Keynotes - Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History
Annegret Fauser (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, US & Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna)
Anchoring Musical Networks
Musical networks share with other networks their various forms of constitution. Yet musical networks also have unique characteristics because of the way in which music—especially Western music—is constructed as an artistic medium that can cross boundaries seemingly without translation and mediation. This is particularly valid for transnational musical networks and their intersections. In this contribution, I explore how transnational musical networks are anchored through individuals (such as Wanda Landowska and Nadia Boulanger), shared repertoires (early music or jazz), participation in expert communities (as musicologists), and various markers of identities (ethnic, national, gender). I discuss the entanglement of music and biography within the constitution of such networks, and address the often complex and contradictory intersections of networks and their consequences.
Watch the Keynote lecture on the Uniarts Helsinki`s Youtube channel:
Antoine Hennion (Mines ParisTech, FR)
Music. The Art of Making the Past Present
Drawing on debates among historians about our relationship to the past and what it means to write history, I’ll explore the way in which the musical case — this art only existing if continuously "played again" — may help us both conceive history in a more sensitive way, and conceive musical sensitivity in a radically historical perspective.
Watch the Keynote lecture on the Uniarts Helsinki`s Youtube channel:
Benjamin Piekut (Cornell University, US)
Networks, Materials, and Forms
Music studies in the 2010s was flooded with investigations into the agency of material things. Less common were accounts of how these actors were enrolled in larger networks and more durable institutions. In this talk, I survey some of these studies, as well as the sophisticated responses they have engendered in recent years. Drawing on new research in dance and improvisation, I conclude with a discussion of the importance of form, which has been overshadowed by our obsession with the material turn.
Watch the Keynote lecture on the Uniarts Helsinki`s Youtube channel: