Konferenssit

Music History and Cosmopolitanism

Fourth Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History

June 1–3, 2016 at Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland

http://www.uniarts.fi/en/cosmopol2016

 

Keynote Speakers (see below for abstracts)

Brigid Cohen, New York University, USA

Mark Everist, University of Southampton, GB

Franco Fabbri, University of Turin, IT


Conference Outline
 

The Third Sibelius Academy Symposium (2014) took as its theme the questioning of methodological nationalism in music historiography: the kind of historiography that, according to Beck and Sznaider, equates society with national society ("Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences," 2006: 2). They called, instead, for a methodological cosmopolitanism, an alternative that has gained momentum within musicology, often alongside related concepts: the last two decades have seen increased attention to the conspicuous mobility of works and musicians; to cities as sites of cosmopolitan encounter; and to the transnational and global connections created and exploited by musicians.

The Fourth Sibelius Academy Symposium takes cosmopolitanism as its theme in order to contribute to and clarify this cosmopolitan turn, which raises as many questions as it answers. The label "cosmopolitan" is easily attached to instances of diversity in performance and consumption, for example, but it has been more broadly reinterpreted as an ethical standpoint transcending the local and national. Clearly, the meaning of the cosmopolitan remains hard to define, both theoretically and in relation to particular times and places. The danger of naïve universalism is obvious enough, but how, in musicological practice, can the discourse on cosmopolitanism engage with the post-colonial experience of musicians, with diaspora and migration, or with the complexities of Creolization and métissage? Without losing sight (or sound) of nuanced case studies, we might also ask, more broadly, after the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the transnational as analytical categories. Moreover, how can the study of music and musicians contribute to our understanding of the intersection of cosmopolitanism and social class?

This international symposium will offer a forum for debate about how we might build a post-national understanding of the social in the musical past. The aim is to pursue a better understanding of the kinds of social interweaving and mutual dependence that set cosmopolitan musical processes in motion well before the mass migrations and technological changes that characterized the twentieth century, and to begin to identify features that might signal the emergence of a cosmopolitan society. We therefore invite proposals for papers and group sessions under the following themes:

  • The transnationalization of music, its import and export, its cultural transfer and exchange
  • Music and transnational mobility, migrancy and nomadism.
  • Music and belonging: the exiled musician and the stateless musician
  • Music and urban culture; cosmopolitan musical genres
  • Music and international networks of digital communication
  • Diasporic communities, music and border crossing
  • Music and non-state politics (e.g. human rights and ecological issues)
  • Music and non-state affiliations: religion, ethnicity, pan-nationalism, (Communist) Internationalism

The Conference Committee welcomes individual papers and proposals for panels and roundtable discussions. For individual papers, abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted, with a short biography of the presenter. Panels and roundtable proposals should include a session overview, participant biographies and descriptions of individual contributions.

Please send abstracts and proposals to the conference secretary, Dr. Kaarina Kilpiö, at kaarina.kilpio@uniarts.fi by Wednesday 30 September 2015. Notices of acceptance will be sent by Friday 30 October 2015.


Conference Committee
 

Vesa Kurkela (chair) / Sibelius Academy

Philip Bohlman / University of Chicago, USA

Katherine Hambridge / University of Warwick, GB

Markus Mantere / Sibelius Academy & The Finnish Musicological Society

Tomi Mäkelä / Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

Derek Scott / University of Leeds, GB

Anne Sivuoja-Kauppala / Sibelius Academy

Kaarina Kilpiö (conference secretary) / Sibelius Academy


Keynote Abstracts
 

Brigid Cohen: Musical Cosmopolitics in Cold War New York

New York crystallized as an archetypal "global city" under the pressure of the early Cold War, when the U.S. asserted heightened economic and military dominance, while absorbing unprecedented levels of immigration in the wake of the Holocaust, decolonization movements, and the internal Great Migration.  During this period, the city built a cultural infrastructure that benefitted from, and sought to match, the nation's enhanced geopolitical and economic power.  This talk examines the role of musical "migrant mediators" who navigated new patronage opportunities that arose in this setting, helping to reinforce transnational art and music networks for generations to come.  With attention to concert music, jazz, electronic music, and performance art—and figures ranging from Yoko Ono to Vladimir Ussachevsky—I highlight creators' wildly disparate enactments of national citizenship and world belonging in the arts of the Cold War "global city," their different cosmopolitanisms in counterpoint and contestation with one another.

Mark Everist: Stage Music and Cultural Transfer in Europe, 1814–1870

The history of stage music in the nineteenth century trades largely in the commodities of named composer and opera in the early 21st century canon.  This serves our understanding of the nineteenth century badly, and in ways in which colleagues in other disciplines would find strange.  Examining stage music on a European scale, from Lisbon to St Petersburg and from Dublin to Odessa, in pursuit of an understanding of the cultures that supported opera in the long nineteenth century begins to uncover networks of activity that span the entire continent, and that engage the reception of French and Italian stage music in the farthest flung regions.

Setting forth an understanding of nineteenth-century stage music that attempts to grasp the complex reality of ‘opera' in Seville, Klausenberg or Copenhagen, opens up the possibility not only of going beyond tired notions of national identity, or even of the ‘imagined community' but also of beginning to understand the cultural contest in terms of urban encounter or melee.

Franco Fabbri: An ‘Intricate Fabric of Influences and Coincidences in the History of Popular Music': Reflections on the Challenging Work of Popular Music Historians

What we now call ‘popular music' isn't simply the Anglo-American mainstream from the Tin Pan Alley era (or even the 1950s) onward, with the optional addition of a handful of local genres, styles, and scenes: it's an extremely varied set of music events that became visible and audible almost simultaneously in many places around the world since the early decades of the Nineteenth century (the ‘third type' of music, according to Derek B. Scott, emerging in the void created by the invention of ‘classical' and ‘folk' music). If we accept this idea, then a popular music historian has to face a number of challenging questions.

Which sources (sheet music, paintings, photographs, movies, recordings, memories and ethnographic research, ads, posters, reviews, demographic and economic data, objects, instruments, technologies, places, up to web-based documents, etc.) are available? How reliable are they? In which languages were they conceived, written or recorded? Within which theoretical framework can they be studied? It's a huge work, but it must also produce a manageable output, in the form of handbooks, audio-visual products, web pages, and other material suitable for teaching and dissemination. The paper will address some of these questions and challenges, with the aim to avoid the sheer transferral of concepts from the study of the current mainstream to a cosmopolitan history of popular music(s).

 

Confronting the National in the Musical Past Third Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History

May 21–23, 2014 at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts, Helsinki


An international conference hosted by the Rethinking Finnish Music History research project at Sibelius Academy.
 

Keynote speakers
 

Celia Applegate, Vanderbilt University, USA
Philip V. Bohlman, University of Chicago, USA
Tomi Mäkelä, Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

Conference program: http://sites.uniarts.fi/web/confronting-the-national/conference-program 


Conference outline
 

In cultural studies, a growing interest towards questioning methodological nationalism has emerged. Methodological nationalism points to an attachment between historiography and historical research, on the one hand, and nationalism and the nation state, on the other – an attachment, which has gone, for the most part, unquestioned. For instance, music history has regarded the contemporary nation states as defining the borders and essence of various musical idioms, regardless of whether or not those nations were in existence in the period of the music in question.

The "Netherland schools" and "German Baroque" are among the best known and widely used examples of methodological nationalism at work in music historiography, and, even in the 21st century, most general histories of music – independent of genre – are narrated from a national point of view. Most of these nationally oriented histories of music manifest the tendency of associating Great Composers – and famous artists – with a certain nationality, no matter the ethnic and cultural origin of those individuals. It is also very common to read about "Italian", "Spanish", "Norwegian" or "French" music as if these were supra-historical epithets, something that in and of themselves qualify and define the essence of those musics.

Widening the scope into categories that are more international and multinational is not necessarily a solution to the ideological fallacy described above – we still have the "national" to contend with, even if our grasp extends beyond national borders. Even through this paradigm shift, it is very difficult to do away with international comparisons of musics . We can, however, detach our research from nation states: instead of focusing on musical idioms, styles and practices within the borders of nations, we can shift our focus towards transcultural musical processes that unfold independent of those borders.

In conclusion, we could argue that a certain "national gaze" has pervaded western music historiography ever since the 19th century, and in relation to this we still have a number of problems to solve in our historical research. The symposium provides a forum for presenting new, critical research in this field, as well as acting as a forum for a critical re-evaluation of the historical narratives to which methodological nationalism has given ground.

We invite proposals for papers and group sessions under the following themes:

1. Writing the Nation in Music Historiography
2. (De)constructing the National Grand Narrative in Music
3. Methodological Nationalism in the Music Media
4. Methodological Nationalism in Music Education
5. Globalization vs. Competition Between Nations in Music History
6. Cultural Transfer in Music History

The Conference committee welcomes individual papers and proposals for panels and roundtable discussions. For individual papers, abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted. Panels and roundtable proposals should include a session overview, participant biographies and description of individual contributions. Abstracts and proposals should be sent to conference secretary, Dr. Kaarina Kilpiö (kaarina.kilpio@siba.fi) by January 31, 2014.

 

Keynote speaker biographies
 

Celia Applegate studies the culture, society, and politics of modern Germany, with particular interest in the history of music, nationalism and national identity. She is the author of A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990), the co-editor (with musicologist Pamela Potter) of Music and German National Identity (Chicago, 2000), and the author of Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Cornell, 2005), winner of the DAAD/GSA Book Prize. She is currently working on comprehensive interpretation of musical life in Germany from the 17th century to the present, titled Music and the Germans: A History. She is Past President of the German Studies Association and Vice President of the Central European History Society.

Philip Bohlman is a distinguished scholar whose teaching and research covers a broad range, with special interests in music and modernity, folk and popular music in North America and Europe, Jewish music, music of the Middle East and South Asia, music and religion, and music at the encounter with racism and colonialism.

A pianist, he also is the artistic director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret ensemble at Chicago. He has written and published extensively, and among his most recent publications are World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, USA, 2002), The Music of European Nationalism (ABC-CLIO, 2004), and Jewish Music and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2005).

The New Budapest Orpheum Society has released the double-CD Dancing on the Edge of the Volcano (2002). Current projects include books on music drama in the Holocaust and a translation of Johann Gottfried Herder's writings on music and nationalism. Bohlman was awarded the Edward Dent Medal by the Royal Music Association in 1997 and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin in 2003.

Tomi Mäkelä is a Finnish-German scholar with a wide range of interests in music, music research and education. Starting with publicationson Romantic virtuosity, he soon changed over to the 20th-Century studies in the 1990s. He wrote a book on the Max-Reger-student Aarre Merikanto and participated in a German DFG-project on Music in Exile 1933-1950, and finally (not living in Germany) became interested in his cultural roots. His first book on Sibelius. Poesie in der Luft (2007) was celebrated internationally (and occasionally attacked on Finland) as a new wiev on the composer. Due to its methodological setting, it got the distinguished "Geisteswissenschaft International" - price that is rarely given to a book of music. 2011 an English version was published. After that Mäkelä wrote the compendium Jean Sibelius und seine Zeit (2013). In the meanwhile he had also published a book on Fredrik Pacius, the composer of Finland's national anthem (2009 in Swedish, 2014 in German).

His newest contribution on the "New North", the musical culture, and music education (including the popular) in Finland after Sibelius is about to be on marketin late 2014. 2013 he started in the Edvard Grieg scholarship, building up music research on Grieg's home region in Bergen, Western Norway. Mäkelä is professor in music in the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany and member of the Editorial Board of both Studia Musicologica Norwegica and Twentieth-Century Music (CUP).   

 

Conference Committee at Sibelius Academy
 

Vesa Kurkela (chair), Anne Sivuoja-Kauppala, Heidi Westerlund, Lauri Väkevä, Veijo Murtomäki, Kaarina Kilpiö (conference secretary), Markus Mantere, Olli Heikkinen, Saijaleena Rantanen, Derek B. Scott, University of Leeds.