traveling experience while establishing the margins within which the musical performance can reach a flow. It is often the experience of making music that serves as a reference for social, spatial and temporal situations on tour and attributes meaning to both place and travel. Ruptures to either appear as arhythmic elements of an overall, collective rhythmic endeavor.
The moment when all elements fall into place is often referred to by musicians as "cracking the code" - a condition in which a flow is achieved that transcends each practice performed on tour and on stage.
In this paper, I will explore the aspects encountered in a mobile fieldwork on tour as well as in extensive interviews with musicians to consider the notions of rhythm and flow as connecting elements between the experiences of music and movement.
Josep Marti (IMF-CSIC)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to give a view of the current relationship music/human being through the post-humanist prism. The basic idea is that understanding music as transformative technology, music makes us, as part of the very same process by which we make it.
Paper long abstract:
It would be impossible to understand what music means for human beings without the idea of "situation". But the great radical change that has been taking place in the last few decades is that music has been released from the original and specific situations for which it could have been conceived. The current powerful musical technologies and media, in quality of actants (Actor Network Theory) have made possible the emergence of a new subject characterized by the all-embracing musical listening, i.e. with a total musical availability. We can dwell in music at any time and in any situation we want. To this new subject the possibility of implementing itself in music is offered as never before.
Departing from this reality, and conceiving music as transformative technology (Aniruddh Patel), I will explore the relationship music/human being through the basic assumptions that the world is not filled, in the first instance, with facts, but with agency (Andrew Pickering) and that the individual is constituted from open-ended dynamics of intra-activity (Karen Barad). With this approach we overcome the old idea that technologies have to be understood as something totally external to humans, or only somewhat related to the social context. The basic idea that I will develop in this paper is the post-human understanding that music makes us, as part of the very same process by which we make it.