Saturday, 28 November 2020

Zdravko Blažeković 

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, New York

ZBlazekovic@gc.cuny.edu

Advancing Communication in Global Musicology:  

RILM’s Social Responsibility 

The world of music scholarship is today most broadly divided into four linguistic megaregions: Europe with North America (dominated by English language of communication), Iberian Peninsula with Latin America (dominated by Spanish), Russia with Central Asia (dominated by Russian), and East Asia (dominated by Chinese). Generally speaking, each region is self-contained, maintaining its own gravitational forces. The Anglo-American scholarly networks are perceived as arbiters of the global scholarly relevance, despite the fact that they often ignore currents in other linguistic regions. Content in the reference works created in Europe and North America, which claim the ultimate authority in the discipline (The New Grove, MGG, RISM, RIPM), are international in the scope, but fall short of being global. The aggregators of altmetrics data and citation indexes (Scopus, Google Scholar, Web of Science) are bias toward the English-language literature. This leaves scholars from other parts of the world in a disadvantaged position. When they publish in their national languages, their work does not receive sufficient reception and their scholarly impact is not adequately measured. Although the modern world is better connected through the social media than ever before, the true global communication between scholarly music communities is in crisis.

In such scholarly inequality and the dominance of English-language literature, the mission of the RILM Abstracts of Music Literature has always been creating truly global tools for music scholarship. Each country and political system where the scholarship has originated from, each language or writing system in which scholarship has been published, each type of music that has been researched is conceptually conceived equal in RILM Abstracts. In the postglobal time of protectionism and social closure, RILM sees building global networks for the dissemination of music research as its social responsibility, which can be helpful to scholars disadvantaged by the Anglo-American academic imperialism. 

Key words: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, almetrics in musicology, social responsibility, global musicology, inequality in music scholarship

Zdravko Blažeković is director of the Research Center for Music Iconography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and executive editor of Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale. In 1998 he founded an annual journal for music iconography Music in Art, and in 2016 a monography series Music in Visual Cultures (Brepols), both of which he has been editing since. He is chair of the ICTM Study Group on Iconography of the Performing Arts. His research area concerns 18th- and 19th-century music of Southeast and Central Europe, music iconography, organology, historiography of music, reception of Greek and Roman organology in modern times, musical contacts between Europe and China before the early 19th century, and music symbolism in medieval and renaissance astrology.

Srđan Atanasovski

Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade

srdjanatanasovski@yahoo.co.uk

Rhythmanalysis and (Post)Musicology:

From horror silentii to Social Distancing

In his last book, Elements de rythmanalyse (1992), French Marxists socio-logist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre described a figure of “rhythmana-lyst” as a researcher who is “always ‘listening out’, but […] does not only hear words, discourses, noises and sounds; [she or] he is capable of listen-ing to a house, a street, a town as one listens to a symphony, an opera”. Notwithstanding usual interpretations along these lines as an allegorical description, in this paper I will explore how we can use Lefebvre’s rhyth-manalysis as a guide to expand the purview of traditional musicology and engage with wider social issues. In the last decades it was usually musicol-ogy which was invaded by novel methods, ranging from semiotics and discourse analysis, to cognitive psychology, to which it merely offered the object of its investigation – that is, the music itself.

I will argue that the tables can be turned if we depart from the core com­pe­tence of a musicologist – that is, the listening – and investigate how it can be put into practise outside of what we usually think of as music stud­ies. In other words – what can listening tell us about society and what forms of listening are needed to grapple with this question? In order to answer these questions I will engage with the ongoing pandemic and eco­nomic crises of 2020, analysing the shift from horror silentii (fear of si­lence), which has increasingly been characteristic of public spaces in the 2010s, towards the (silence of) social distancing imposed by the crises, and I will investigate how listening and rhythmanalysis can contribute to our knowledge of ongoing restructuring of labour relations.

Key words: rhythmanalysis, post-musicology, Henri Lefebvre, listening, horror silentii, social distancing

Srđan Atanasovski is a Research Associate at the Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade, lecturer at the School for International Training (SIT) Study Abroad Balkans programme in Belgrade and member and coordinator of the Centre for Yugoslav Studies in Belgrade. In his research he focuses on nationalism, culture and music in the Yugoslav space. Atanasovski was engaged as a fellow of international research pro­jects funded by Swiss Science Foundation and he has received research scholarships from the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research. His articles have appeared in South-eastern Europe, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Südosteuropa, Musicological Annual, etc., as well as in different edited volumes published by Brill, Ashgate, Transcript and other international academic publishers. His first book, Mapiranje Stare Srbije (in Serbian, trans. ‘Mapping Old Serbia: In the footsteps of travel writ­ers, tracing the folk song’), was published in 2017 by Biblioteka XX vek.

Richard Parncutt

Centre for Systematic Musicology, University of Graz

parncutt@uni-graz.at

The Short Future of Musicology, and What We Can Do Before It Ends

Even without considering global biodiversity loss or the probability of nu­clear war, climate change will either destroy or radically change human civ­ilization by 2100, a new “end of history”. The science of climate change and humanity’s persistent failure to control it suggests we are head­ing for 3 to 4°C of warming – but 2°C will already be catastrophic, unprece­dented, and irreversible.

Any realistic discussion of the future of music and musicology (or any oth­er academic discipline) must therefore be limited to a few decades and ad­dress the inevitable. Rather than asking “Is there room for academic ac­tiv­ism”, we musicians and musicologists – like all professional people – should be asking “Can we afford NOT to be politically active?”

How might music and musicology contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation? From a psychological perspective, music promotes em­pa­thy and social cohesion. If so, musicians have a special responsibility to de­fend human rights. An example is flying – the best way to increase one’s personal carbon footprint. Musicians and musicologists can be role mod­els, developing remote teaching and low-carbon conferences that addi­tion­ally improve global cultural inclusion and electronic documentation.

It’s time to overcome our fear of addressing politically sensitive topics. We must promote both individual minimalism (foregoing flying, driving, meat, and consumerist extravagance) and political activism (pushing for a new democracy that prioritises the interests of young people and future generations).

We can also highlight relevant political activities, messages, and lifestyle chang­es of musicians and composers, not to mention diverse attempts to mu­sically present the enormity of global tragedies. Examples include Ben­ja­min Britten’s War Requiem (1962), a setting of the Catholic requiem mass with pacifist poems by Wilfred Owen, and Paul Kelly’s Sleep Aus­tral­ia Sleep (2019), a country-music lullaby about the current Australian gov­ern­ment’s failure to reduce emissions despite the existential con­se­quences.

Key words: climate change, civilisation, activism, cohesion, empathy, flying, human rights

Richard Parncutt is Professor of Systematic Musicology, University of Graz, Austria (since 1998) and director of the Centre for Systematic Musicology, University of Graz (since 2009). He was chair of the 15th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) combined with the 10th triennial conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM), Graz, Montreal, La Plata, Sydney (23-28 July 2018) and president of ESCOM (2015-2018). He holds Bachelor’s degrees in Music and Science, University of Melbourne, Australia (1981), an Honours (Master’s) de­gree in Physics, University of New England (UNE), Australia (1982), and an in­terdisciplinary PhD in psychology, music and physics (UNE) with supervisors Catherine Ellis (music), Neville Fletcher (physics), William G. Noble (psychol­ogy) (1987). His research addresses musical structure (pitch, consonance, har­mony, tonality, tension, rhythm, meter, accent), music performance (psy­chology, piano, applications), origins of tonality and of music, and musi­cological interdisciplinarity.