Resonances: Exploring Global Music Histories Across Cultures

Second Conference of the IMS Study Group on the Global History of Music

Resonance: Exploring Global Music Histories Across Cultures

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Organizers:

Maria Alexandra I. Chua | University of Santo Tomas, Philippines

David R.M. Irving | ICREA &IMF, CSIC,Spain

Location : Central Laboratory Auditorium, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines

Organization: Research Center for Culture, Arts and Humanities, University of Santo Tomas

Date: Friday, 3 November 2023 | Saturday, 4 November 2023 

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Call for Papers

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Resonance is an essential characteristic of music in all times and places. Sounding bodies resonate, places resound with music, and some musics are deliberately re-sounded over time. In broader metaphorical terms, resonance can also imply agreement or accord among communities who are in direct contact, or parallels and correspondences between those who are not. Scholars in many fields use musical analogies of tuning or harmony to describe interpersonal and intercultural relationships, whether they are looking at the present or the past. Within the field of global music history, thinking about music in terms of resonances already involves the recognition of resonant bodies—human or other—within specific cultural contexts, or the comparative critique of how resonances circulate between cultures. It also engages with music theory to consider how different cultures interpret physical or acoustical laws, as recent studies of encounters between Chinese and French musical thought of the eighteenth century have shown (Hu 2021; Jiang 2022). As scholars in global music history consider the rapid circulation of “humanly organized sound,” to use John Blacking’s classic formulation (1973), they also take into account the ideas of soundscapes (R. Murray Schafer
1977/1993), acoustic ecology (Barry Truax 1978) and Steven Feld’s concept of acoustemologies (1992), as Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne Cusick have recently demonstrated (2021).

This second conference of the IMS Study Group “Global History of Music” aims to investigate the many ways in which the emerging field of global music history can approach, engage, and interpret “resonances” across cultures. Looking at questions of social interconnectedness, technological advances, travel and mobility, and imbalances of power, we invite papers that explore how sounds from diverse cultures resonate both locally and in global circulation. Keeping in mind Thomas Turino’s distinction between “depth” and “breadth” in globalist discourse (2003)—and his proposed categories of “immigrant communities,” “diasporas,” and “cosmopolitan formations”—we ask how sounds are adapted and adopted in new environments. How do resonating bodies act and interact in the processes of transculturation and hybridity? How do humans and non-humans resonate in the soundscape or in acoustemological contexts, and how can the notion of resonance be interpreted by scholars of global music history? How do travel and mobility, or longstanding local residence, impact on the ideas and practices of resonating bodies (variously human, material, or metaphysical)?

This conference will take place in Manila, a metropolis that has been described as “the world’s first global city” (Irving 2010). We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of global music history that relate to resonating bodies, from the perspectives of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, organology, anthropology, sound studies, sociology of music, and sister disciplines.