Evrim Hikmet Öğüt: Music and Musicians “in the Days of Corona” – creating a new hope or deepening inequalities?

Music and Musicians “in the Days of Corona” – creating a new hope or deepening inequalities?

Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic not only determines our agenda but also surrounds us all. What we do and what we cannot, everything is related to it. We live through the pandemic and speak its language. Our way of seeing the present world, our ways of understanding the past and envisioning the future are all under transformation. This epistemological shift, most probably, will become more distinctive in the following days and we will discuss it a lot. My intention here is to think about how our relationship with music gets and can get its share of this transformation.

Keywords: Corona pandemic, precarity, solidarity

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SIEF Working Group BASE: Bodies, Affects, Senses and Emotions 3rd workshop in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 4 and 5 June 2020

The 3rd BASE workshop seeks to explore the work which is currently being done by working group members and other researchers whose work focuses on the body, affects, senses and emotions.

We invite 20-minute presentations from scholars across the arts & humanities concerned with the focus of the working group – bodies, affects, emotions, senses – but taking a variety of perspectives (historical, synchronic etc). We especially welcome presentations that focus on “collective becomings” – affective politics in the time of global uprisings.

Proposals of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a max 100-word biography, should be submitted to Ana Hofman ahofman@zrc-sazu.si and to basewg@siefhome.org by Monday, 3 February 2020.

Workshop Convenor: Dr. Ana Hofman, Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Venue: Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Local organising team: Dr. Ana Hofman, Dr. Martin Pogačar, Teja Komel Klepec (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts)

“Affection of Sounds and Politics in South-Eastern Europe: Challenges and Perspectives” panel at 2020 EASA conference

The panel will touch affection of sounds and politics in SE Europe in the widest anthropologically relevant aspects: from sound studies to anthropology of music and dance. It will especially theorize cross-sections of art and politics, work and leisure, affect and defiance, past and the present.

https://easaonline.org/conferences/easa2020/panels#8758

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Ana Hofman on decoloniality and ethnomusicology

Ana Hofman v debati o dekolonialnosti in etnomuzikologiji z: Naila Ceribašić, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb; Regina F. Bendix, Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, Göttingen, Germany; Olga Pashina, State Institute for Art Studies, Moscow, Russia; Timothy Rice, Department of Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los Angeles, USA; Jonathan P. J. Stock, Department of Music, University College Cork, Ireland

Entire article available here.

Ana Hofman – SINGing, SOCIALizing, SELForganizing: An insight into an engaged Viennese music collective

It is the evening of 11 December in Vienna’s 15th district, and I am sitting with Jana, Lejla, and Šarlot, eagerly awaiting the screening of a documentary about a unique community choir on the occasion of its fourth anniversary. We are in Brunnengasse, known as a migrant district of Vienna, at the AU Gallery, which is starting to crowd with men, women, and children of all ages and various ethnicities, all of them warmly greeting each other. In this setting, through the documentary and a public rehearsal that soon began, I became acquainted with a most interesting Viennese singing collective, the 29th of NovemberChoir. Vienna is a city known for its music, and one can expect many different musical networks, organizations, and professional bodies. And yet the choir members, many of whom I met at the documentary screening, do not perceive themselves as musicians at all. Rather, they claim radical amateurism, musical self-education, and self-organization. Why?

 

More information available here.

Ana Hofman, lecture: Partisan Songs on Screen: An Affective Archive of Antifascism

Ana Hofman held a lecture at the Institute for Slavistics, Vienna University

In this talk, I examine how affective power of collective singing (and listening) of partisan songs is an essential aspect of the construction of Yugoslav revolutionary subjectivity. I draw on my long-term research on the genre of partisan songs, its affective politics during Yugoslav socialism and its afterlife in the post-Yugoslav societies. Looking at the iconic soundtracks from the partisan films Bitka na Neretvi (1969) and Užička Republika (1974), I observe the affective encounters produced by and through the auditory experience of partisan songs as a main tool for portraying collective revolutionary becomings. The fact that partisan songs are “born” in the moment of struggle and resistance suffuses them with a particular drive or spirit that triggers the songs’ mobilizing force and enables mobilization on various somatic, sensorial, emotional and cognitive levels. For this reason, they are not employed in the films as a tool for mediating a particular set of ideas and values, but are primarily as affectively imbued sonic objects. In other words, affective power of collective singing and listening is used to portray the emergent revolutionary sense of collectivity as highly somatic and affective experience. In this talk, I first examine the historical discourses of the affective power of partisan songs with an emphasis on their collective authorship, performance, mediation and circulation. In the second part, I engage with complex overlapping histories and memories of the antifascist struggle, resistance, and revolution as condensed in an aural experience that is capable of transmitting a spirit of the moment of Yugoslav partisan struggle with all its revolutionary exceptionality.

Alenka Bartulović, Affective hospitality: sevdalinka and the new politics of solidarity in Slovenia

In the framework of Erasmus+ teaching exchange, Assist. Prof. Alenka Bartulović gave four lectures at the University of Zadar at the end of October. She addressed the imagining of the future in post-war Sarajevo and especially the role of music in antinationalist activism. In her second lecture she focused on affectivity and politics of Bosnian music, particularly sevdalinka in Ljubljana in the 1990s.

Rajko Muršič: Affective and political dimensions of Yugoslav popular music, block of lectures, Bern 2019

Between October 14 and 16, 2019, Rajko Muršič gave a short block of lectures on Affective and Political Dimensions of Yugoslav Popular Music. The lectures were organised in the frame of the joint degree programme Creole: Cultural Differences and Transnational Processes at the Institute for Social Anthropology, University of Bern (Universität Bern, Philosophisch-historische Fakultät, Institut für Socialanthropologie).

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