Music and Displacement
Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond
Contributions by Michael Beckerman, Philip V. Bohlman, Sean Campbell, Ruth F. Davis, Björn Heile, Jehoash Hirshberg, Sydney Hutchinson, Max Paddison, Peter Petersen, Jim Samson Edited by Erik Levi, Florian Scheding
Publication date:
25 March 2010Length of book:
216 pagesPublisher
Scarecrow PressISBN-13: 9780810863798
The grand narratives of European music history are informed by the dichotomy of placements and displacements. Yet musicology has thus far largely ignored the phenomenon of displacement and underestimated its significance for musical landscapes and music history. Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond constitutes a pioneering volume that aims to fill this gap as it explores the interactions between music and displacement in theoretical and practical terms. Contributions by distinguished international scholars address the theme through a wide range of case studies, incorporating art, popular, folk, and jazz music and interacting with areas, such as gender and post-colonial studies, critical theory, migration, and diaspora.
The book is structured in three stages—silence, acculturation, and theory—that move from silence to sound and from displacement to placement. The range of subject matter within these sections is deliberately hybrid and mirrors the eclectic nature of displacement itself, with case studies exploring Nazi Anti-Semitism in musical displacement; musical life in the Jewish community of Palestine; Mahler, Jewishness, and Jazz; the Irish Diaspora in England; and German Exile studies, among others. Featuring articles from such scholars as Ruth F. Davis, Sean Campbell, Jim Samson, Sydney Hutchinson, and Europea series co-editor Philip V. Bohlman, the volume exerts an appeal reaching beyond music and musicology to embrace all areas in the humanities concerned with notions of displacement, migration, and diaspora.
The book is structured in three stages—silence, acculturation, and theory—that move from silence to sound and from displacement to placement. The range of subject matter within these sections is deliberately hybrid and mirrors the eclectic nature of displacement itself, with case studies exploring Nazi Anti-Semitism in musical displacement; musical life in the Jewish community of Palestine; Mahler, Jewishness, and Jazz; the Irish Diaspora in England; and German Exile studies, among others. Featuring articles from such scholars as Ruth F. Davis, Sean Campbell, Jim Samson, Sydney Hutchinson, and Europea series co-editor Philip V. Bohlman, the volume exerts an appeal reaching beyond music and musicology to embrace all areas in the humanities concerned with notions of displacement, migration, and diaspora.
Levi (Royal Holloway, Univ. of London, UK) and Scheding (Univ. of Southampton, UK) present essays that explore issues and questions brought about by the unwilling, sometimes violent, dislocation of people or peoples. Music lends itself to such study, perhaps because of its temporal, ephemeral nature. Ethnomusicology has long been the domain for studying the Other but primarily as related to location. Many of the essays in this book turn the tables on that Otherness, locating it not in a geographical place but instead in the displaced person or persons, who become that Other in dislocation. Though the issues the book raises originate in a music context, they reveal a great deal about migration, dislocation, and acculturation. The editors include considerations of the effect of the Nazi stigmatization and exile of Jews, the struggle of displaced philosopher Theodore Adorno to define German-ness and his subsequent renunciation of the absolute, the equating of the mind/body dichotomy with the contrast of music (mental) and dance (physical), and "displacement" of a musical work through arrangements for other instruments. This collection raisestimely questions not previously examined, questions relevant to the study of music and to the study of an increasingly mobile, diverse, 21st-century society. Highly recommended.