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Prof. Barbara Titus - "Sonic Entanglements on Tour: Visiting Colonial Sound Archives in the Early Twenty-First Century"

Event Start: 
Thu, 01/23/2020 - 4:00pm
Location: 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusioclogy)


The Center for Ethnomusicology invites you to a public talk by:

Barbara Titus  
Associate Professor of Cultural Musicology, the Univ. of Amsterdam (UvA), The Netherlands.

Sonic Entanglements on Tour: Visiting Colonial Sound Archives in the Early Twenty-First Century

Thursday, January 23, 2020
4:00PM-6:00PM 
701C Dodge Hall (The Center for Ethnomusicology)
Free and Open to All 
Reception to follow

Abstract: In this presentation I report on a sound archive tour through Europe in September 2019 by historians, performance scholars, (ethno)musicologists and anthropologists from Southeast Asia and Europe. During our collective visits of sound archives in Hilversum (Beeld en Geluid), Amsterdam (Jaap Kunst Collectie), Berlin (Phonogrammarchiv, Lautarchiv Humboldt) and Vienna (Phonogrammarchiv), we contemplated and scrutinized 1.) the implications of sound being captured in colonial Southeast Asia and transported to colonial metropoles in Europe, and 2.) the ways in which these objectified sounds and their organization as “collections” provide as well as deny affordances to listeners, musicians and scholars in cultural, musical and scholarly constellations today.

I present our contemplations in dialogue with recent attempts to excavate decolonial and anti-colonial agency from colonial archives (Moreno 2016, Edwards 2016, Steingo & Sykes 2019) and to reanimate the captured voices that have been sonically embalmed for so many decades (Schmelzer 2016, Goh 2017, Mundy 2019). Following this presentation I would like to invite discussion about the implications of me being the individual narrator of this story about our collective tour.

More information about the tour and the participants:
https://sonic-entanglements.com/news/


Speaker Bio: 
Barbara Titus is an Associate Professor of Cultural Musicology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), The
 Netherlands. She studied musicology at Utrecht University and gained her doctorate from the University of Oxford. Trained as a music historian of German musical aesthetics, she shifted her attention to South African street music (maskanda), with the explicit aim to question the polarity that these two fields of investigation still seem to represent. She taught as a visiting professor at the University of KwaZulu- Natal in Durban, South Africa, the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany, and was a researcher-in-residence at the University of Vienna in Austria as a Balzan Visiting Scholar.

Barbara has published in journals such as Acta MusicologicaEthnomusicologySAMUS: South African Music Studies and the Dutch Journal of Music Theory. Barbara is a Fellow at the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) Community and the Co-Editor of the journal the world of music (new series). Her book about the epistemic and epistemological dimensions of South African maskanda music is currently under review. She also curates the Jaap Kunst Collection at the UvA, encompassing sound and visual recordings, photographs, correspondence and teaching material of many musics of the world from the 1920s up to the early 2000s. 

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