Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond (Volume 10) (Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities, 10) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810863790 ISBN 13: 9780810863798

Publisher: Scarecrow Press, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Florian Scheding is Research Fellow in Music at the University of Southampton.

Erik Levi is Reader in Music and Director of Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London. He writes regular reviews for the BBC Music Magazine.

Review:

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. (CHOICE 2010-11-01)

The book offers a useful investigation of some of the various techniques by which scholars might consider the significant effects of displacement in the history of music....The contrasting tales of displacement and scope of methodological approaches introduced in Samson’s essay serve appropriately as a suggestive conclusion to a book that promises to introduce readers to this important and growing field of musicological inquiry. (Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 2011-09-01)

Eric Levi and Florian Scheding have delivered a significant contribution to the burgeoning literature on the relationship of music to place and displacement, particularly with regard to the exiled composer. Published in the Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities series by Scarecrow Press, the book is salutary because it juxtaposes authors with a broad range of expertise. ... [T]his book presents timely and insightful topics that need to be addressed. . . it will no doubt become standard reading for many of us. (CAML Review)

[M]any of the themes introduced by this book deserve to be at the very heart of contemporary musicology. (Music & Letters)

About this edition

• Publisher: Scarecrow Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0810863790
• ISBN 13: 9780810863798
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Levi Erik, Scheding Florian