During the 10th Sief Congress to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, Cyril Isnart (CIDEHUS-Universidade de Evora) and Eckehard Pistrick (Martin-Luther-University Halle/Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre) are directing a panel called “Sound, space and memory: ways of emotionalizing and instrumentalizing sound”.
19 Apr, 2011 at 11:30-18:00
Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Av. de Berna 26, Lisbon
Argument
Sound and space have been considered as two distinct phenomena, visual and aural, to be studied by different disciplines: (ethno)musicology and geography. But the anthropology of space, the anthropology of senses (Turner) and performance studies (Schiefflin, Marshall) have shown how music links with space and memory. Every experience of space is at the same time a visual, acoustic and memory experience. Places possess a particular soundscape (Murray Schafer, Feld, Scaldaferri) linked to the process of recollecting and learning the traces of the past.
In times of musical globalization and musical hybridization, music detaches itself from its space of origin and tends to exist as a non-spatial and non-identifiable object. On the other hand, sound becomes appropriated by space influenced by local discourses, nationalist rhetorics or heritage politics. Space is considered in these terms as the mythical origin of musical expressions.
In the last decades, human migrations have profoundly remodeled the relation between music and space. As a result, an increased role was attributed to aural memory for remembering places, involving particular emotions. In these terms, memory stimulates a widespread nostalgia for the sounds and spaces of origin.
The panel aims to highlight the connections between sound and space, in local emic terms and as an etic concept of cultural politics. How can ‘local sounds’ be understood in a globalized world? What role do memory processes play in linking space and sounds? In what sense does the aural compliment the visual in performance? In what respect can music as a symbol evoke a ‘lost space’?
Program
Silence habité: constructions sonores de la spatialité dans la clôture
Francesca Sbardella (Università di Bologna)
Building the hero: from ritual mourning to mp3 among the Armenian Yezidis
Estelle Amy de la Bretèque (Instituto de etnomusicologia (INET-MD/UNL)
Sound, space, and dance in the local “panigyria” in Greece: the co-relation of sound, space and dance in the local “panigyria” in Northwestern Greece, their dynamics and their social implications
Athena Katsanevaki (University of Macedonia)
Sounds like history: maritime heritage soundscapes and the appropration of the past
Johannes Mueske (University of Zurich) and Thomas Hengartner (University of Zurich)
Embodied imagination: understanding place through sound and movement
Eva Rodriguez Riestra (University of NSW)
Synchronization of images and music realised by Leoš Janáček in Moravia in 1906 in the context of documentation of the traditional Whitsuntide ritual “The Little Queens“
Jarmila Procházková (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Eastern dreams and sonic utopias: the amplified worlds of Romanian manele
Victor A. Stoichita (Instituto de etnomusicologia (INET-MD/UNL)
“Die besten falschen Russen”: Exploring music and memory in the Russenpartyszene in Berlin
Tirza de Fockert (University of Amsterdam)
L’église, écrin de sonorités et de mémoires musicales: un espace en redéfinition
Josee laplace (UQAM)
