MUSICAL FREESPACE: Towards a Radical
Politics
of Musical Spaces and Musical Citizenship
S.a.L.E. Docks, Dorsoduro 265, 30123 Venezia
SCHEDULE OF SPEAKERS
[with links to Abstracts]
____________________________________________________
Wednesday
12 September 2018 :: 10.00am
____________________________________________________
Impact of
austerity in the music scenes of Cergy-Pontoise and musical citizenship: ‘It is
your responsibility to make music life happen!’
Solène
Heinzl [Royal Holloway University of London] [Abstract]
Collaborative songwriting and
cultivating liminal spaces
Lucy
Cathcart Frödén [University of Glasgow] [Abstract]
Toward academia as musical freespace
Catherine Grant [Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia]
[Via video] [Abstract]
COFFEE BREAK -
11.30–12.00
Luigi
Nono’s transformation, creation, and discovery of musical space
Hyun
Höchsmann [Visiting Professor, East China Normal
University, Shanghai] [PDF of full
paper] [Abstract]
Theory and practice of the Music Room :: Towards a
manifesto for musical freespace
Ed Emery [SOAS, University of
London] [Abstract]
LUNCHTIME
– 1.00 to 2.00pm
People Music: Experimental
liberal aurality in the classroom, 1965-1980
Patrick Valiquet
[University of Edinburgh] [Abstract]
Performative
dissensus in the Greek public sphere
Dafni Tragaki [University of
Thessaly, Greece] [Abstract]
TEA BREAK – 3.00 – 3.30pm
Music breaks the boundaries of
the Sikh temple: the Nagar Kirtan procession
Thea Tiramani [Università degli Studi di Pavia] [Abstract]
Uneventful spaces
acte vide (Danae Stefanou & Yannis Kotsonis) [Abstract]
____________________________________________________
Wednesday
12 September 2018 :: 8.00pm
____________________________________________________
Music Conference dinner in a
local pizza restaurant. “Ae Oche”, at Zattere. Details to follow.
____________________________________________________
Thursday 13 September 2018
:: 10.00am
____________________________________________________
Walking sonic commons in Venice: A case study in
auditory access
Meri
Kytö [University of Tampere,
Finland] [Abstract]
Dispatches from Sicily: music, movement and the mobile
phone.
Rachel
Beckles Willson [Royal
Holloway, University of London] [Abstract]
Sio toumolaa meeta (Patience is hard): Giving voice
to migrants
Fulvia Caruso [Università degli
Studi di Pavia] [Abstract]
COFFEE BREAK - 11.30–
12.00
Free Space Music
Room
Sean
Prieske [Humboldt-University of Berlin] [Abstract]
The dialogic dynamics of musical space: Understanding
musical subjectivities and musical speech in travelscapes with the Banda Internationale
Carolin Mueller [Ohio State University] [Abstract]
LUNCHTIME
– 1.00 to 2.00pm
“Belonging”:
LimerickSoundscapes and the “Freespace” agenda
Tony Langlois [Mary Immaculate College] [Abstract]
“Stregoni”: Building temporary
spaces in Europe for migrants and refugees’ intercultural integration with the
practice of improvised music
Nico Mangifesta
[University of Rome “Tor Vergata”] [Abstract]
Grassroots
music venues in Slovenia – Condemned to oblivion or spaces of
trans-generational resistance?
Rajko
Muršič [University of Ljubljana] [Abstract]
TEA BREAK – 3.30 –4.00pm
On the concept of 'freespace' in
music
Martin Stokes [King’s
College, London] [Abstract]
Neighborliness, reciprocity,
and the alternative infrastructures of DIY performance in authoritarian Egypt
Darci Sprengel [Beloit College
/ University of Oxford] [Abstract]
Friday
14 September 2018
We visit the Venice Architecture Biennale. Timings to be announced
We shall deliver a “Manifesto for Musical Freespace” to
the Biennale, travelling by gondola, with
musicians.
Musical event. On Friday
evening we travel to the Lido island, to do an impromptu beach party with our
musicians. Timings to be announced.
Saturday
15 September 2018
Evening concert. For those who wish to join us, we travel to the nearby fishing port of
Chioggia, where our musicians will do early morning music at the Fish Market, followed
by an evening concert.
__________________________________________________________
REGISTRATION:
The conference is
open to members of the public and all interested parties.
** We request
a 10-euro contribution per person, from all persons attending the conference,
including speakers, in order to cover the hire costs of the building.
The official
language of the conference will be English.
To receive the
conference mailings, and for all enquiries, write to
____________________________________________________
ABSTRACTS
____________________________________________________
1. Dispatches
from Sicily: music, movement and the mobile phone
Rachel
Beckles Willson [Royal
Holloway, University of London
ABSTRACT: Arguments about immigration
developed in Europe since 2015 have frequently engaged with the mobile phone. But
while this small object’s capacity to facilitate people’s movement through
space is now clear, much less discussed is its role in musical processes,
particularly in the same communities of people on the move. My interest is in
thinking about the phone in both fields: movement and musical practice.
In
the paper I will discuss several months of work in eastern Sicily, where I have
co-run musical activities for male minors recently arrived, unaccompanied, from
Bangladesh, Pakistan, and parts of Africa. Our workshops had the aim of
joining, on some level, pockets of support promoting free movement (see for
example No Borders and the Italian Per cambiare l’ordine delle cose).
Unexpectedly, the phone was a central medium for our collaborations. We and/or
the boys used it, for instance, to provide tracks in workshops, for sending
songs and videos that were often recorded directly as Whatsapp messages, for
sharing remixes, and developing Italian song texts. The phone was a crucial
part of our activities and, I suggest, through music, intimated a
respatialisation of the world that was as politically-charged as it was
entertaining.
CV: Rachel Beckles Willson is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway,
University of London. Her research has centered on 19th to 21st-century Hungary, Palestine and, most recently, has explored
international networks generated by the oud. She has published three
monographs as well as specialist articles in the sub-disciplines of analysis,
historical musicology and ethnomusicology. She is also an active
musician – pianist, oud player, saxophonist and composer. Since 2015
Rachel has expanded her research in music and migration, and is currently
working in Eastern Sicily with recently-arrived under-age African
asylum-seekers, engaging participatory methods by running music workshops on
song-writing, recording and performance.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________________________
2. Sio toumolaa meeta (Patience is hard*): Giving voice to migrants
Fulvia Caruso [Università degli
Studi di Pavia]
In
Italy we face a paradox: while the media sound off about invasions of migrants
from Libya, in our daily lives we barely encounter them. Except in big cities
such as Rome, Milan or Bologna, or particular economic centres such as Prato,
migrants are invisible in our cities. Especially economic migrants: they have
been here for years but you don’t see them and you don’t hear, them except for
special occasions.
This
is the situation in Cremona, despite the fact that 12% of its population is
from overseas. Even if they are always struggling to find their own spaces to
celebrate their transcultural belonging, their voice is sometime silenced; and
sometimes they themselves prefer to be silent or unheard.
Asylum
seekers have had no time to learn this “etiquette”. They want to be heard, they
try to be heard, but mostly they are not. They are traumatised; they have not chosen
to be in the Extraordinary Acceptance Centres; they do not want to stay in
Italy. Most of all, in the words of our Senegalese friends, they are tired of
having to be patient.
In our
work in Cremona we are trying to help all migrants to find their sonic space, a
kind of musical citizenship.
*Mandingo
phrase
E-mail: [email protected]
__________________________
3. Theory and practice of the Music Room :: Towards a manifesto for musical freespace
Ed Emery [SOAS, University of
London]
ABSTRACT: Consideration of practical and theoretical framings
of the Music Room. Reading those framings in a context of insurgent musical
citizenship. Creating structural points towards a ‘Manifesto for Musical
Freespace’.
CV:
Ed Emery is a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies
[SOAS], founder member of the Free University [Universitas adversitatis], and organiser
of various musical ensembles..
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________
4. Collaborative Songwriting and Cultivating Liminal
Spaces
Lucy Cathcart Frödén [University of Glasgow]
ABSTRACT: In his work on Liminality and Communitas (1969), ethnographer Victor Turner explores times of liminality in human relations, as characterised by transition, humility, absence of status, and equality. Some echoes of Turner’s ‘anti-structure’ (1969) can be found in the anarchist concept of the ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ (Bey, 1990), a community beyond the reach of formal structures of control or commodification. These concepts may have some light to shed on the discussion of the politics of musical spaces.
Drawing on experience of collaborative music-making in carceral spaces and with migrant communities in Glasgow, this session will share some initial findings from a practice-based, interdisciplinary PhD project. Theories around liminality and community have some resonance in relation to this project, where communities come together for a short, intensive period to engage in collaborative songwriting and to probe key concerns around communication of identity, acceptance and belonging in re/integration processes. The songwriting process here is informed by theories of translation and intercultural communication, seeking to shed light not only on linguistic and cultural barriers but also, crucially, on what might be ‘found in translation’.
The session will weave together threads from dialogue theory, popular musicology, narrative therapy, criminology, applied linguistic and communication studies, and migration studies, drawing on voices including Sappho, Bakhtin, McLuhan and Cavarero.
CV: Following a 15-year patchwork career as a community development worker, musician and translator, Lucy Cathcart Frödén is now undertaking a PhD at the University of Glasgow that draws all these strands together. She is exploring how collaborative (popular) music-making processes might be able to play a role in social integration, particularly among migrant communities and people with experience of the criminal justice system, and how translation theory might be able to shed light on this process.
E-mail: [email protected]
_____________________
5. Toward academia as musical freespace
Catherine Grant [Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia]
ABSTRACT: Physical spaces for music – municipal parks,
universities, churches, pubs, and the like – are necessary but insufficient for
the flourishing of ‘musical freespaces’. In addition to such spaces, the
attitudes, values, and behaviours of individuals and institutions are
fundamentally and profoundly implicated in rendering musical spaces open or
closed to certain groups of people, in ways that support or inhibit a
flourishing of musical cultures, musical diversity, and musical futures. In
this presentation, I reflect on certain attitudes, values, and behaviours that
are enabled, encouraged and sometimes demanded by the academic system, which
may inhibit both academic and non-academic musical freespaces.
Though academic institutions
in many countries have recently progressed in developing greater critical
reflexivity about their social responsibilities, some processes and systems of
academia serve to entrench and perpetuate global power imbalances and
inequities. One result is the marginalisation or exclusion of certain groups of
people from academic discourse, including people from developing countries,
asylum-seekers, and refugees. This presentation considers how, and by whom, the
space of academia might be ‘opened up, maintained, defended, and rendered
sustainable’, and includes practical suggestions for personal commitments,
small-scale interventions, and acts of individual witnessing that could move
academia further toward a musical freespace.
CV:
Catherine Grant is author of Music Endangerment (OUP, 2014), co-editor
of Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures (OUP, 2016), and current Chair
of the Australia-New Zealand Regional Committee of the International Council for
Traditional Music. Former recipient of an Endeavour Australia Cheung Kong
Research Fellowship on the relationship of poverty to the viability of
traditional music in Cambodia, she was awarded the 2015 Australian Future
Justice medal for her research, advocacy and activism on cultural
sustainability. Catherine’s research on music endangerment, musical
citizenship, and social justice education has featured in print media and on
radio in Australia, the USA, and Cambodia.
E-mail: [email protected]
_____________________
6. Impact of austerity in the music scenes of
Cergy-Pontoise and musical citizenship: ‘It is your responsibility to make
music life happen!’
Solène
Heinzl [Royal Holloway University of London]
ABSTRACT: This
paper takes an urban ethnomusicological view on Cergy-Pontoise, a new town in
the North-West suburb of Paris. Cergy-Pontoise has a lively and well supported music
scene. This allows residents to socialise at music events of various genres and
musicians to develop within a supportive environment.
Music as
part of the city life is crucial for new towns and urban development areas as it
allows residents to appropriate their new urban space (De
Saint-Pierre 2002) and
create a collective memory (Raibaud
2006; Finnegan
2007). In the
context of austerity characterised by cuts in state funding, a lot of music
initiatives that depend on volunteering and public funding are stopped or
threaten to be so.
How do the
remaining music initiatives survive? Is the development of sense of place and
identity via music (Cohen
1995; Reyes 2012) in the
urban environment threatened ? How are shared economy and other strategies used
by musicians to cope with the lack of support? How are spaces being
appropriated and disputed between musicians, politics and residents due to the
lack of funding?
This paper
will tackle these questions from on-going fieldwork in Cergy-Pontoise including
interviews with musicians, volunteers, local authorities and
participant-observations at music events.
CV: Solène Heinzl is an ethnomusicology PhD student at
Royal Holloway. Her thesis is on the impact of cultural policy on the
development of new towns. Her approach is urban ethnomusicology and her case
study is the French new town of Cergy-Pontoise from the 1960s until present
day. This paper draws on her on-going fieldwork in Cergy-Pontoise.
E-mail:
[email protected]
______________________
7. Luigi Nono’s Transformation, Creation, and Discovery of Musical Space
Hyun
Höchsmann [Visiting Professor, East China Normal
University, Shanghai]
ABSTRACT: It is the
inaudible, the unheard that does not filled the space but discovers the space,
uncovers the space as if we too have become part of sound and we were sounding
ourselves (Luigi Nono).
Emphasising
the necessity for contemporary music
to ‘intervene in the sonic reality of our time’, Nono strove to
expand the conception of musical space in three directions: the transformation
of non-musical space with the performance of his music in factories and
prisons, the creation of a new musical space for the opera, Prometeo, and the discovery of the inner
musical space of sound and silence, ‘the inaudible, the unheard’, in which we
‘become part of sound’ and we are ‘sounding ourselves’. Nono aimed at ‘the
composition of music that wants to restore infinite possibilities in listening
today, by use of non-geometrical space’. With the conception of opera as ‘azione scenica’ (stage
activity) and a ‘theatre of consciousness’, Nono’s ‘musical space’ for the
performance of Prometeo was realised
within a colossal wooden structure (by Renzo Piano) combining the stage, the set, and the orchestra pit
into a single element. With the conviction that it is the composer’s and the listener’s responsibility
to recognise how every sound is politically charged by its historical
associations, Nono affirmed the simultaneity of musical invention and moral
commitment and political action for justice and freedom.
CV: Hyun
Höchsmann studied philosophy, art history, and literature at Ludwig Maximilian
University, the Sorbonne, and at the University of London. Her publications
include, ‘Essence and Context – Process of becoming and dialectical temporality
in Adorno and Nono’, ‘Bridging the Gulf between Nature and Freedom in Kant and
Zhuangzi’, and ‘Walter Benjamin on Hölderlin’s “Poetic Cosmos”’. Her research
interests include Philosophy of Music, Eastern Philosophy, Critical Theory, and
Comparative Philosophy. Höchsmann is affiliated with East China Normal
University in Shanghai as a visiting professor. She has taught at the Julliard
School of Music and at the American University in Cairo.
8.
Walking sonic commons in Venice: A case study in auditory access
Meri
Kytö [University of Tampere,
Finland]
ABSTRACT: In her classic text Soundwalking (1974), Hildegard Westercamp notes that if you can’t
hear your footsteps while walking the soundscape is out of balance and the
environment might not be scaled on human proportions. Venice struggles with the
influx of tourists, diminishing number of local inhabitants and commodification
of its public space the same time its narrow streets, stone pavements, wooden
bridges and street musicians offer a labyrinth for the listening pedestrian.
This paper proposes auditory access as a mode of agency and a possibility of
sonic commons in the urban environment, using documents made in June 2017. Walking
Sonic Commons in Venice was a workshop of listening walks, discussions and
documentation of sonic environments (https://soundcloud.com/akueko/sets/walking-sonic-commons-in) organized by the Finnish Society for Acoustic Ecology collaborating with
the Research Pavillion.
CV: Meri
Kytö is a post-doctoral researcher in music studies at the University of
Tampere, Finland. Her dissertation (2013) investigated articulations of private
and common acoustic spaces in urban environments. Currently she’s writing about
sensory agency of technology and digitalization of the sonic environment. Her
previous work has been on cultural intimacy in sound design of Yeşilçam
films, sonic resistance during the Gezi Park protests, and acoustic communities
of Beşiktaş football fans, ecocritism in soundscape composition, and
apartment home acoustemology. She is the chair of the Finnish Society for
Acoustic Ecology and has edited five books on soundscape research.
9. “Belonging”: LimerickSoundscapes and the "Freespace" agenda
Tony Langlois [Mary Immaculate College]
ABSTRACT: Sound is a political phenomenon. The
right to occupy space with sound, its prohibition in regulated locations and
definitions of such concepts as 'noise' reflect prevailing power relations. The
demarcation of public from private space is itself a function of economic
imperatives and the ideological momentum supporting them. Consequently,
wealthier neighborhoods tend to benefit from more peaceful, 'naturalistic'
soundscapes than poorer ones, whose residents are also likely to work in
environments that are noisier and louder – sometimes dangerously so.
This paper discusses an experiment taking place in Limerick, Ireland where a
wide range of urban communities have been encouraged to record and share the
sounds of their environment. Those sounds that they love, hate and have meaning
for them. The sounds are edited by the groups themselves, and then are
added to an online map of the city. This exercise creates an awareness of the
sonic environment in which a person lives and offers an opportunity to hear
others in different parts of the city.
Although there are numerous soundscape projects around the world, and many are
concerned with environment as well as aesthetics, there are very few that are
so focused upon 'bottom up' collection and exchange. The project invites
recordists to share their personal as well as more public sonic experiences;
sounds that are influenced by their age, ethnic background, social class,
gender, ability etc. It fosters inter-community communication and critical
listening to a much more complex city than would otherwise be accessible.
The intention is for the Limerick Soundscape project to last for 100 years -
long enough to develop into an open archive of recordings; to map social,
cultural and environmental changes, and to offer local communities access to
the sonic heritage of previous generations.
CV: Tony Langlois lectures in media and Communication at
Mary Immaculate College, Univerity of Limerick. He is co-founder of the LimerickSoundscapes research cluster which
has generated a number of publications and an international symposium .
E-mail: [email protected]
___________________
10. “Stregoni”: Building temporary spaces in Europe for migrants and refugees’ intercultural integration with the practice of improvised music
Nico Mangifesta [University of
Rome “Tor Vergata”]
ABSTRACT: Since 2006, the Italian
musicians Gianluca Taraborelli and Marco Bernacchia, under the name “Stregoni”,
have been organizing workshops and concerts involving more than 2,300 economic
migrants, asylum seekers and refugees (from Africa, Syria, Afghanistan and the
Indian subcontinent) who are hosted in European reception centres and camps.
During their workshops, the two
musicians begin to develop original compositions by sampling the music that
refugee and asylum seekers usually listen to on their smartphones, creating
soundscapes with them on which they will improvise together during their shows.
These meetings are an attempt to understand, through musical encounters, what
is happening within and outside the borders of the European Union, and to try
to reshape the political crisis and mass-media alarm into opportunities for
communal spaces and experiences for intercultural integration.
This non-institutional series
of artistic acts raises two interesting points for reflection: first, the
distance between locals’ expectations of musical exoticism and migrants’ real
musical influences, which are mainly related to hip-hop and “macromusics”; and
second, the complicated mutual integration process involved in performances by
groups whose diverse composition defies the bureaucratic social model of non-EU
citizens as a homogenous entity.
CV: Nico Mangifesta has a cum
laude Master's Degree in Musicology and Musical Heritage from the University of
Rome "Tor Vergata". His thesis in Ethnomusicology is about Balinese
gamelan. Between 2013 and 2015 he conducted field research on the island of
Bali in Indonesia and was enrolled at ISI (Istitut Seni Indonesia) – Denpasar
through the Darmasiswa Scholarship program during academic year 2013/14.
11. The dialogic dynamics of musical space: Understanding
musical subjectivities and musical speech in travelscapes with the Banda Internationale
Carolin Mueller [Ph.D. Candidate, The Ohio State
University]
ABSTRACT: In
opposition to rising anti-immigrant sentiment and racism in Dresden, Germany,
local activists initiated collaborations with refugees. Among them, the local
musician collective Banda Comunale,
who invited refugee musicians to become part of their musical community,
leading to the band’s transformation into the Banda Internationale. Playing over sixty concerts annually, the
newly-formed group spends much time on the road, making the space of tour buses
into discursive freespaces where the relationship between bodies, music and
physical space is negotiated.
This presentation reports on my experiences as a
researcher traveling down the road with Banda members May-August 2017. I argue
that paying attention to their travelscapes, which are rendered by the place
and register of voices, the proximity of speakers, and the power of volume to
fill up and empty aural spaces in the bus, gives insight into how musical
subjectivities and musical speech develops. The dialogic dynamics of the
musical space of the tour bus reveals how different voices in the band
interact, how they speak, and why that matters. My analysis sheds light on how
their collective consuming and performing music together in the mobile spaces
of tour buses functions as a way to understand, develop and ascertain
individual roles in the band.
CV: Carolin Müller is a PhD
Candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio
State University. She is interested in arts-based pro-immigration
activism, community projects, music, and literature to understand how
arts-based strategies define specific political spaces in which claims to
religion, ethnicity, democracy, and cultural diversity are negotiated. Her current research analyses the organization,
communication and interaction between receivers and new-comers in Dresden,
Germany, specifically the projects and developments surrounding the
Dresden-based brass band project “Banda Comunale/Banda Internationale.”
E-mail: [email protected]
12. Grassroots Music Venues in Slovenia – Condemned to oblivion or spaces of trans-generational resistance?
Rajko
Muršič [University of Ljubljana]
ABSTRACT: In his
presentation, the author will present his long-term studies of grassroots music
venues and youth clubs in Slovenia, starting with ethnographic and historical
study of the nationally important music venue in the village of Trate Mladinski
klub Trate (Youth Club Trate; 1979-1994). He will then present overview of the
grassroots venues and initiatives across Slovenia in the 2010s, compiled in the
collaborative monograph To the Firm Ground (2012) by the Foundation
Pohorski bataljon.
It
comprises activities of various clubs, associations, informal initiatives and
squats, as well as formally established cultural centres that provide space for
various cultural events, but their priority is music. Activities in such
venues, especially in squats, are under constant pressure by the authorities
and capital. This will be the main topic of the presentation: what is the
future of “free territories” under the pressure of neoliberal state and
capital? The author will present various answers to this question: historical
overviews and selected examples from the present. His view is that these places
are essentially commons of the present.
CV: Prof.
Rajko Muršič has published eight monographs (all in Slovene), among them
monographs on punk rock group CZD, rock club in Trate and underground music and
youth centres in Slovenia. He has co-edited ten edited volumes (six in
English).
His
professional interests and teaching include anthropology of popular music;
theories of culture; epistemology, urban anthropology, methodology of
anthropological research, etc. He has done fieldwork in Slovenia, Poland,
Macedonia and Japan.
Selected
publications:
Muršič,
Rajko, 2017, Music Glossary for the Youth. Maribor: Aristej.
Muršič,
Rajko, 2012, On the solid ground: analysis of grassroots venues and youth
non-governmental field in Slovenia. Tolmin: Ustanova nevladnih mladinskega
polja Pohorski bataljon.
13. Free Space Music Room
Sean Prieske [PhD
candidate, Humboldt-University of Berlin]
ABSTRACT: Being a
musicologist and an activist in the field of music and forced migration, I
founded the project Freiraum Musikraum (Free Space Music Room) in the
spring of 2017. The main goal was to establish a room for rehearsal,
performance and creativity in a refugee accommodation in Berlin run by the
German Red Cross.
While searching for
self-placement and identity after having arrived in Germany, refugees still
face bureaucracy and ever-changing laws. In Freiraum Musikraum, we tried
to experience stability through music in the people’s lives that are so much
determined by uncertainty. Being a city with some of the fastest rising rents
in Europe, Berlin provides less and less affordable space for free culture.
This is especially true for refugee musicians, who very often neither live in
their own flat nor have their own instruments.
Since many
accommodations are being closed, music initiatives already face new challenges.
The presentation focuses on strategies of musical agency in refugee housings
and discusses future perspectives for refugee music projects and cultural free
spaces.
CV: Sean
Prieske studied music, media and German linguistics in Berlin and Newcastle. He
received his Master in musicology at Humboldt University of Berlin in 2016. His
research interests include cultural exchange processes in music, the social in
music, and musical experience. In 2017, he started a PhD project on music and
self-placement in the Berlin refugee relief at Humboldt University.
14. Neighborliness, reciprocity, and the alternative
infrastructures of DIY performance in authoritarian Egypt
Darci Sprengel [Beloit College (current
affiliation) / University of Oxford (starting fall 2018)]
ABSTRACT: Egyptian DIY (do-it-yourself)
music is made primarily by urban Egyptian youth who mix Arab music aesthetics with
globally-circulating genres such as rock, hip hop, electronic, and jazz. DIY
music in Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, has largely existed outside
the demands of capital. Unlike Cairo, which enjoys a few independent
performance spaces, Alexandria lacks a commercial artistic infrastructure.
Additionally, since a return to military rule in 2013, the Egyptian state has
severely limited artistic performance outside its purview. This paper examines
the community relationships that sustain a DIY music scene despite these
precarious conditions. It suggests that through affective bonds of
neighborliness, Alexandrian DIY musicians enact an alternative infrastructure
of music performance sustained not by capital but by relations of
kinship, reciprocity, and
informality. It is through affective bonds that Alexandrian DIY music persists
despite the increasing commercialization of Cairo-based Egyptian DIY music and
expanding authoritarian repression following the 2011 revolution. Maintaining a
music scene through community, however, is likewise to enact certain
exclusions.
Drawing from approximately 30
months of ethnographic research conducted in Alexandria, Egypt between 2010 and
2017, this paper demonstrates how a music scene can thrive outside the demands
of both neoliberal capital and authoritarian repression while teasing out the
politics it likewise invokes.
CV:
2018 (Fall) Junior Research
Fellow in Music, St John’s College, Oxford
2018-present Visiting Assistant
Professor, Dept of Music, Beloit College, Wisconsin
2017 Adjunct Faculty, Dept of
the Arts, The American University in Cairo,
EDUCATION
2017 Ph.D., University of
California, Los Angeles, Ethnomusicology with a
Concentration in Gender Studies
Dissertation: “‘Postponed
Endings’: Youth Music and Affective Politics in
Post-Uprisings Egypt.”
Co-chairs: A.J. Racy and Timothy D. Taylor.
PUBLICATIONS
Under review “‘More Powerful
than Politics’: Affective Magic in the Youth Music of Egypt’s Failed 2011
Revolution.” Popular Music 37 (1).
15. Uneventful spaces
acte
vide (Danae Stefanou & Yannis Kotsonis)
ABSTRACT: Over the past decade, an impressive number of DIY music venues
opened up in Athens, Greece. These quickly became spaces where first-time and
seasoned improvisers of different ages and backgrounds would gather, play and
listen to each other on an almost daily basis. By 2013-14, the majority of
these venues had closed down, struck by multiple, and unusually harsh legal and
economic measures. At the same time, sponsored creativity hubs and large-scale
cultural foundations were established, with powerful stakes in the promotion
and support of improvised music-making as a one-off, event-based activity of
considerable symbolic (but little actual) capital. Looking at the latent
micro-histories and unaddressed repercussions of this globally resonant
paradigm shift, we discuss cases of fragile resistance, irreducible to events
or products, which revisit music as a shared or communal space.
CV: acte vide ("empty act") is the electroacoustic duo of
Yannis Kotsonis and Danae Stefanou. Active since 2006 as an improvisatory unit,
they explore noise and silence, often in dialogue with other musicians, visual
artists and directors. Past commissions include collaborations with Vicki
Bennett (In Mute 2014) & Tarek Atoui (Locus Athens 2015), and live
improvised soundtracks for Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (Goethe Institut
Athen 2016) and early French animation films (Festival du Film Francophone
2013). The duo has given over 50 live performances in Greece, the UK and
Ireland, and participated in several international festivals (Borderline,
Moving Silence, ΜΙR, Thessaloniki International Film Festival, etc).
They also organise and convene music improvisation workshops for children and
adults in Athens and Thessaloniki, as well as residencies on sound art and
site-specific sonic experimentation in the island of Syros, Greece. Their first
CD, Noeud, was released on Moremars in 2011, while the majority of their
earlier releases are available for free download on http://acte-vide.blogspot.gr
E-mail: [email protected]
16. On the concept of 'freespace' in music
Martin
Stokes [King’s College, London]
ABSTRACT:
The challenge of the concept of “freespace” in music is, on the one hand, one of rescue
from libertarian narratives of one kind or another, and on the
other managerial narratives of cultural heritage, intangible
cultural assets and so forth. In both, I will argue, a habit of thinking
of music spatially might actually compound some of these
challenges. Emerging thinking about citizenship and an ethic of care in
relation to musical practice seem to articulate a route forward. Recurrent
refugee crises in Western Europe and mounting anxiety about urban space
makes this thinking pressing. But it too needs critical reflection if it
is to be sustainable, and sharable in practice. My contribution, based on my
ongoing work on musical citizenship, will attempt to sketch some of these
critical dimensions.
CV: Martin
Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at King's College London. He has also
taught at the Queen's University of Belfast, and the universities of Chicago
and Oxford. Recent publications include Islam and Popular Culture
(co-edited with Karin van Nieuwkerk and Mark LeVine) and Theory and Practice in
the Music of the Islamic World (co-edited with Rachel Harris). Last year he
gave the IMR Distinguished Lecture series in London, entitled 'The Musical
Citizen'.
E-mail: [email protected]
________________________
17. Music breaks the boundaries of the Sikh temple: the
Nagar Kirtan procession
Thea Tiramani [Università degli Studi di Pavia]
ABSTRACT: Music is
fundamental in the Sikh’s religious rite, which is celebrated in each gurdwara (temple) all over the world. In
a migratory context, temples are often built in isolated places, thus the music
produced in the temples remains itself isolated.
But there are some occasions where music breaks the
boundaries of the temple and crowds the urban context. These occasions are
particularly appealing in the migrating context, where Sikh show all their
“being Sikh” to the hosting community, aiming at making themselves known, also
in a musical way.
In this paper, I write about a religious procession,
called nagar kirtan, for the Vaisakhi
celebration, which occurs every year on 14 April. The procession is followed by
lot of people and characterized by a “scattering of sounds”, which strongly
modifies cities soundscape. The musical heart is a cart where the Holy Book is
transported, accompanied by musicians. But religious music is not the only kind
of music you can listen to: Punjabi pop music, for example, is spread at high
volume in the opening and at the end of the procession, to involve in the event
all those present , in an interesting musical exchange.
CV: I’m a PhD Candidate
in Musicology at the Dipartimento di Musicologia e Beni Culturali, University
of Pavia. My research project is about
Sikh music in a migratory context. I have been working on Sikh music since some
years, starting from the master thesis, which I discussed in 2015 at the
University of Pavia. Now I’m also involved in a research about music and
migration in Cremona surroundings.
E-mail: [email protected]
18. Performative dissensus in the Greek public sphere
Dafni Tragaki [University
of Thessaly, Greece]
ABSTRACT: The paper
discusses the cultural production of massive protest concerts in contemporary
Greece organized in public spaces which are contested, (re)produced and
rematerialized in the regime of musical performance. Concerts organized in
support of various social movements, such as the anti-fascist and anti-racist
movement, temporarily radicalize the public space questioning and suspending
its normalities through the mobilization of musical counterpublics of dissensus in Jacques Ranciére’s terms.
It explores the sort of musical scenes and musicians commonly involved in (or
excluded from) popular activist concerts, while focusing on the ways sensibilities
of resistance and certain forms of civility and are affectively materialized in
song and in the context of what is often described as, the crisis of democracy.
Musical performance is thus explored as a transformative medium that produces
public spheres as sites for the performative re-distribution of social
knowledge and as agonistic regimes for reclaiming urban space. Thinking of the
ways music tentatively occupies and radicalizes ordinary spaces challenges the
re-visiting of the concept of “political song” away from bounded and
commonplaced notions of what constitutes the political in music.
CV: Dafni Tragaki is assistant professor in Music
Anthropology at the department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology,
Univ. of Thessaly (Volos, Greece). She is the author of Rebetiko
Worlds: Ethnomusicology and Ethnography in the City (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and the
editor of Empire of Song. Europe and
Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest (Scarecrow Press, 2013) and Made in Greece. Studies in Popular Music
(Routledge, 2018).
19. People Music: Experimental liberal aurality in the
classroom, 1965-1980
Patrick Valiquet [University of
Edinburgh]
ABSTRACT: There is an expansive
literature tracing the emergence of musical experimentalism as a genre, but
relatively little attention is paid to its entanglement with policy-making and
research. Experimental musicians played a key role, however, in existing
formulations of ‘musical rights’ such as those set forward by the International
Music Council of UNESCO, as well as in efforts to democratise and decolonise
music curricula during post-WWII university expansions. Education, in fact,
became one of the main targets of experimentalist intervention. By reaching
children and youth before their ‘cultural prejudices’ had formed,
experimentalists hoped to raise a generation of ‘open’ and ‘active’ listeners,
primed for participation in a global, mass-mediated musical marketplace.
Drawing upon archival research
in England, France and Quebec, I argue that the experimentalist listening
exercises and performance practices endemic to the 1970s classroom, while
certainly radical in their time, articulated a technoscientific liberalism
which has since become dominant. Although patriarchal convention has helped
write these educators out of history, and their ‘relativist’ experiments were
quickly withdrawn from curricula, their ideas about musical rights and values
have left significant traces in musical knowledge, practice and media.
Analysing the contradictions of past liberalisms can help activists respond to
new challenges.
CV: Patrick Valiquet is a writer
and researcher interested in the historical framing of musical experimentation
as an object of science, education, and cultural policy. Patrick completed his
doctoral studies at the University of Oxford in 2014, and also holds a Master's
degree from the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague,
and a Bachelor's degree in Performance from McGill University. Prior to
commencing a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of
Edinburgh in 2017, he held fellowships from the Institute of Musical Research,
University of London, and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et
Culture.
E-mail: [email protected]
_______________________________________________________________
[Here follows the original Call for Papers]
MUSICAL FREESPACE: Towards a radical politics
of musical spaces and musical citizenship
PROSPECTUS:
The 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale has the
concept of “Freespace” as its principal theme.
We invite musicologists, architects, urbanists and
migration activists to join us in Venice for a “fringe” conference running
alongside the Biennale. Our intention is to add to the “Freespace” agenda
important questions of musical citizenship, and a radical politics of musical
spaces, in relation to music, song and dance. We feel that the matter is
pressing at a time when, all across the world, music, song and dance are
increasingly constrained by the interests of power and commerce.
The organisers of this conference have been engaged in
ongoing work in the conjoined fields of musical citizenship and activism – in
particular as regards music in the lives of refugees and migrants. We see this
as a particular and pressing issue. Music, song and dance are important areas
of empowerment of refugees and migrants, and a fundamental bedrock of
personhood. We would argue for music, song and dance to be recognised
officially as a basic human right. And therefore that there should be provision
of planned and serviced spaces for music, song and dance for migrants and
refugees in all situations in which they find themselves, however temporary.
As regards the broader picture: in villages, towns and
cities, as the years pass, more and more spaces are lost for non-commercial
music, song and dance. Municipal spaces face budget cuts, university spaces are
monetised, churches close, and taverns give way to coffee culture. By way of
shorthand, you can’t sing in a Starbucks. All music practitioners recognise
this as a crisis, and the time has come to reverse the tide, with new and
imaginative initiatives.
All of this raises many questions. How, and by whom,
are such spaces to be opened up, maintained, defended, rendered sustainable?
How and by whom are they to be heard? Integrated within, or interruptive of,
neighbourhoods, local soundscapes, educational systems? Archived, networked,
circulated beyond? Through what agencies, technologies, mediations? And how to
deal with issues of rights, royalties and remunerations arising in the context
of performance?
We welcome papers that address these issues, from both
a practical and a theoretical point of view. We also welcome reflection on
existing activism. Interventions in this area are often non-institutional acts
of individual witnessing and personal commitment. Such acts – as well as the
more visible, institutionalised, and better-documented work of NGOs – have
histories from which we can learn and on which we can build.
A longer-term aim of our conference will be to consider
the production of a manifesto for musical freespace, prompted in part by
the crisis of urban music making, and in part by the migration and refugee
crises of our time.
Evening music at the conference will be provided by
members of the SOAS Ceilidh Band.
_____________________________________
Conference participants – S.a.L.E. Docks – 13 September 2018
_____________________________________
ACCESS DETAILS FOR THE CONFERENCE
We
gratefully acknowledge the hospitality and assistance that has been offered by
the colleagues from the S.a.L.E. Docks occupied social centre
** Location of the venue: Near Punta della Dogana, in Dorsoduro.
How to get there:
Actv line 1 (stop: Salute)
Actv lines 2, 5.1, 5,2, 6.1, 6.2,
(stop: Zattere)
Actv lines 5.1, 5,2 (stop: Spirito Santo).
Map:
http://www.saledocks.org/contact-fullwidth-map/
Please note that
there are no toilets at our venue – we shall use the neighbouring bars.
________________
Conference
organisers:
Fulvia Caruso [University of Pavia];
Ed Emery [SOAS, London];
Martin Stokes [King’s College, London]
_______________
All
enquiries to: [email protected]
Last
updated: 9.ix.2018
.