Abstracts
In April 1939, just a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Maurice Halbwachs published an essay on "collective memory among musicians". This is the only part of his best-known work, La Mémoire collective, to have been published during his lifetime, as the final volume was not published until 1950 by his sister Jeanne Alexandre, five years after his death in the Buchenwald concentration camp. The article on musicians, originally planned as the first chapter, was not included in the edition.
My paper will replace this text within the history of musical memory and the epistemological debates surrounding the modern sciences of memory. I will show that Halbwachs was deliberately using musical memory as a powerful tool to counter the psychophysiological and neurological trends which had taken roots in memory studies from the 1870s onwards, opposing the peculiarities and the pervasiveness of musical memory to a more traditional understanding. I will also argue that the need for a critical reflection on the culturality of musical memory is particularly urgent in plural societies, moving away from the "dominant Western classical music expert gaze in music and memory studies" (Odendaal 2020) towards a more inclusive and pluralistic concept of collective memory.
Louis Delpech is Professor of Musicology at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. His research focuses on the history migrations in early modern Europe and the modern history of memory. A graduate of the ENS and the Conservatoire in Paris, he received his Ph.D. in 2015 and has been a fellow at the Fondation Thiers and an assistant professor at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Zürich, where he received the Venia Legendi in 2021. His first book received the Prix du Livre France Musique – Claude Samuel, his second book is forthcoming. In 2022, he was awarded the prize of the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer Stiftung (Zürich) for his research. He has been visiting professor at the University of Zurich and at the ENS in Paris.
In music created by, and circulated widely among, French Caribbean communities, music, lyrics, and music-making (musicking) have both represented and instantiated history and historical processes of colonization, resistance, and solidarity. From the biguine to rap, the physical beauty of the Islands, the work of its heroes, and the exchanges between colonizers and colonized, exchanges which are multi-directional and have complex gender and power dynamics – these have been remembered and processed through music.
This paper examines how Caribbean musical practice and creation has worked to represent hidden histories and also to preserve, transmit, and grow them for future generations. As several scholars, now, have shown Antillean musical forms bore witness to colonization, resistance, and exchange. Scholars of interwar Paris and France have shown how archipelagic musical flows - from the Islands to the metropole and back again - did political solidarity-forming and identity work (see Gillett, Hill, Boittin, Berrian, Moore.) These were, however, conditioned by gender. This paper reveals identifies some features of highly popular genres, the biguine, and rap, that reveal how histories were conveyed, solidarity was shown, and political claims were made, in sound and in musicking. It analyses historical context, legislative attempts at control, sound, and sonic and lyrical mixing to show how music is plural in its origins and has offered a sustained and continuous audio-visual rendering of French citizenship – and it limits – for over a hundred years.
Key conceptual terms include: solidarity, musicking, cultural politics, Black Francophone Atlantic, and braiding.
Rachel Anne Gillett lectures in cultural history at the University of Utrecht and writes about race, popular culture and empire. Her 2021 book is entitled At Home in Our Sounds : Race, Music, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (OUP). She leads a research team in the Dutch research Association funded project Re/Presenting Europe: Popular representations of Diversity and Belonging (2022-2027.) She focuses on the French Empire and the Francophone Black Atlantic and has written for the Washington Post, History Today magazine, and Black Perspectives blog, and she can be heard on “Unsettling Knowledge” a podcast about how empire shaped European societies.
In 1994, Alain Corbin published a history of French “village bells” that has been foundational to the development of sensory history and sound studies. Drawing on recent calls within these fields to decenter, or “remap” (Steingo and Sykes 2019) sound history and grapple with the complexity of “audible empires” (Radano and Olanyian 2016), my paper examines the history of colonial bells during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French empire. Beyond the territory of metropolitan France, bells were powerful auditory presences that profoundly reshaped urban and rural colonial soundscapes. Bells delineated new (political and religious) territorial entities (the municipality, the parish, the diocese), conveyed metropolitan standards of time, and spread information about the empire. What is more, bells often had close connections to war. The metal of newly erected bells routinely came from the melting of cannons or bells seized during armed conflicts, and bells were also regularly captured and displaced.
Because of their powerful auditory presence, and due to their political, cultural, and affective significance for diverse communities, bells are ideal sites to retrieve the plurality of sonic—and, more broadly, sensory—histories in colonial settings. Confronting indigenous testimonies about the violence of bells as disciplining tools with colonial framings of the instrument as a familiar and protective figure, I first introduce bells as archives of plural sonic pasts. Second, I turn to the present to examine how bells support the development of plural and contested histories. In the wake of decolonization, in particular, a large number of bells were repatriated to metropolitan France, where they serve as auditory monuments to France’s colonial past and further elicit the production of diverse narratives about the French empire.
Fanny Gribenski is an assistant professor of music at New York University. She is the author of L’Église comme lieu de concert. Pratiques musicales et usages de l’espace (2019) and Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science and Politics (2023). She is currently at work with two projects examining the relations between instruments, ecology, and empire: Sound Systems, which traces the entanglement between several networks of instruments and various powers; and The Elephant in the Piano, a global history of the piano through its materiality.
The project of a history of music in a society that sees itself as pluralistic leads to a dilemma: in a pluralistic society there are different ideas about what the subject of music history is and what its purpose should be. That, among other things, is what makes it a pluralistic society. History, on the other hand, is more than the sum of individual contributions to a constantly differentiating historical research. In order to be told as a story, a unifying synthesis of divergent conceptions of music and its history would be necessary. This, however, presupposes a consensus, at least at the elementary level, which, according to the premise outlined above, is neither given nor desirable. It is, of course, possible to simply accept this dilemma. Those who confront the problem are faced with the alternative of either (over)inclusive or confrontationally exclusive positions (strikingly parallel to current political discourse). The current debate about an appropriate music historiography moves between these positions. It is polarised between a “transcultural music history” (Reinhard Strohm) without clear boundaries and an emphatic insistence on the non-relativisability of a few musical truth events (J. P. E. Harper-Scott).
The paper takes up the problem and explores the institutional, scholarly-pragmatic, and subject-related preconditions for a minimal consensus in music historiography that does not rely on resolving the dilemma in one of these directions.
Tobias Janz (*1974) studied piano and music theory at the Musikhochschule Lübeck as well as musicology and philosophy at the Humoldt Universität zu Berlin. He wrote his dissertation on the dramaturgy of sound in Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen and, following professorships in Hamburg (2007-13) and Kiel (2013-17), has held the Chair of Musicology at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn since October 2017. Tobias Janz is editor of the journal Musik & Ästhetik. Music historiography and global history are among his main areas of research. Recent book publications in this area include: Decentering Musical Modernity. Perspectives on East-Asian and European Music History (2019, co-edited with Chien-Chang Yang), and Carl Dahlhausʼ ‘Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte’. Eine Re-Lektüre (2016, co-edited with Friedrich Geiger).
Verdi's opera Nabucco occupies a singular place in our cultural and political economies. Premiered at La Scala in Milan on March 9, 1842, it is Verdi's third opera. Set in northern Italy under Austrian occupation, it embodies the ideal of Italian unification, of which the Va pensiero chorus is to become the anthem. The opera pits Nabuccodonosor's Babylonians against Zaccaria's Hebrews. In this epic tragedy, Ishmael, son of the king of Israel, and Fenena, daughter of Nabucco, fall in love and set out to reconcile their enemies. Fenena takes advantage of her father's regency to free the Hebrews. In the third act, Va Pensiero condenses this ideal of love and freedom.
The opera's success is such that inventive forms of appropriation proliferate. On March 12, 2011, Riccardo Muti conducted the opera in Rome to mark the 150th anniversary of Italian Unity in the presence of Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Immediately after performing the Chorus of the Slaves, he interrupted the opera. He addressed the audience: please don't let the political authorities cut funding for culture and stop closing down public theaters. He then announced that the chorus would resume, asking the audience to sing along with the artists. Opera becomes an instrument of concert policy.
On March 10, 2019, the Staatsoper Hamburg presents Verdi's Nabucco, staged by Kirill Serebrennikov, who was under house arrest in Russia at the time and who works out the staging details by telephone with his lawyer, and a slave chorus performed by asylum seekers. Georges Delnon, director of the Staatsoper, assumes: "The refugees who have been here for a few months don't necessarily want to play refugees, and we don't want to put them in an unpleasant situation. But I completely understand Kirill Serebrennikov when he says that refugees are the central subject of the opera, that we have a lot of refugees in Germany, and that it would be nice if they were on stage".
How can we mobilize the play of referential mobilizations to make opera express the dramas of today's world? This is the question this paper will address.
Denis Laborde is an anthropologist, Director of Research at the CNRS and Director of Studies at the EHESS (Paris). His work focuses on improvisation (La Mémoire et l'Instant), blasphemy (Bach à Leipzig, vendredi saint de 1729; The unbearable sound, MIT Press), music venues and music in situations of forced migration (Institut Convergences Migrations, CNRS, Columbia University, New York). He coordinated Le Cas Royaumont (Creaphis, 2014) and published L'idéal du musicien et l'âpreté du monde (Gradhiva, Musée du Quai Branly, 2021).
He is currently a researcher at the Marc Bloch Franco-German Research Center in Berlin, and heads the CNRS International Research Network, which brings together 10 research teams from around the world on the theme: "Of What is Music Capable in Situation of Forced Migration". With his PhD students, he founded the HAIZEBEGI festival in Bayonne (French Basque Country), which he sees as a new form of scientific writing. The relevance and originality of his research earned him the CNRS Silver Medal in 2020.
Given the 67 years of History of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), the majority of the contributions ignores or forgets subjects like history or contemporary politics. Nevertheless, there are some examples which comment on historical facts, according to the competition rules that strictly prohibit political content and political messages. In general, the European Broadcasting Union, the organizer of the contest, wants to send signals towards diversity and tends to empower minorities. In the case of France which presented some ecological content only in the late seventies and the early eighties, the minister of culture Jack Lang himself tried to stimulate multilingual songs on the stage of Eurovision in the period between 1990 and 1996, but France mostly ignored the chance of giving statements in favor of diversity.
The contributions of 2015 („N’oubliez pas“) which focusses on World War One, 2017 („Requiem“) which sings about transiency, 2018 („Mercy“), a song about the Mediterranean refugee routes, and 2019 („Roi“), on homophobia and intersectionality, show how the French contributions of some of the last years share a certain tendency of the Eurovision Song Contest. Songs like the Ukrainian winner of 2016 („1944“), the Armenian contribution of 2015 („Face the Shadow“) or Australia in 2022 („Not the same“) try to combine music and memorial culture or even try to do trauma work. Also Italy in 2018 („Non mi avete fatto niente“), Albania in 2019 („Ktheju tokës“) or Israel in 2009 („There must be another way“), especially songs presented in the national language, share this phenomenon.
The paper shows how the above-mentioned French contributions bring memorial culture on the stage of Eurovision. It is the aspect of popular culture that transforms history to memory and produces a musical subgenre which is rare on the Eurovision stage, but can be found in the range of modern popular music as “chanson engagée”.
Bibliography:
- Christoph Oliver Mayer / Paula Rebecca Schreiber (Hg.): „Nous sommes européennes…“ – Romanistische Perspektiven auf europäische Populärmusik, Berlin (Lit) 2023.
- Christoph Oliver Mayer: „Die deutsch-französische Freundschaft und der Grand Prix de la Chanson de l'Eurovision“, in: Dieter Hüser/ Ulrich Pfeil (Hg.): Populärkultur und deutsch-französische Mittler. Akteure, Medien, Ausdrucksformen, Bielefeld (transcript) 2015, S. 153-166.
Since 2018, Christoph Oliver Mayer teaches Romance culture and didactics (French, Italian, Spanish) at Humboldt University of Berlin. He graduated in Romance literature at Munich University and completed his doctorate in 2001 with a thesis on Renaissance French poetry. In 2012 he finished his habilitation at Technical University of Dresden with a study on the French academies of the 17th Century. Later on, he worked at universities in Germany, France and Italy and is specialized on popular culture and sociological questions. He collaborates in the research group MIRA (Middle Ages and Renaissance in the Romance area) and is the editor of several manuals for students on literature.
Ethnographies of mobile musicking are rooted in ephemeral and pluricultural processes, leading to interpretations of individuals' and collectives' cultural knowledge and practices such as music-making. To trace and understand such interpreted and "translated" musical practices in more nuanced ways, I use multi-locational ethnographic fieldwork, meaning that, over the past several years, I "followed" migrants' movements, their stories, and biographical narratives, their experiences, ideas, and conflicts as voiced in their musical practices. For this presentation, I mainly analyze the musical expressions of migrants and refugees from Syria, who now musick in Germany. Applying theories and notions such as musical syncretism, transcription, cosmopolitanism, borrowing, exchange, self-translation, and the "unsaid" to performance ethnography and other artistic research practices with and about mobile people, I show the dynamism evident in how people and "their" music adjust, transform, persist, and are accommodated in and after transition. This approach foregrounds how the study of these musical practices provides insight into fieldwork methods and methodologies for tracing mobile music. It further signifies how the performance and performativity of transient experiences reflect the dynamics of change, the resilience of musical practices, and people's (hidden) agency in asserting their sounding distinctiveness. All of this is to show, while applying collaborative research designs, what kind of musical interventions people in and after transition describe as "valuable" for their new life circumstances and why. Therefore, the focus is on the how of musical translation and meaning-making, an approach that challenges standard simplified renderings of musical impact in liminal and diasporic contexts.
Ulrike Präger is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Louisville. She has also taught at the University of Chicago, the Chicago College of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research lies at the intersections of ethnomusicology, musicology, and migration studies, focusing on how and why sonic phenomena act as nuanced tools for investigating interrelations between mobility, place, sociality, and political expression. In her previous postdoc position at the University of Salzburg, she authored and co-published a compendium titled Handbook Music and Migration: Theories and Methodologies, recently published in English and German. She is also currently working on a monograph titled Sounding 21st-Century Post-Migration. Ulrike also performed for decades as a soprano with ensembles in Europe and the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology/Ethnomusicology from Boston University and degrees in Voice/Voice Pedagogy from the University Mozarteum Salzburg and Music and Dance Pedagogy from the Mozarteum's Carl Orff Institute.
Mauricio Kagel reversed the history of the conquest and colonization of (South) America in two works in the mid-1970s: In Mare nostrum (world premiere 1975, Berlin), a tribe from Amazonia “discovers” and “pacifies” the Mediterranean region using music-theatrical means. The focus is not exclusively on all kinds of acoustic and regional clichés, but on playing with the ambiguity and sound of language. In Die Umkehrung Amerikas, Kagel continued the theme and the dedication to language in a radio play format. The composer, who himself had made the journey from South America to Europe, combined this mirror-image representation of historical events with his own experiences. He may have been inspired by Darius Milhaud, who – after years spent in Brazil – brought the violent conquest of America to the stage in his opera Christophe Colomb (world premiere 1930, Berlin), based on a libretto by Paul Claudel, with the help of flashbacks and a variety of music-theatrical and cinematic means. Milhaud’s opera was not only performed at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in the early 1950s, but was also shown in a reduced theatrical version by the Compagnie Barrault-Renaud with musical director Pierre Boulez in Paris and South America. Milhaud’s and Kagel’s stage works are also linked by the fact that they were premiered in Berlin. The presentation discusses the conception of the works mentioned and asks about the significance of Spanish colonial history for the German premiere and other later reception contexts.
Christina Richter-Ibáñez is Professor of Musicology with a focus on performance studies, contemporary and popular music at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts (HfMDK). After completing her doctorate in Stuttgart with the thesis Mauricio Kagel’s Buenos Aires (1946-1957). Kulturpolitik – Künstlernetzwerk – Kompositionen (published by transcript 2014), she worked at universities in Tübingen and Salzburg. In 2016, she was a guest at the University of Oxford as a participant in the Balzan Research Project Towards a Global History of Music. From 2018 to 2023, she researched translation strategies in popular music in a postdoc project at the University of Tübingen (Habilitation). As co-founder of the research network www.trayectorias.org and the German-Ibero-American Music Relations section of the German Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, she is particularly committed to the dialog with Latin American musicians and researchers. She publishes and teaches on 20th and 21st century music.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5095-9162
https://www.hfmdk-frankfurt.de/person/prof-dr-christina-richter-ibanez
A study of television music games, part of the "variety" genre, shows the importance of quizzes, games of blind recognition and music identification.
This type of game brings together the identification of the external object (the piece offered to the player's ears) and a process of identification as oneself: the person recognizes him- or herself through the music he or she recognizes. But both of these processes in fact refer back to the identification of the common: the pieces proposed constitute a set of musics considered a priori, by the producers of the game, as identifiable. This raises the question of how the set of music offered in the game is constructed collectively, historically and implicitly - a set that is diverse in itself and fluctuates over time.
The paper will use the notion of repertoire: these sets of supposedly known music are structured into a series of titled tracks, and manifest what "music" and/or "song" are, in a given context.
The corpus of programs analyzed is French and focused on the 1960s and 1970s, according to the INA collection, as its exploration was conducted as part of the En quête de variétés project (Sobonne Alliance and INA, 2023-2025). However, it should be seen as a case study for a broader problematization of the links between the history of entertainment music and social history. In particular, the mediatized musical game of "recognizing music" is used in a variety of contexts, including today.
Biographical details
Catherine Rudent is Professor of Musicology at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she teaches about popular music (20th and 21st centuries). Her main research themes are the analysis of popular music voices, the study of popular musical spectacles (including the notion of the « sonic spectacular »), and the stylistic effects of global musical circulations.
Rogers Brubaker's description of the end of the Ottoman Empire as 'the great unmixing' certainly invites consideration regarding its musical histories. On the one hand, the sharing of musical practices across the region's nation-state borders today shapes a nostalgic vision of historical commensalities; on the other, Greek, Armenian, Jewish, Arab, Turkish and other music histories have proceeded, for the most part, as though in separate worlds. Nationalism and nostalgia are usually offered as explanations, but this is to ignore projects that have, historically, sought more sustained connections across this space (a history of 'mediterraneanisms' across the twentieth century), and operates, arguably, with a limited conception of what 'music history making' is in the first case. It neglects, too, the complex dynamics of music history making in the European and North American diasporas. My contribution offers some analysis of this situation, and some weighing up of the broader claims of the affective and sensory histories with which a newly 'connective' music history, one attentive to diversities and pluralities, must - necessarily - now be in dialogue.
Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at King's College London. He is an ethnomusicologist who has written about Europe, the circum-Mediterranean, Turkey and Egypt. He is currently PI of the ERC/UKRI funded project 'Beyond 1932: Rethinking Musical Modernities in the Middle East and North Africa'. His most recent book is Music and Citizenship (OUP, 2024).