Paper Short Abstract:

This paper shows how popular music performers in archive interviews use different ways of music-making to transcend interview conventions. These transmodal performances are used to add complexity and width to their life histories but also come to question genre as well as archival categories.

Paper Abstract:

An archive for music and dance, such as Svenskt visarkiv (the Centre for Swedish Folk music and Jazz research), holds many examples of written, audio and video recordings documenting and transcribing sound, speech and movement. With changing documentation ideals and practices, that which is documented has been circumscribed in different ways, leaving different traces in both archive material and its organization. This paper focuses life history interviews with popular schlager singers carried out within the archive’s documentation activities. I will show how the singers transcend the spoken format of the interview at special points in their life histories, for example by using recorded music or singing. These examples of what I refer to as transmodal performance provide insight into the role of extraverbal layers as both expressive and rhetorical instruments. As archive records, they also pose questions to categories that are defined by performative and communicative modes.