ABSTRACTS
„Urban Ethnomusicology Revisited. An Assessment of Its Role in the Development of Its Parent Discipline”
Adelaida Reyes
Urban ethnomusicology, as a concept and as practice, was late being born. No one suspected its existence until the 1970s, almost a century after ethnomusicology, then called vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, became an academic discipline.
This paper will offer a brief review of the circumstances surrounding the birth of urban ethnomusicology, placing it in the context of the parent discipline's history of ideas as well as in the larger context of what might be called the spirit of the times. This summary will then be used as springboard for exploring:
1) the impact of urban ethnomusicology on the discipline as a whole;
2) the lessons the history of urban ethnomusicology might have to offer to individual practitioners
in the field.
„Tales of Three Cities: Berlin, Chicago, Kolkata at the Metropolitan Musical Crossroads”
Lars Koch, Sebastian Klotz, Philip Bohlman
With our panel at the Vienna conference we shall present the early stages of our project, „Klangwelten - Lebenswelten: Musik als Medium urbaner Transformationen in den Metropolen Berlin, Chicago, Kolkata.” This multiyear comparative and interdisciplinary project takes urban culture as a new framework for examining city music in its many dimensions - musicological, sociological, anthropological, systematic, and communicative. As a medium of transformation on the urban landscape, music enters and opens the spaces between the local and the global. Indeed, musical practices - performing, listening, embodying, empowering human action - form along communicative networks within cities and stretch beyond them, again providing arteries along which musical exchange flows, transforming human agency.
The Vienna presentation itself will unfold as a series of three sections. In the first section, we sketch the theoretical approaches from the several fields that we combine for the foundations of the study. Second, we discuss a series of pilot projects, each designed to reflect the ways in which music articulates the distinctive musical and social structures of one of the cities: Bohlman on musical identity in the Chicago ethnic neighborhood; Klotz on clubs and popular dance in Berlin; Koch on the narrative functions of genre in multicultural, multireligious Kolkata. Third, we shall delineate and theorize a series of key concepts and processes that characterize urban musical landscapes, among them „diaspora”, „cosmopolitanism”, and „discourse network”. Our aim is not to undermine these valuable concepts from cultural studies and the social sciences, rather to suggest that they acquire new meanings and new transformative power when mapped on city music and city culture.
As in the Dickens novel from which we adapt our title, the panel will have a complex narrative texture, rather than contain individual studies and stories in succession by each of the three panelists. We move between themes and theories in ways that effectively evoke connections, many of them unexpected, all of them, we hope, critical for the theoretical work of the Vienna conference itself.
„Folklore, Modernity and the Urban Area in Twentieth Century Portugal”
Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco
This paper will examine the processes through which rural traditions were represented, invented and institutionalized in twentieth century urban Portugal. It will establish a comparison between these processes and the underlying cultural policies in two distinct periods: the totalitarian regime of António de Oliveira Salazar (1926 - 1974) and the democratic regime established since 1974. It will address the notions that politicians, intellectuals and artists held about the rural and the urban, and the ways in which they drew on rural traditions to construct national and regional identities within a modern framework, as seen from an urban perspective.
„Musical Worlds in the City of Vienna. A Source-Critical Overview of Documents in the Phonogrammarchiv”
Christiane Fennesz-Juhasz
Since the middle of the 1980s researchers of the Phonogrammarchiv (Austrian Academy of Sciences) have conducted fieldwork on current music of various groups in Austria's capital. Funded by the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna, these projects have been dealing with Hausmusik and home concerts, the city's jazz scene, traditional Viennese Music, with cultural activities of several ethnic minorities and of the Jewish Community, and the sacral music of various religious communities. Corresponding to the basic attempt to document a sample of the actual musical practice among the particular groups, as a rule, field research concentrated on music making in the context of live events. Apart from about 270 hours of music recordings (audio and partly video) resulting from these projects, the archive holds some older sound documents which can be subsumed under the label „field research among Viennese population groups”. While giving a survey of the Phonogrammarchiv's holdings mentioned, the paper discusses their relevance to the respective music cultures, considering criteria like approach and methods, kinds of events and organisers, and performers and audiences.
„The Community of Bukharian Jews in Vienna - A Preliminary Report”
Gerda Lechleitner
The Bukharan Jews, a rather young but constantly growing minority group within Vienna's Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (Jewish Cultural Association), form the topic of the Phonogrammarchiv's most recent urban area field recording. Special emphasis is put on researching the Bukharan understanding of music, the role music plays in their everyday lives, and more generally, on the way they have been living their culture ever since they first settled here in the 1970s. Their communication with and position within other Jewish groups as well as their contacts to the non-Jewish population are also investigated. Using the method of participant observation, six events - such as theatre and dance performances, concerts or activities on the occasion of religious holidays - have so far been documented and recorded chiefly on video. Interviews with the organisers complement this project.
„Musical Practice of Immigrants from the Former Yugoslavia and Turkey in Vienna”
Ursula Hemetek/Sofija Bajrektarevic/Hande Saglam
This panel presents the initial results of a pilot study documenting the musical culture of immigrants in Vienna undertaken from March 2005 until February 2006 (Sofija Bajrektarevic, Hande Saglam and Ursula Hemetek) at the Institute for Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Music performance and musical behaviour in different surroundings like in public space (concerts of the so-called world music scene), in the ethnic ghetto (weddings, circumcisions, religious rituals), and in private atmosphere were documented and analyzed. The questions that arose concerned musical style, hybridity or traditionality of the emerging genres, as well as the use of music and the importance of music for identity constructions of the certain groups under study. The meaning of music in an urban area, in a city that is called Stadt der Musik is an important aspect and how we find that reflected in music of immigrants reveals much. The transculturation processes, the integral features of music but also the segregating aspects of certain styles are aspects that touch the sociological approach in the research project. The results of this pilot study are by no means to be seen as final, and the study has revealed the great variety of a lively music scene in Vienna quite unknown to the Austrian public.
Ursula Hemetek will talk about historic and political background, methodology, and some structural solutions that the diversity of the vast material suggests. Sofija Bajrektarevic, an insider to some communities of the former Yugoslavia, will use the example of wedding music from Croatian an Serbian immigrant communities in Vienna to show how, through this music, „place” is constructed with an intensity not found elsewhere in their social lives. (Stokes, 1994). Hande Saglam, will talk about one traditional Turkish song used at the Henna ceremony and the musical transformations of that song, symbolizing different musical expressions of the communities from Turkey in Vienna, reaching from the very traditional to the World Music scene.
„Italian Music in Vienna”
Barbara Kostner and Paolo Vinati
Research carried out in the months between October 2004 and October 2005 at the Institute for Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology of the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna yields an overview of the music of Italians living in Austria both in urban areas (Vienna) and in rural areas (Vorarlberg)--two opposite contexts of Italian emigration to Austria from the historical point of view but also in present. As far as Vienna is concerned, there were no specific studies about the music of Italians, whereas in Vorarlberg important studies about the Italian emigration have been done.
In urban area, the public music scene (entertainment music, religious music, Italian liturgy, the private sphere of music, and the passive musical behaviour) has been documented. The public Italian music scene in Vienna is without doubts dominated by the entertainment singers, an activity of men. The entertainers conform to the Austrian audience's taste; they could not perform in Italy with their repertory and with their style of singing. So the context in which they are living is the deciding factor. We encountered the women's world in the private sphere of music. Of the Italian music listened to by Italians, regional styles are seen as supra-regional and they act as symbols of the Italian music in a broadest sense.
Thanks to one musician, we were able to document orally transmitted Italian music in Vienna. Alessio Arnoldo is an ice-cream seller from Zoldo Valley in the Province of Belluno who continues his grandfather's activity. Like all ice cream sellers he has a divided life, between Austria and Italy. In Italy he works as semi-professional musician and he regularly plays the mandolin within a group, he knows many dance music tunes and a lot of ballads from the region of Northern Italian. Among the Italians in Vienna the music does not have the function of a get-together in the sense of common singing, possibly because there is no will for a get-together among the Italians. We met rather „single musical individuals”.
„Urbanization goes Global”. From Early Broadcast to Webradio. The Emap.FM - Example”
Emil H. Lubej and Regine Allgayer-Kaufmann
When broadcasting started in 1923 it was welcome with open arms as the medium of a new age. It was supposed to bring people closer, i.e. to bring listeners from anywhere to places where life is and things happen. Because broadcasting was wireless no cables were necessary and radios soon became readily available. Very quickly music was in the air and available to many.
Emap.FM is an independent web radio in cooperation with the Institute of Musicology at University of Vienna and was founded in March 2002. It broadcasts 24 hours a day. The programs are from the realm of ethno, folk, and world music. In addition to its own productions - live concerts, festivals, and other events in Vienna - Emap.FM provides programs from international radio stations, such as ORF, Fequnce Paris Plurielle, SWF, and RTSI.
Live Broadcasting leads to a dislocation of events; web radio in addition dispenses time. We may listen to a radio program wherever we are and whenever we have time. Consequently, events are live or on demand independent of time and place. Never before concurrence and simultaneousness was so much experienced as today. Simultaneousness is considered to be a sign of the times. Our paper will explore the idea that it is (also) result of the fact that „urbanization goes global”.
„African Music in Vienna - Seen through the eyes of various African artists”
Research Group African Music
The African music scene in Vienna is quiet diverse-encompassing music making in the private circle up to prestigious appearances in the Konzerthaus or Musikverein, from listening to cassettes brought from Africa to instruction by professionals. Generally, music is a matter of importance for Africans living in Vienna. It is the carrier of memories of the distant homeland and the most important medium of identification with their origin and the past. Music is, however, also an important means of displaying identity in the foreign surroundings. What are the understandings and expectations of both sides, the Viennese public and the African musician, and how are they brought together. Does mutual enrichment exist, or is the perception of African music guided by clichés? Roundtable
„The Online Content Management System for Vienna Music Institutions. What Do We Get Out of It?”
Participants: Regine Allgayer-Kaufmann, Christoph Reuter, Silke Aichberger
The Institute of Musicology at Vienna University started the project in 2004 after winning funds through a call for „Science for Creative Industries”. Our partners are Vienna music institutions such as the Phonogram Archive, The Schubert Archive, and the Technical Museum. The Cologne Institute for applied Musicology and Psychology took the responsibility of programming and organizing.
Our partners are institutions of archiving, education, and public relations. Their activities relate to aspects of musical life in Vienna which comprises classical, popular, and traditional music as well as the manifold transitions between these contentious categories. Consequently, the respective materials are of very different kinds: tapes, records, scores, musical instruments. Our ambitious plan was to create a database for all these different materials and interests.
In a round table discussion, we will briefly show some applications with a special focus on ethnomusicological materials - such as the database for field projects and a database for commercial records. We will then discuss the benefits of such a project for explorations in urban musicology. What do we get out of it? If the urban environment is defined as multicultural, dynamic, and non-hierarchical a content management system seems to be most adequate for its representation. As an online version it offers the advantage to be accessible from all over the world and will therefore be a useful platform for discussions with researchers and informants as well as for direct, sustainable and corrective feedbacks from the recorded musicians.
Kurzbiographien der ReferentInnen
Silke Aichberger is a M.A. candidate in musicology at Vienna University. From 2001- 2003 she studied musicology, psychology, and ethnology, and has been focused on musicology since 2003. She is currently writing a thesis on minimalist music. She has worked in the Arnold Schoenberg Center here in Vienna and has experience working in archives and libraries. She is also active performer of Indian music.
Regine Allgayer-Kaufmann studied pedagogy, music, and German literature at the Ludwigsburg College of Education and Stuttgart University (1969-72), graduated in 1972 and took a teaching post in West Berlin (1972-4). She studied musicology at Göttingen University and the Berlin Free University (1974-86) and took a doctorate in comparative musicology in 1986. She has been an assistant professor at the Berlin Free University (1987-9), a part-time lecturer at Göttingen University (1992), and completed her Habilitation in 1995 with a study on bandas de pífanos (based on field research in Brazil). She served as interim chair of comparative musicology at Berlin Free University (1996-02) and was appointed professor in Vienna in 2002. She has carried out fieldwork in Brazil and in Italy. Her main areas of interest are Brazilian music, oral tradition and transmission, aesthetics, and music theater.
Sofija Bajrektarevic is a doctoral candidate and research fellow at Institute for Folk Music and Ethnomusicology of the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. She holds an M.A. in ethnomusicology from University of Music, Sarajevo. Her decade-long research has focused on ethnic minority (primarily of former-YU) and she has published widely, participated in international symposia on urban and rural music practices, and prepared and curated numerous presentations of Balkans music. Her Ph.D. looks at ethnic Serbs wedding and wedding-related festivities especially in Vienna and Austria.
Philip V. Bohlman is Mary Werkman Professor of the Humanities and Music, and Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. He has published widely in many areas of ethnomusicology, most recently Jüdische Volksmusik - Eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte (Böhlau 2005) and the edited volume Music in American Religious Experience (Oxford University Press 2005). He is currently President of the U.S.-based Society for Ethnomusicology.
Salwa EL-Shawan Castelo-Branco. Vice-Chancellor, Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Instituto de Etnomusicologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology, Columbia University. Responsible for the implementation of the School of the Arts at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Member of the Executive Board (1984-2001) and Vice-President (1997-2001) of the International Council for Traditional Music, an NGO in consultative relations with UNESCO. Has taught at universities in the U.S., Portugal, and Egypt. Extensive field research in Egypt, Portugal and Oman resulting in publications on cultural policy, music and identity, music making and the media, music and modernity, and transcultural processes in music.
Christiane Fennesz-Juhasz is a curator of the ethnomusicological holdings at the Phonogrammarchiv, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Since 1988, she has been participating in the archive's field research projects on aspects of cultural life in Vienna. She also carried out field work among an old Austrian minority in Transylvania, on the island of Nias, Indonesia, and among Roma and Sinti. Her publications include writings on political popular music in Austria, on Romani music and oral traditions, and on holdings in the Phonogrammarchiv.
Ursula Hemetek, Associate Professor at the Institute for Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the University for Music and the Performing Arts. 1987 Ph.D. in Musicology, 2001 Habilitation in Ethnomusicology. Main focus of research: traditional music of minorities in Austria. Research projects on Roma music, music of Burgenland Croats and music of Bosnian refugees. Publications in the field of ethnomusicology and music of minorities; Roma - das unbekannte Volk (1994), (Echoes of Diversity) (1996), „Und sie singen noch immer - die Musik der burgenländischen Kroaten” (1998), „Yoruba Childrens Songs” (1999) and the series: Edition Minderheiten; Mosaik der Klänge. Musik ethnischer und religiöser Minderheiten in Österreich (2001), „Manifold Identities - Studies on Music and Minorities” (2004). CDs: Amare gila - Lovari songs (1994/1999), „Sevdah in Vienna- Bosnian urban songs 1996”. Chair person of the ICTM Study Group „Music and Minorities”.
Sebastian Klotz, Professor of Systematic Musicology, acting Chair of Institute of Musicology, Leipzig University. Habilitation 2003, Ph.D. Musicology 1989, Humboldt University, Berlin. He has edited Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns: Erich M. von Hornbostel als Gestalt-psychologe, Archivar und Musikwissenschaftler. Studien und Dokumente (1989) and published „Music with her silver sound”. Kommunikationsformen im Goldenen Zeitalter der englischen Musik (1998). His third book on musical combinatorics and late-Baroque writings systems is in the press (Akademie-Verlag Berlin).
Lars-Christian Koch. Head of Department of Ethnomusicology and Berlin Phonogramm Archive at the Museum of Ethnology, Berlin. Habilitation 2002, Ph.D. 1994, M.A. Ethnology (Cultural Anthropology) Bonn University, 1985. Extensive fieldwork in India and Korea. Interests in theory and practice of North-Indian Music, organology, Buddhist music, aesthetics of music in intercultural perspective, music and medicine, media and ethnomusicology, popular-music and urban culture, historical recordings, music archaeology.
Barbara Kostner studied ethnomusicology at the University of Bologna (Italy). She finished her studies in 1998/9 with a dissertation about traditional religious singing in the Ladino (her mother language) speaking Val Badia, Gadertal where she was born. After university she studied transverse flute at the conservatory G. B. Martini in Bologna and completed this studies in the conservatory F.A. Bonporti in Trento.
She has conducted fieldwork in Trentino and in the Ladinian valleys of South Tyrol and Trentino together with archival work on historical documents of the Ladino minority in Italy, work she published in several books and CDs.
Gerda Lechnleitner is musicologist and from 1979-1986 at the Institute of Acoustic Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Since 1996 she has been the editor of the CD-Edition „Sound Documents from the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The Complete Historical Collections 1899-1950” and curator of the historical recordings.
Emil H. Lubej is assistant professor for comparative musicology at the Institute for Musicology at Vienna University. He does fieldwork mainly in regions around Europe and wrote his doctorate on tenores in Sardinia. His main field of research is computer-aided analysis in musicology. He is the founder of the internet Radio Emap.FM.
Christoph Reuter, Ph.D. 1996, habilitation in musicology, 2002 at the University of Cologne. Managing associate at CyberSpider, Cologne (http://www.cyberspider.de). In Guest professor for systematic musicology at the University of Vienna, 2003-2004. In 2004: managing associate at the Institute for applied Musicology and Psychology, Cologne (http://www.iamp.info). Books, CD-ROMs, articles and lectures about musical acoustics and multimedia at home and abroad. Further information at http://www.chr-reuter.de.
Adelaida Reyes-Schramm Ph.D. Columbia University (1975). Professor Emerita New Jersey City University. Also held visiting positions at Columbia University, New York University, and The Julliard School of Music. Her Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience received the IASPM Book of the Year Award in 1999.. She has published extensively and internationally most recently the forthcoming „Asymmetrical Relations, Conflict, and Music as Human Response” in the Proceedings of the ICTM Colloquium, „Music and Conflict” „Music and Minorities: The Future through the Past,” in Questioning Authenticity. Southeast Asian Performing Arts and Issues of Cultural Identity. Osaka, Japan: Museum of Ethnology. „In Search of the American in American Music: Musical Identity in the American Context,” in West Along the Road, Michael Moloney, ed.
Hande Saglam (Turkey/Austria) graduated in composition at the Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. In 2003 she received MA in music theory from the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Since then she is working on her Ph.D. at the Institute for Folks Music and Ethnomusicology with Prof. Ursula Hemetek. Her dissertation deals with the âsik tradition in Sivas. She is also working on a project about the musical identities of the immigrants from Turkey in Vienna.
August Schmidhofer, Assistant Professor of Comparative Musicology at the Department of Musicology, University of Vienna. Studies in musicology and psychology at the Universities of Innsbruck (M.A. 1984) and Vienna (Ph.D. 1991). Studied organ and composition at the Conservatory of Innsbruck. Previously ethnomusicologist at the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv before moving to the University of Vienna in 1989.
Main research focuses: Music of Madagascar, Music and Trance. Extensive fieldwork in Madagascar since 1986, further in Malawi, Mozambique, Jamaica and Austria.
Paolo Vinati studied ethnomusicology at the University of Bologna (Italy) finishing in 1996 with a dissertation on traditional multipart singing in the Lombardy region. He has conducted fieldwork in Lombardy, Trentino and in the Ladinian valleys of South Tyrol and Trentino as well as archival work on historical documents of the Ladino minority in Italy.