Music, Knowledge, and Global Migration, ca. 1700−1900

Mapping Music and Migration: Questions of Scale

April 16 | 11 am - 12 pm

The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life | Berkeley, CA

Speaker: Kate van Orden, Harvard University

Musicology’s embrace of what is being called global music history is proving extremely useful as a place from which to contest Eurocentric histories of music and develop new working methods equipped to address the meaningfulness of music in places where cultures, languages, and people were in constant contact. In this talk, 1.) I begin by outlining the analytic categories employed in migration studies and underscoring their usefulness to music historians. 2.) I go on to ask some larger questions designed to incite discussions concerning matters of scale. What is the relationship between micro and macro history in musicological research? How can musicology best operate at the scale of seas and oceans? 3.) I wrap up by setting musicological research in perspective by comparing it to hard forms of world history designed to discover global unities created by economic, colonial, and—eventually—industrial processes. Case studies drawn from recent scholarship are threaded throughout.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

Conveners

Tina Frühauf is Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University in New York and serves on the doctoral faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center, where she heads the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation. An active scholar and writer, the study of Jewish music in modernity has been Dr. Frühauf’s primary research focus. Among Dr. Frühauf’s recent editions and books are Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989 (Oxford University Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards, and the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Simone Lässig, Director of the German Historical Institute Washington, is a cultural and social historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research has focused on Jewish history, religion and religiosity, philanthropy and patronage, and memory cultures and the politics of memory. Simone Lässig has done work on educational media and she is particularly interested in digital history.

Francesco Spagnolo is the Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. He is also an Associate Adjunct Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Music and the Center for Jewish Studies, and is affiliated with the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Institute for European Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Religious Diversity Cluster of the Haas Institute. His publications include Italian Jewish Musical Traditions (Rome-Jerusalem, 2001) andThe Jewish World: 100 Treasures of Art and Culture (New York, 2014). Spagnolo hosts cultural programs for Italian National Radio (RAI) in Rome, and is a Scholar-in-Residence with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in San Francisco.

Chairs

Isabel Richter is a Deputy Director at the German Historical Institute where she has led the GHI Pacific Office at the University of California, Berkeley since fall 2023. She studied Modern History, German Studies and Spanish at the University of Freiburg/Br., the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, and the Free University Berlin (M.A.). She was a graduate student at the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the Technical University in Berlin and received her Ph.D. from the TU Berlin. She was Assistant Professor at the Ruhr University Bochum where she also completed her Habilitation. She was Postdoctoral Feodor Lynen Fellow at the University of California Los Angeles and Temporary Full Professor (Vertretungsprofessur) at the Universities of Göttingen, Bielefeld, and Vienna. Between 2017 and 2022 she held the DAAD professorship in German history at University of California, Berkeley and joined the GHI in 2023.

Nicholas Mathew is Professor of Music and Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. Born in Norwich, in the UK, he was educated at his local comprehensive school, and went on to study music history and the piano at Oxford University, the Guildhall School of Music, and Cornell University. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 2007.  His publications include the books Political Beethoven and The Haydn Economy. 

James Davies is a historian and professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Music. In his work, Prof. Davies thinks about what music is and has been made out of – broadly about poietic matters in musicmaking. His first book, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (University of California Press, 2014), is a history of European hands and voices, critiquing the idea of “expression” in nineteenth-century music, and thinking about how music acts in the cultivation of bodies. His interest in the history of nineteenth-century science, particularly Euro-US engineering and the biological sciences, is borne out in Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London (University of Chicago Press, 2017) co-edited with Ellen Lockhart. Creatures of the Air (University of Chicago Press, 2023) is a macrohistory and critique of environmentality indebted to elemental media theory. Together with his colleague Nicholas Mathew, Prof. Davies edits the book series New Material Histories of Music at the University of Chicago Press.

Viola Alianov-Rautenberg joined the GHI Pacific Office as a Research Fellow in 2024. She is a historian of German, Jewish, and Israeli history of the 19th and 20th century. She is especially interested in questions of gender, home, and migration as well as sound and music. She received her Ph.D. in 2018 from the Berlin Institute of Technology. Her first book, No Longer Ladies and Gentlemen: Gender and the German-Jewish Migration to Mandatory Palestine, was published by Stanford University Press in October 2023. Before joining the GHI, Viola held positions at the Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Bucerius Institute for the Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa, and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research project explores songs and singing in Jewish migration.

Panelists

Silvio J. dos Santos is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Florida. He specializes in European and Latin American music from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing on issues related to music, indigeneity, and cultural identity. He is the recipient the 2002 Paul A. Pisk Award from the American Musicological Society, as well as several research grants. He is author of Narratives of Identities in Alban Berg's ‘Lulu’ (University of Rochester Press, 2014) and articles in the Journal of Musicology, Notes, the second edition of the American Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Serialism, ed. Martin Iddon (2023). He is currently working on a book, tentatively entitled, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Imagined Indigeneities in Brazilian Music, which examines Villa-Lobos’s depiction of historical moments of contact between colonial forces and Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

Christian Breternitz studied musicology, educational science and psychology in Weimar and Jena. He completed his doctorate at the Berlin University of Arts in 2019 with a thesis on “Berliner Blechblasinstrumentenbau im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert” (Berlin brass instrument making in the 18th and 19th century). After working at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum (Berlin, 2012–2014), the Landesmuseum Württemberg (Stuttgart, 2015–2017) and the Deutsches Museum (Munich, 2017–2021), he has been working as a research associate and curator for woodwind, brass and percussion instruments at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum Berlin since 2020. His research focuses on 18th-to 20th-century wind instrument making and Berlin musical instrument making, as well as on the cultural transfer processes associated with musical instrument making.

Nancy Yunhwa Rao is Distinguished Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her work bridges musicology, theory, Chinese opera and Sinophone studies. She is the author of Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (2017), which unfolds from an easily neglected piece of lyrics into extraordinary stories of Chinese community. It has been recognized with four awards from American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, Association of Asian American Studies, etc. Chinese translation of the book was published in 2021. Her research also includes the use of musical gestures, singing, and percussion patterns of Beijing opera in contemporary music by composers of Chinese origin, as well as gender and music analysis. She currently works on the analysis of materiality and timbre in contemporary East-Asian music. Her new book, Inside Chinese theater: Community, Identity, and Artistry in 19 century California, is forthcoming. Rao is the editor of American Music.

Samuel Cheney is an AHRC-funded PhD student in history at the University of Edinburgh. He is a historian of music and the British Empire, whose research project is entitled "Perceptions and Representations of Chinese Musicality in Britain, 1860 – 1939". This project explores how music and sound influenced British conceptions of China’s racial and civilizational profile in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Devon J Borowski received his PhD in Music History and Theory from the University of Chicago in 2023. His research interrogates the relationship between song, as a material practice and an object of knowledge, and constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Devon’s research has been supported a Predoctoral Fellowship for Excellence through Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania, an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society, and an LGBT Studies Research fellowship from Yale University. His current book project investigates eighteenth-century singing cultures and colonial discourses of voice, humanity, and history in late Georgian Britain, especially in relation to the aesthetics of Camp, gothic horror, and Orientalism. He currently serves as Teaching Fellow in the Department of Music and in the College at the University of Chicago, where he is an affiliated postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.

Elizabeth Rouget is a PhD candidate at Princeton University.  Her dissertation titled “Dance as Translation: Establishing French Opéra-Comique, Ballet, and Circus in Early North America, 1780-1810” is the first comprehensive study of the dynamic and vibrant tradition that fascinated Northern American audiences in the eighteenth century.  Following the circulation of musical works, ballet masters, and star performers, she traces the artistic networks and performance practices of opéra-comique in New Orleans, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Montreal, and Quebec City.  Elizabeth’s research is supported by the Margery Lowens Dissertation Research Fellowship through the Society for American Music, and the Bombardier Fellowship through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Janie Cole (PhD University of London) is a Research Scholar at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and Visiting Professor in Yale’s Department of Music, an Affiliate of the Yale Council on African Studies, Research Officer for East Africa on the University of the Witwatersrand and University of Cape Town’s interdisciplinary project Re-Centring AfroAsia (2018-), and a Research Associate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (2022-). Prior to this, she was a Senior Lecturer (adjunct) at the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music for nine years (2015-23). Her current research focuses on musical practices, instruments and thought in early modern African kingdoms and Afro-Eurasian encounters, transcultural circulation and entanglements in the age of exploration. She is the author of two books, as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. Fellowships include The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and the Claude V. Palisca Award in Musicology from the Renaissance Society of America. She is currently the founding Discipline Representative in Africana Studies (2018-23) at the Renaissance Society of America, on the Editorial Advisory Board of Renaissance Quarterly, co-founder of the International Musicological Society Study Group Early African Sound Worlds, and the founder/executive director of Music Beyond Borders.

Molly Barnes is a musicologist, musician, and private music instructor currently residing in Chapel Hill, NC. She received her Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has taught music history at UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Greensboro and Durham University (UK). A specialist in nineteenth-century American music history, Molly has published in Nineteenth-Century Music Review and has presented her research at national and international conferences including the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music. She is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled Old World Harmony, New World Democracy: American Idealism and the European Musical Inheritance, 1830-1870. This project explores the enthusiastic embrace of an elite tradition—European “classical” music—by American listeners during a period when so much public discourse revolved around national ideals of democracy and egalitarianism.

Giuseppe Gerbino is Professor of Historical Musicology at Columbia University, New York. His research interests include Renaissance theories of cognition and sense perception, the Italian madrigal, the relationship between music and language in the early modern period, and nineteenth-century opera. He is the author of Canoni ad Enigmi: Pier Francesco Valentini e l'artificio canonico nella prima metà del Seicento (Rome, 1995), and Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2009), which won the 2010 Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society. Among his most recent publications is the co-edited volume Italian Opera in the United States, 1800-1850: At the Origins of a Cultural Migrations (Lucca, 2023), and he is currently at work on a book on Music, Mind, and Soul in the Italian Renaissance.

Kate van Orden is Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music at Harvard University. She specializes in the cultural history of early modern France, Italy, and the Mediterranean, popular music (mostly 16th-c, but also in the 1960s), and cultural mobility. Her latest project is Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, 1550-1800 (I Tatti Research Series 2), an edited volume. Her prize-winning publications include Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in 16th-c. Europe (Oxford, 2015), Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2005), and articles in Seachanges, Renaissance Quarterly, and Early Music History. In 2016, she received a French Medaille d’Honneur. van Orden currently serves as President of the International Musicological Society (2022-2027), editor-in-chief of Oxford Bibliographies of Music, and co-edits the series Musics in Motion (Michigan). She also performs on baroque and classical bassoon, with over 60 recordings on Sony, Virgin Classics, and Harmonia Mundi.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a critical period for migration, seeing an acceleration that peaked at the turn of the twentieth century. These two hundred years also saw a change in the profile of migrants, from the initial colonists or settlers driven by population growth, economic changes, political instability, war, and freedom of religion to those first and foremost fleeing persecution. Among the migrants were musicians, scholars, ethnographers, writers, and intellectuals who brought with them knowledge about music. This conference seeks to map a specific concept within this distinct time period: how music functions as a vehicle to carry and develop knowledge in migration, and how migration affects knowledge about and understanding of music on a global scale. Sources can include a variety of “musical objects,” including music scores, musical instruments, and records of music performances, as well as encyclopedias, scholarly literature, popular literature, travelogues, letters, translations, and more. As such the conference focuses on the global migration of knowledge through texts and people.

We are inviting scholars from all disciplines, whose work engages with music in both specific and broad ways, to contribute historiographical or ethnographical case studies and/or theoretical and methodological contributions that explore questions like the following:

• How do music and knowledge correlate in specific migratory contexts?
• What knowledge remains relevant for migrants and diasporic communities, and how is this articulated in music production (composition and performance) as well as within discourses about music?
• How do the knowledge and practice of music reflect belonging?
• How can the knowledge of music contest essentialist discourses of integration and assimilation?
• What is the impact of the knowledge of music on the transmission and performance of music?
• What role do place, class, sex, and ability play in the context of migration, music, and knowledge?
• How do different media of transmission affect the dissemination of knowledge in migratory contexts?
   

We welcome proposals for papers and other types of presentations that engage with the conference theme. Individual paper presentations must be kept to 30 minutes (15-minute presentations, followed by 15-minute discussions).

Please submit a proposal through our online application portal before 1 October 2023. Proposals for whole panels are welcome. Accommodations will be arranged and paid for by the organizers. Subsidies for travel are available upon request for selected scholars, especially those who might not be able to attend the workshop otherwise, including junior scholars, and scholars from universities with limited resources. 

The conference will be held in English.