Reviews
The editors have done an honourable job of highlighting synergies and creating common contexts for the articles. However, it is the diversity of individual studies that is the great benefit of the anthology.Puls
Cultural Mapping and Musical Diversity
Edited by
Britta Sweers [+–]
University of Bern
Britta Sweers, Ph.D., is Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Music at the Institute of Musicology (since 2009) and Director of the Center for Global Studies (since 2015) at the University of Bern (Switzerland). She has been President of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology (ESEM) since 2014. Major publications include Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (2005), Polyphonie der Kulturen (CD/CD-ROM 2006/8), Grenzgänge – Gender, Race und Class als Wissenskategorien in der Musikwissenschaft (ed.; w. Cornelia Bartsch, 2015). She is co-editor of the European Journal of Musicology and of the Equinox book series Transcultural Music Studies.
Sarah M. Ross [+–]
Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover
Sarah M. Ross is professor of Jewish music studies and director of the European Center for Jewish Music at the Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She is author of A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States (Brandeis University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience (Peter Lang, 2013) and editor of the book series Jewish Music Studies (Peter Lang). Her main fields of research are Jewish music, ethnomusicological gender studies, and music and sustainability.
‘Cultural mapping’ has become a central keyword in the UNESCO strategy to protect natural and world cultural heritage, including music traditions. As a tool to increase the awareness of cultural diversity it transforms the concept of intangible cultural heritage to visible items by establishing multi-dimensional profiles of cultures and communities. Cultural mapping has been used as a resource for a variety of purposes as broad as the analysis of conflict points and peace building, adaptation to climate change, sustainability management, as well as heritage debates and management. Music has been playing a significant role in each of these aspects. As this theme has rarely been explored within ethnomusicology, this collection approaches the topic of cultural mapping from four different thematic perspectives: The book starts out with historical and methodological reflections on cultural mapping in ethnomusicology, followed by an exploration on possible relation between nature/ landscape (and definition of such) and music/ sound. How exactly is landscape interrelated with music – and identified (and vice versa)? The second half focuses more specifically on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. The articles not only address the broader political framework, but also thematic and geographic case studies of Intangible Cultural Heritage and music, as well as the pro of UNESCO’s endeavours.
Series: Transcultural Music Studies
Table of Contents
Preliminaries
List of Figures [+–] vii-x
University of Bern
Britta Sweers, Ph.D., is Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Music at the Institute of Musicology (since 2009) and Director of the Center for Global Studies (since 2015) at the University of Bern (Switzerland). She has been President of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology (ESEM) since 2014. Major publications include Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (2005), Polyphonie der Kulturen (CD/CD-ROM 2006/8), Grenzgänge – Gender, Race und Class als Wissenskategorien in der Musikwissenschaft (ed.; w. Cornelia Bartsch, 2015). She is co-editor of the European Journal of Musicology and of the Equinox book series Transcultural Music Studies.
Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover
Sarah M. Ross is professor of Jewish music studies and director of the European Center for Jewish Music at the Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She is author of A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States (Brandeis University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience (Peter Lang, 2013) and editor of the book series Jewish Music Studies (Peter Lang). Her main fields of research are Jewish music, ethnomusicological gender studies, and music and sustainability.
‘Cultural mapping’ has become a central keyword in the UNESCO strategy to protect natural and world cultural heritage, including music traditions. As a tool to increase the awareness of cultural diversity it transforms the concept of intangible cultural heritage to visible items by establishing multi-dimensional profiles of cultures and communities. Cultural mapping has been used as a resource for a variety of purposes as broad as the analysis of conflict points and peace building, adaptation to climate change, sustainability management, as well as heritage debates and management. Music has been playing a significant role in each of these aspects. As this theme has rarely been explored within ethnomusicology, this collection approaches the topic of cultural mapping from four different thematic perspectives: The book starts out with historical and methodological reflections on cultural mapping in ethnomusicology, followed by an exploration on possible relation between nature/ landscape (and definition of such) and music/ sound. How exactly is landscape interrelated with music – and identified (and vice versa)? The second half focuses more specifically on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. The articles not only address the broader political framework, but also thematic and geographic case studies of Intangible Cultural Heritage and music, as well as the pro of UNESCO’s endeavours.
Preface and Acknowledgements [+–] xi-xii
University of Bern
Britta Sweers, Ph.D., is Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Music at the Institute of Musicology (since 2009) and Director of the Center for Global Studies (since 2015) at the University of Bern (Switzerland). She has been President of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology (ESEM) since 2014. Major publications include Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (2005), Polyphonie der Kulturen (CD/CD-ROM 2006/8), Grenzgänge – Gender, Race und Class als Wissenskategorien in der Musikwissenschaft (ed.; w. Cornelia Bartsch, 2015). She is co-editor of the European Journal of Musicology and of the Equinox book series Transcultural Music Studies.
Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover
Sarah M. Ross is professor of Jewish music studies and director of the European Center for Jewish Music at the Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She is author of A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States (Brandeis University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience (Peter Lang, 2013) and editor of the book series Jewish Music Studies (Peter Lang). Her main fields of research are Jewish music, ethnomusicological gender studies, and music and sustainability.
‘Cultural mapping’ has become a central keyword in the UNESCO strategy to protect natural and world cultural heritage, including music traditions. As a tool to increase the awareness of cultural diversity it transforms the concept of intangible cultural heritage to visible items by establishing multi-dimensional profiles of cultures and communities. Cultural mapping has been used as a resource for a variety of purposes as broad as the analysis of conflict points and peace building, adaptation to climate change, sustainability management, as well as heritage debates and management. Music has been playing a significant role in each of these aspects. As this theme has rarely been explored within ethnomusicology, this collection approaches the topic of cultural mapping from four different thematic perspectives: The book starts out with historical and methodological reflections on cultural mapping in ethnomusicology, followed by an exploration on possible relation between nature/ landscape (and definition of such) and music/ sound. How exactly is landscape interrelated with music – and identified (and vice versa)? The second half focuses more specifically on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. The articles not only address the broader political framework, but also thematic and geographic case studies of Intangible Cultural Heritage and music, as well as the pro of UNESCO’s endeavours.
Introduction
Cultural Mapping and Musical Diversity [+–] 1-10
University of Bern
Britta Sweers, Ph.D., is Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Music at the Institute of Musicology (since 2009) and Director of the Center for Global Studies (since 2015) at the University of Bern (Switzerland). She has been President of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology (ESEM) since 2014. Major publications include Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (2005), Polyphonie der Kulturen (CD/CD-ROM 2006/8), Grenzgänge – Gender, Race und Class als Wissenskategorien in der Musikwissenschaft (ed.; w. Cornelia Bartsch, 2015). She is co-editor of the European Journal of Musicology and of the Equinox book series Transcultural Music Studies.
Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover
Sarah M. Ross is professor of Jewish music studies and director of the European Center for Jewish Music at the Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She is author of A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States (Brandeis University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience (Peter Lang, 2013) and editor of the book series Jewish Music Studies (Peter Lang). Her main fields of research are Jewish music, ethnomusicological gender studies, and music and sustainability.
Cultural Mapping has become a central method within the UNESCO context that has been focusing on safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, which likewise includes music. Yet, the method of mapping has long been neglected within ethnomusicology. Briefly sketching central framing issues of this book, such as the UNESCO and the Intangible Cultural Heritage debate, the Introduction thus addresses the question of far the approach of Cultural Mapping can be transferred to ethnomusicology. This is intertwined with central issues, such as general possibilities of musical mapping, the role of diversity with regard to the sustainability of musical environments, and the interrelation of music and landscape. Set against this background, the book is thus subdivided into four parts that address 1. the actual process of musical mapping in ethnomusicology; 2. cultural landscape and music; 3. music and the politics of the UNESCO-related Intangible Cultural Heritage debate, which is further illustrated by 4. individual case studies of music as Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Part I: The Method of Cultural Mapping
Introduction [+–] 13-18
University of Bern
Britta Sweers, Ph.D., is Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Music at the Institute of Musicology (since 2009) and Director of the Center for Global Studies (since 2015) at the University of Bern (Switzerland). She has been President of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology (ESEM) since 2014. Major publications include Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (2005), Polyphonie der Kulturen (CD/CD-ROM 2006/8), Grenzgänge – Gender, Race und Class als Wissenskategorien in der Musikwissenschaft (ed.; w. Cornelia Bartsch, 2015). She is co-editor of the European Journal of Musicology and of the Equinox book series Transcultural Music Studies.
The concept of “Cultural Mapping” has been regarded as a central methodological resources for safeguarding cultural diversity within the UNESCO context. Before addressing the specific UNESCO approach and ethnomusicological perspectives of mapping further detail, the introduction to Part I provides a brief overview of the main features of mapping in general. In contrast to conventional maps, the specific documentation of the Cultural Mapping approach not only comprises landscape features, but also a variety of other sociocultural and –political elements. As is evident here, Cultural Mapping has become a central tool of urban planning projects, but also of other applied approaches. While repeatedly described as a method or tool kit in many handbooks that emerged since the mid-1990s, most approaches remain nevertheless relatively vague, rarely ever reflecting on the actual set of methodologies being used. As is argued here and is likewise illustrated by the articles of Part I, ethnomusicology could make a strong contribution here.
Independent Scholar
Marcello Sorce Keller, originally a pop music arranger who later repented and became a music scholar, is the author of What Makes Music European (Scarecrow 2012) and, with Linda Barwick, of Italy in Australia’s Musical Landscapes (Lyrebrd 2012). Sorce Keller graduated in composition and social sciences in Milano. He later obtained a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and taught in conservatories and universities in Switzerland, Italy, the USA, Australia, and Malta. Now retired, he spends much of his time playing and composing frivolous music.
The idea of cultural mapping has often been associated with the “culture area concept”, formulated before World War II by Franz Boas, Alfred L. Kroeber and, most of all, Clarck Wissler. Since then, the sonic profile of our planet has considerably changed, and it could be argued that this old concept of “culture area” is quite inadequate for contemporary ethnomusicology. While not ruling out the usefulness of coming up with new concepts, this chapter thus suggests that the “culture area” concept has often been interpreted and applied in a more restrictive sense than Clark Wissler originally intended, and even the older and nearly forgotten concept of “Kulturkreis” still has something to offer. This is especially the case if it is used in conjunction with the modern knowledge about migrant and transplanted traditions, as well as about cultural change more generally.
University of Limerick
Svend Kjeldsen, Ph.D., is a musician, ethnomusicologist, and psychologist. For more than twenty years, he worked as a composer, recording artist and toured as a professional musician all over Europe. Kjeldsen has taught at Aarhus University, the University of Limerick, and at music schools all over Europe. He has done research on the bodhrán, lilting, and on British-Irish music. Publications focused on topics like music and migration, cultural politics, regional and local Irish music traditions, trends on the European-Celtic music scene, contemporary bodhrán playing techniques, the origins of bodhrán and bones, and other organological subjects.
The last half of the 20th century saw an increase in urban studies. The study of migration and globalization, formation of transnational identities, social construction of place as well as the growing impact of technology and media in dense communication settings are hardly thinkable without research in the urban context. Consequently, the mapping of urban cultures has likewise become vital not only in cultural studies and the social sciences, but particularly also in ethnomusicology. This is illustrated by a case study on music performance practices of British-Irish second-generation music makers in Manchester, Great Britain, in their socio-cultural context within the British-Irish Diaspora. Urban Manchester appears as a power centre for recycling of traditional musical ideas and for articulation of new, hybridizing performance practices with significant consequences for everyday life and identity production among second-generation Irish in Manchester. As the mapping process highlights, a life in displacement involves subjacent forms of nostalgia, but hybridized sonic practices make it possible to cope with these through strategies offering utopian perspectives, either as a celebration of own locality or as an invitation to the Manchester Irish to take up a position as citizens in the global imagined community of Irishness. Yet they might even enter a global diasporic solidarity based on general experiences of immigration and multiculturalism.
University of Eastern Finland
Pekka Suutari is professor of cultural studies at the Karelian Institute of University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu). He has studied musicology (ethnomusicology) at the Universities of Helsinki and Gothenburg, and he has acted as a visiting professor at the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Petrozavodsk, Russia. His main research interests are on the music of the borderland between Finnish and Russian Karelia, and the ethnic activities of these areas. His current article is resulting from a joint research project, “Flexible Ethnicities,” that hosted researchers from UEF, Joensuu, and KRC, Petrozavodsk.
Karelian language is in serious danger and is disappearing in both sides of the border – in Finland and in Russia. It is not mediated in families anymore, but some of the societal structures aim at creating space for the language use. Music is one of the most influential and visible means of creating space for minority identity and discourse over the role of minorities in the contemporary world. Folk rock is an attraction for the activities of the Nuori Karjala (Young Karelia) association. At the same time traditional education of folk music (in the Petrozavodsk conservatory) as well as the professional popular performances (estrada) on the national material do not meet the local linguistic problems. The need for raising the identity issue is different from the point of view of Russian speaking supervisors and the young activists of Karelian language and music. This chapter will discuss the paradoxical situation of the Karelian language and music in Russian Karelia: the important role of independent musicians and associations which aim to increase the role and attractiveness of minority identity with music.
4. Mapping ‘Inconvenient’ Music Heritage [+–] 67-83
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Ana Hofman, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts in Ljubljana. Her research focuses on the intersection of memory, music, and sound studies, with a focus on activism and the social meaning of resistance in the past and present. She uses both archival and ethnographic methods to examine musical sound during socialism and the present-day conjuncture of neoliberalism and postsocialism in former Yugoslavia. She has published many articles and book chapters, including two monographs: Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (2011) and Music, Politics, Affect: New Lives of Partisan Songs in Slovenia(2015), which deal with the sonic reatualizations of cultural memory on anti-fascism in post-Yugoslav context. She is currently working on the monograph Socialism, Now! Music and Activism after Yugoslavia (2019).
The method of cultural mapping – more particularly the concept of counter mapping (Duxbury, Garrett-Petts, and MacLennan 2015: 6) – can also serve as a critical theoretical avenue of escaping the rigid discourses of post-socialist heritage management that operates within “socialist totalitarianism” vs. “post-socialist democracy” dichotomy. Drawing on authors that have examined heritage as a political and cultural process of remembering/ forgetting, this chapter offers critical reading of the politics of heritage by showing that anti-totalitarian paradigm in heritagization of socialist musical past is not ideologically neutral or unproblematic, but strongly related to both ideologies of nationalism (and revisionism) and neoliberal capitalism. Although scholars agree that every heritage is contested, the concept of the so-called “inconvenient heritage” (Dearborn, Lynne and Stallmeyer, John C, 2009: 34), contested or dissonant heritage (Tunbridge and Achworth 1996), incorporates greater degree of the problems of ownership, control and representations. The heritage management generally promotes the dominant or authorized interpretations of such contested heritage by obscuring or removing the politically inexpedient parts. This is exemplified in a case study addressing the contested discourses of heritage management related to the socialist musical past in the post-Yugoslav context. This chapter thus examines the political aspects of heritagization of contested genre of partisan songs (antifascist resistance songs during WWII) as the leading genre of socialist music legacy, which has been after the collapse of socialism and breakup of Yugoslavia proclaimed “inappropriate heritage of totalitarian past.”
Part II: Cultural Landscape and Music
Introduction [+–] 87-93
University of Bern
Britta Sweers, Ph.D., is Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Music at the Institute of Musicology (since 2009) and Director of the Center for Global Studies (since 2015) at the University of Bern (Switzerland). She has been President of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology (ESEM) since 2014. Major publications include Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (2005), Polyphonie der Kulturen (CD/CD-ROM 2006/8), Grenzgänge – Gender, Race und Class als Wissenskategorien in der Musikwissenschaft (ed.; w. Cornelia Bartsch, 2015). She is co-editor of the European Journal of Musicology and of the Equinox book series Transcultural Music Studies.
Part II focuses on the interrelation of music performance and landscape by addressing another central issue that were taken up by UNESCO-related discourses – the so-called “cultural landscapes.” Having been strongly interconnected with debates on the interaction of humans and nature, the UNESCO concept is likewise strongly intertwined with the concept of sustainability. Starting out with a linguistic elucidation of central terminological expressions, such as environment, scenery, and sustainability, this introduction then specifically discusses the polarized division between a human-less environment and a culturally-shaped landscape. Consequently, the four articles of this part not only each focus on different landscapes, but also provide examples of an in-depth study of different human-music-environment relations and interaction processes.
Independent Scholar
Lukas Park is an independent researcher. From 2015 to 2018 he was assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the Soochow University School of Music in China. He completed his Ph.D. in musicology in 2015 at the University of Vienna, with specializations in the fields of ethnomusicology and sinology, and further studied at Fudan University and Qiqihar University. His academic interests focus on Chinese culture and music, especially rock and folk music.
In order to illustrate how far music has been shaped by environmentally influenced living styles, this chapter focuses on hua’er, a vocal folk music style sung in China’s ethnically diverse northwest. During the field research, one interlocutor, himself being an expert researcher on hua’er culture, offered a hypothesis of the probable origin of hua’er music: He proposed that hua’er, and especially hua’er festivals, are a result of the intermixing of pastoral and agricultural societies and lifestyles. The lyrics of hua’er songs are frequently connoted with sexual topics and activities, and the actual coalescence of nomad and farming cultures might indeed have happened right at the hua’er festivals. At these annual gatherings, many singers of different ethnic groups, cultural backgrounds, religions, and geographical areas meet and engage in singing with each other. Occasionally, sexual activities offside the main performances have been accounted for. This chapter thus aims to scrutinise the feasibility of these landscape-related activities being a probable driving force for the origin of hua’er festivals. Furthermore, also the circumstance why so far nobody has published this theory, albeit being very obvious, is scrutinised. Drawing on expert interviews and social media inquiries as researching methods, results point to both, academic as well as ideological grounds, being the reason why scholars are hesitant to publish this hypothesis of origin.
Tel Aviv University (retired)
Shai Burstyn, Ph.D., was professor and senior faculty member of the department of musicology at Tel-Aviv University (1974–2007), including a three-year tenure as chair. He also taught at the Mannes College of Music (New York) and was a Research Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Burstyn served on the board of ESEM (European Seminar of Ethnomusicology) and chaired the Israeli Society of Musicology. He has published extensively on various aspects of late medieval and early Renaissance music, notably medieval oral polyphony and Arab influence on medieval European music. His interest in oral music practices led him to research the early Israeli folksong (1925–1960), primarily its ambiguous relations with the music of the Middle-East and its national-ideological constraints. Burstyn is a founding member of Zemereshet, an Internet project dedicated to collecting and preserving the early Hebrew song repertory.
Early ethnomusicological research already addressed the interrelation of environment and music. This is illustrated in this chapter by the striking case study of A.Z. Idelsohn. Exploring the dominant position of nature, landscape and climate in Idelsohn’s theoretical-developmental view, this chapter not only analyses some possible influence factors, but also highlights how his narrative served to promote his ideological-national bias. By 1924 A.Z. Idelsohn was already well-known among comparative musicologists, mainly due to his monumental Hebräisch- Orientalischer Melodienschatz, which began to appear 10 years earlier. But as an ardent Zionist, Idelsohn deemed it important to publish in Hebrew as well, even though this automatically limited his readership. This is probably the reason why his History of Hebrew Music, which appeared in 1924 in Hebrew, did not get much ethnomusicological attention at the time, and in fact, not to this day. In its first volume (the only one of three to be published), Idelsohn constructs a fascinating view of the origin and development of music. His view leans heavily on the dependence of music on landscape and climate: “Nature, climate and the conditions of life are the main influences on the culture of every nation, especially on a spiritual property such as music.” In his account Idelsohn advances from the musical traits of a race to those of the various tribes and nations belonging to it, making interesting, albeit conjectural, causal connections between landscape, climate and musical style. By selectively weaving appropriate aspects of various contemporaneous theories of origin, Idelsohn finally arrives at an explanation of the unique nature of Hebrew melody.
7.Dancing the Landscape: Music, Place, Collective Memory, and Identity in a Highland Bolivia Pilgrimage [+–] 123-144
University of Bergen
Thomas Solomon, Ph.D., is Professor in the Grieg Academy-Department of Music at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has previously taught ethnomusicology and popular music studies at New York University, University of Minnesota, and Istanbul Technical University. He has carried out ethnographic research on music, place, and indigeneity in highland Bolivia, and on place and identity in Turkish rap music and hip-hop youth culture in Istanbul. His publications include articles in the journals Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Yearbook for Traditional Music, as well as numerous chapters in edited volumes.
Drawing on data from fieldwork in highland Bolivia, this chapter explores how music may mediate between human society and the physical landscape. Every year during the celebration of the Feast of the Holy True Cross on May 3, indigenous people living in rural communities surrounding the colonial-era town of Chayanta in the Bolivian Andes perform a pilgrimage to the town. During the pilgrimage the men of the communities play continuously on panpipes. The music of the panpipes enables movement, in the form of dance, through the culturally defined landscape of the pilgrimage route. Specific places along the pilgrimage route, each having distinct geographical features, are also marked as sacred spots through the performance of a distinct repertoire of tunes performed only at those places, defining them as nodes in a large-scale sacred landscape saturated with meaning. Musical performance during the pilgrimage thus enables coordinated sociality in and across culturally defined landscapes, inscribing group identity on the physical features of the land. The chapter argues that music can be understood as a mediator that gives human agency a physical, sensuous form – sound waves traveling through air, land, and people’s bodies – embodying ideas about the relationship between natural geography and social identity.
8. The Space of the Gong Culture in the Central Highlands of Vietnam: Old and New Directions in Ede Traditional Music [+–] 145-171
Centre Asie du Sud Est
Vincenzo della Ratta, Ph.D., has a particular interest in the gong music of the Austronesian peoples of Southeast Asia. This led him to conduct fieldwork in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and in East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), where he concentrated on the music and culture of the Jarai, Ede, and Dayak Benuaq ethnic groups. Vincenzo della Ratta studied and played gamelan music for over six years, in Indonesia and Italy. He has published several articles on his research, and released two albums of his field recordings.
This chapter illustrates how the perception of cultural landscapes has likewise been shaped by the UNESCO Intanglible Cultural Heritage debate. The Central Highlands of Vietnam are an area inhabited by about twenty different ethnic groups belonging to two different linguistic families, but connected by their similar traditions and music. Factors such as colonization by the French, three Indochina Wars, governmental mass resettlement policies, and the đổi mới (“renovation”) policy adopted by the central government in 1986 have all contributed to drastically affect the traditions of the indigenous ethnic groups of the Central Highlands. Gong music, traditionally conceived as a means through which man can communicate with the supernatural world and therefore played only in ritual contexts, is no exception to this rule. In 2005 UNESCO declared the Space of Gong Culture of the Central Highlands of Vietnam as Intangible Cultural Heritage, with the aim of safeguarding and preserving the endangered gong culture of the area. This chapter aims to clarify the role and function of gong music in a modern context, by analysing a musical performance held for tourists by an ethnic Ede troupe of musicians and dancers.
Part III: The Politics of Intangible Cultural Heritage
Introduction [+–] 175-180
Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover
Sarah M. Ross is professor of Jewish music studies and director of the European Center for Jewish Music at the Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She is author of A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States (Brandeis University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience (Peter Lang, 2013) and editor of the book series Jewish Music Studies (Peter Lang). Her main fields of research are Jewish music, ethnomusicological gender studies, and music and sustainability.
One of the main challenges ethnomusicologists face when studying musical heritage of the world are the often politicized discourses centering on the concept of intangible cultural heritage, as well as the equally policy-driven aims, strategies and institutional infrastructures of UNESCO enabling states worldwide to document and archive musical heritage professionally. Against the background of diverse ethnomusicological studies, authors in the following chapters discuss how the earlier understanding of intangible cultural heritage, first of all supported scholars and institutions to document and preserve a record of disappearing traditions, rather than to identify the causes for their vanishing, which includes thoughts on how the concepts of intangible cultural heritage and cultural sustainability are interconnected. In this regard, the following chapters also discuss processes of creating and implementing appropriate policies for the protection of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Poland, Austria and Switzerland, and demonstrate how the construction and identification of ICH often becomes a value-laden project of ideology, and thus a never-ending act of a politics of inclusion and exclusion as well as of power.
9. Historical Voices Reloaded – Rethinking Archival Responsibilities Compared to Intangible Cultural Heritage [+–] 181-193
Austrian Academy of Sciences
Gerda Lechleitner, Ph.D., works at the Phonogram Archive at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is curator of the Historical Collections. She is the editor of the CD edition The Complete Historical Collections 1899–1950 and the Phonogram Archive’s Yearbook “International Forum on Audio-Visual Research.” Her research focus includes intellectual history around 1900, and the history and development of audiovisual archives and their role as “lieu de mémoire.” She is also interested in the significance of (acoustic) historical sources, as well as in music and minorities, and multipart music.
Archives have been playing a central role in the UNESCO-related Intangible Cultural Heritage debate. Drawing on the case study of the Vienna Phonogram Archive, this chapter thus discusses audiovisual archives as places of historical sources and their responsibilities in comparison to experiences in archival work, particularly with regard to the Intangible Cultural Heritage debate. What were the considerations of the early archivists? What was their strategy for collecting cultural expressions like music and languages all over the world at the end of the 19th century? And how do we today assess those documents from our point of view? The text of the UNESCO convention for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage highlights it “as a mainspring of cultural diversity”, while UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme underlines “that the world’s documentary heritage belongs to all, should be fully preserved and protected”, and “permanently accessible to all”. The Historical Collections of the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv have been included in this programme as “documents of universal significance”. Considering that the world’s documentary heritage includes not only written but also audio-visual documents, the discourse oscillates between the positions of the static document on the one hand and the living cultural activities on the other. Selected examples are used to clarify the position of the archive and to critically question its role.
University of Wroclaw
Marzanna Poplawska holds degrees from Warsaw University (M.A. in Musicology, 1998) and Wesleyan University (Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology, 2008). She has studied and taught in Poland (Warsaw University, Wroclaw University), U.K. (Durham University), Indonesia (Institute of Indonesian Arts in Yogyakarta), Ireland (University College Cork), and the United States (Wesleyan University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Her primary interests encompass the musical traditions of Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and Central-Eastern Europe as well as acculturation/ enculturation, music and religion, diaspora, and Intangible Cultural Heritage. She is also an active performer of central-Javanese music and dance.
This chapter examines the process of creating and implementing policies for the protection of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). Falling back on the case of Poland, it discusses the genealogy of particular governmental institutions (Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, National Heritage Institute) charged with the protection of ICH, pointing to the gradual changes in the nomenclature as the aftermath of the 2003 UNESCO Convention. After dawdling beginnings (Poland signed the Convention in 2011, eight years after its proclamation), the process of implementing ICH has accelerated and livened up in the recent years. The evidence comes with the many events of the Year of Oskar Kolberg (2014) and the first cultural elements inscribed into the national list of ICH, including the first musical cultural element, i.e., the bagpipes tradition from southern Poland (2015). However, the chapter also analyses the advantages and possible dangers of creating the lists of intangible cultural properties as well as problems in forming appropriate criteria for recognizing the enlisted items. The instance of uprooted Polish communities poses particular problems in defining ICH, and the development of cultural tourism raises justified concerns. The current situation of the ICH in Poland is compared to the models developed in Asia (Japan, Korea) and Eastern Europe.
11. Mapping and Representing Musical Diversity in Switzerland: The Role of Artists, Ethnomusicologists, and Officials [+–] 210-224
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Marc-Antoine Camp received his Ph.D. from the University of Zürich (Switzerland) after studies in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and anthropology, where he also worked in the Archives of Ethnomusicology. Since 2008, Camp has been a researcher at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. His research and publications focus on music education, the transmission of musical knowledge, and the concept of intangible cultural heritage in Switzerland, Brazil, and China.
University of Music, Vienna
Brigitte Bachmann-Geiser, Ph.D., is specialized in organology. Her work includes an inventory of folk musical instruments in Switzerland (1971–1977), a Swiss contribution for the Handbuch der Europäischen Volksmusikinstrumente, and conceptualizing expositions (Kornhaus Burgdorf, Freilichtmuseum Ballenberg). She has published several books, over 200 articles, 35 records, and a selection of films about traditional music and musical instruments. Her work has been recognized with awards by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., the Bernese Cantonal Music Commission, with the Premio Giuseppe Pittrè of Palermo University, and the Walter Deutsch-Preis of the Österreichischen Bundesministeriums für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur. In 2000 she became Honorary Professor at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau.
Federal Office of Culture, Switzerland
David Vitali is since 2012 the Head of the “Culture and Society” branch at the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, which he joined in 2005. In 2006, he was assigned the ratification and implementation of the “UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Vitali studied history and philology at the Universities of Zurich and Oxford. Thereafter, he worked as a researcher at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Munich and at the University of Zurich (1995–2005), where he obtained his Ph.D. in Philology in 2004.
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Dieter Ringli studied musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Zürich. He received his Ph.D. with a thesis on traditional Swiss music in 2003 and worked as a senior lecturer at the Archives of Ethnomusicology at the University of Zurich until 2008. Since 2001, Dieter Ringli has been a lecturer in the history of music at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Music School) and, since 2008, on aesthetics of popular music and ethnomusicology at the Zurich University of the Arts. He is an active musician in the contemporary folk scene of Switzerland with his band Drüdieter.
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Patricia Jäggi has been a researcher at the Music School of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts since 2012. She completed her Ph.D. at University of Basel with a study on post-war listening cultures as exemplified by the sounds of Swiss Radio International for a project titled “Broadcasting Swissness,” supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Previously, Patricia Jäggi studied cultural analysis, German studies, art history, and general and comparative literature at the Universities of Bern and Zürich. Her research interests are sound studies, anthropology, and ethnography of the senses and of perception, as well as radio anthropology and history.
After Switzerland’s ratification of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008, governmental agencies began to implement the obligations and recommendations and published, in 2012, a national List of Living Traditions. The establishment of this list was managed through several steps of negotiations, involving representatives from cultural groups, cultural anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and officials from state agencies. The process sought to find a comprehensive definition of “Intangible Cultural Heritage”, suitable to accommodate diverse views on cultural traditions in Switzerland. Focussing on sounds, the authors look into this construction process of “Living Traditions” from varying angles: a review of previous collections of musical and cultural traditions in Switzerland, with which the recent concept of “Intangible Cultural Heritage” is compared; a report of the establishment of the List of Living Traditions in Switzerland; a critical assessment of this list with its inclusions and exclusions of musical traditions; a presentation of a virtual soundscape of “Living Traditions” to put in perspective the steady re-assembling of sensual elements in the course of traditions. The authors argue that a continuous re-definition of “Intangible Cultural Heritage” is crucial for a successful realization of this concept.
Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover
Sarah M. Ross is professor of Jewish music studies and director of the European Center for Jewish Music at the Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She is author of A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States (Brandeis University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience (Peter Lang, 2013) and editor of the book series Jewish Music Studies (Peter Lang). Her main fields of research are Jewish music, ethnomusicological gender studies, and music and sustainability.
The term ‘cultural heritage’, as defined and developed by the UNESCO, includes oral traditions and living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants. The ways, how the understanding of this concept is put into practice is, however, often limited to visual rather than audible forms of culture, such as within the context of Jewish culture in Switzerland. Here, much effort has been put e.g. into the preservation of the tangible Jewish heritage of the two villages Endingen and Lengnau in Surbtal, but less into safeguarding of the musical traditions of these two villages. Against this background, the chapter argues to apply the concept of cultural sustainability in the study of the so-called Minhag Ashkenaz (the Western-German custom) in Swiss synagogue music. Within the context of this chapter, the concept is first of all understood as an independent and alternative concept from UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage. Thus transformed, it better represents the discursive and dynamic processes of preserving, transmitting and sharing cultural expressions – such as orally transmitted synagogue chants.
Part IV: Intangible Cultural Heritage – Case Studies
Introduction [+–] 251-255
Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover
Sarah M. Ross is professor of Jewish music studies and director of the European Center for Jewish Music at the Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She is author of A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States (Brandeis University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience (Peter Lang, 2013) and editor of the book series Jewish Music Studies (Peter Lang). Her main fields of research are Jewish music, ethnomusicological gender studies, and music and sustainability.
The final chapters of the book contain three different ethnomusicological case studies on performing arts (such as music, dance, singing and festivals etc.) as one domain of intangible cultural heritage defined by the Convention. One unifying element of these case studies is the application of fieldwork as a central research method. Through fieldwork, the authors are able to gradually extract the concepts, expectations, influences and discourses surrounding the history of musical practices – considered as important cultural assets that need to be preserved – and how this affects the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. Beyond that, the ethnographic (applied) approach to intangible cultural heritage allows the researcher to position her- or himself within the field, and thus to take a critical and self-reflexive perspective on the role of the ethnomusicologist within the context and process of heritagization of musical traditions.
13. Flamenco for Andalusia, Flamenco for Humanity: Regionalisation and Intangible Cultural Heritage in Spain [+–] 256-278
University of Cambridge
Matthew Machin-Autenrieth is a Senior Research Associate at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge and the Principal Investigator for the European Research Council-funded project “Past and Present Musical Encounters across the Strait of Gibraltar” (2018–23). He completed his Masters degree and PhD in Ethnomusicology at Cardiff University. Following his studies, Machin-Autenrieth was appointed as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2014–17). He has taught ethnomusicology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at the University of Cambridge, Cardiff University, and the University of Plymouth. He has numerous publications spanning flamenco, regional identity, heritage studies, and intercultural music making, including the monograph Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain (Routledge 2017).
In 2010, UNESCO declared flamenco as Intangible Cultural Heritage. While the inscription recognises flamenco as a Spanish cultural heritage, the tradition is most commonly associated with the autonomous region of Andalusia. As such, flamenco’s UNESCO status is intertwined with regional identity politics in Spain. The Andalusian Government has instrumentalised the inscription for its own project of regional identity building. This chapter examines the impact of the inscription on regional music policy in Andalusia. As is argued here, there is a need to look beyond the nation-state as the main level of analysis in processes of ‘heritagization’. The flamenco case study illustrates how heritage declarations are tied up with intersecting local, regional, national and international politics. The chapter analyses the effects of the inscription at an institutional level, focusing on Andalusia’s own heritage inventories, the education system and the culture industry. However, it also examines localised points of conflict that have emerged from the inscription. Drawing on the zambra, a local context and sub-genre in Granada, it is argued here that flamenco’s regional development under the branding of UNESCO heritage, runs the risk of stifling local flamenco diversity at the expense of a unified Andalusian tradition.
14. Questioning Safeguarding: Heritage and Capabilities at Jemaa el Fnaa Square, Morocco [+–] 279-299
Independent Scholar
Thomas Beardslee, Ph.D., is a professional musician and music teacher living in Brussels, Belgium. His current professional and research interests concern practical applications of his doctoral research on the Sen/ Nussbaum capabilities approach, including music and capabilities in refugee populations. He also performs regularly on guitar, pedal steel, oud, and banjo throughout Belgium and elsewhere in Europe.
Since the Declaration of Masterpieces and the highly successful 2003 Convention, the UNESCO paradigms of Intangible Cultural Heritage and safeguarding have become influential concepts in international, national, and local cultural policy. However, as is argued here, this concept of safeguarding attempts to impose onto the flow of human activity a way of thinking better suited to physical sites: culture as a static edifice that is under threat of erosion, with safeguarding as a process of ‘shoring up’. This results in an awkward fit of both theory and practice that leads to projects with unattainable goals, poorly-directed resources, and limited benefits for their intended recipients. This chapter is based on a year of fieldwork research conducted with the open-air performers at Jemaa el Fnaa Square in Marrakech, Morocco. The Square was in many ways the genesis of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage project, and serves as a useful case study with which to discuss the effects (or lack thereof) of the safeguarding approach on a community ofperformers. This case study will be used to problematize the concepts of heritage and safeguarding, while proposing Amartya Sen’s/ Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach as an alternative framework for actions relating to cultural heritage, intangible or otherwise. The capabilities approach seeks ways of enhancing the possible range of choices and abilities of individuals and communities, privileging this over the prescribing of particular activities. This approach is well-suited to projects relating to culture, which is a fluid and dynamic process resistant to static, prescriptive notions of ‘heritage.’ The chapter hereby also discusses ways in which using the idea of capabilities as a starting point could result in more effective action, meeting both the capabilities deficits of individuals and many of the hopes of those wanting to see their traditions continue.
15. The Verbuňk under the Pressure of World Fame [+–] 300-315
Charles University Prague
Zuzana Jurková studied ethnology and musicology at the Philosophical Faculty at Charles University and at the music conservatory in Brno. She is professor and head of the Institute for Ethnomusicology at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University, focused mainly on the research of musics of minorities (Voices of the Weak 2009, Sounds from the Margins 2013). She concentrates on Romani music (with several publications and an Open Society Fund grant in 1996-8), the history of Czech ethnomusicology (for her Ph.D. and a Fulbright scholarship in Bloomington in 1998) and, in recent years, urban ethnomusicology (Pražské hudební světy 2013; Prague Soundscapes 2014). She has been awarded numerous international grants, including a Fulbright Research Fellowship (Indiana University Bloomington) and Ruth Craword Mitchell Fellowship (University of Pittsburgh).
In 2005 the Slovácko (a region in southeastern Moravia) verbunk, a male dance with singing, was the first of the cultural phenomena of the Czech lands to be put on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. (Afterwards, three others followed, of which the Ride of the Kings is connected with the same region.) There is no doubt that this dance has been performed for a long time in Moravia, but only in the past decades has it attracted intensive attention of different types of folklorists. Primarily, at the biggest folklore festival in the CR – In the Slovácko celebrations in Strážnice (a regional center) a contest for the best Slovak verbunk dancer has been taking place since the mid-’1980s; at it the victors of the local contests are compared. The Strážnice “celebrations” are organized by the National Institute of Folk Culture (NÚLK) in Strážnice, a folklore institute that publishes scientific and popularizing materials, including those dedicated to the verbunk. It was also from there that the initiative for inscription onto the UNESCO list emerged. NÚLK materials and personal connections of its workers nurture the extensive regional folklore movement (e.g. verbunk lessons), incomparable in other Czech lands. On one hand there is no doubt that initiatives of folklorists influence in many ways the reality connected to the verbunk (including completely decontextualized use of the word verbunk) and so it is a kind of Hobsbawm’s 1983 invented tradition. On the other hand, however, the verbunk is not performed anywhere except Slovácko – despite more than a century of the existence of so-called Slovácko circles in many towns of the CR. It seems then that this phenomenon is inseparably connected to the dense network of local culture, including the component of “tradition”.
End Matter
Index [+–] 316-321
University of Bern
Britta Sweers, Ph.D., is Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Music at the Institute of Musicology (since 2009) and Director of the Center for Global Studies (since 2015) at the University of Bern (Switzerland). She has been President of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology (ESEM) since 2014. Major publications include Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (2005), Polyphonie der Kulturen (CD/CD-ROM 2006/8), Grenzgänge – Gender, Race und Class als Wissenskategorien in der Musikwissenschaft (ed.; w. Cornelia Bartsch, 2015). She is co-editor of the European Journal of Musicology and of the Equinox book series Transcultural Music Studies.
Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover
Sarah M. Ross is professor of Jewish music studies and director of the European Center for Jewish Music at the Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media, Germany. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She is author of A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States (Brandeis University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience (Peter Lang, 2013) and editor of the book series Jewish Music Studies (Peter Lang). Her main fields of research are Jewish music, ethnomusicological gender studies, and music and sustainability.
‘Cultural mapping’ has become a central keyword in the UNESCO strategy to protect natural and world cultural heritage, including music traditions. As a tool to increase the awareness of cultural diversity it transforms the concept of intangible cultural heritage to visible items by establishing multi-dimensional profiles of cultures and communities. Cultural mapping has been used as a resource for a variety of purposes as broad as the analysis of conflict points and peace building, adaptation to climate change, sustainability management, as well as heritage debates and management. Music has been playing a significant role in each of these aspects. As this theme has rarely been explored within ethnomusicology, this collection approaches the topic of cultural mapping from four different thematic perspectives: The book starts out with historical and methodological reflections on cultural mapping in ethnomusicology, followed by an exploration on possible relation between nature/ landscape (and definition of such) and music/ sound. How exactly is landscape interrelated with music – and identified (and vice versa)? The second half focuses more specifically on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. The articles not only address the broader political framework, but also thematic and geographic case studies of Intangible Cultural Heritage and music, as well as the pro of UNESCO’s endeavours.
ISBN-13 (Hardback)
9781781797587
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£75.00 / $100.00
ISBN-13 (Paperback)
9781781797594
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£26.95 / $34.00
ISBN (eBook)
9781781797600
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Institutional
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Publication
15/02/2020
Pages
334
Size
234 x 156mm
Readership
students, scholars and general readers
Illustration
52 figures
Puls
