Digital conference: Urban Nostalgia: The Musical City in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Urban Nostalgia: The Musical City in the 19th and 20th Centuries
5–7 July 2020
Online Registrations : https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tRo1a9djSh2EIaPN7NWs0Q
Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (CRAL)
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris)
Via Zoom (Central European Summer Time)
Organization: Dr Lola San Martín Arbide, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, CRAL, EHESS, Paris
More information here or at @lola_sanmartin on Twitter
Full pdf programme and details
Register via Zoom at: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tRo1a9djSh2EIaPN7NWs0Q
The aim of this conference is to explore space through music, approaching the history of the city via the notion of nostalgia. Often described as a form of homesickness, nostalgia is, by definition, the feeling that makes us wish to repossess or reoccupy a space. Such spaces appear to us as both near and distant, tangible and remote, and it seems that attempts at reclaiming them are frequently musical in nature. We know, for instance, that particular compositions have played important roles in helping people to navigate or mitigate a sense of displacement. In these circumstances, affective experiences may be bound up with trauma or joy, as is the case of song during wartime or musical imaginaries among migrants. Under other conditions, we might identify a ‘second-hand nostalgia’ in the guise of a musically-inflected tourism that seeks to reactivate (for pleasure and/or profit) the historical aura of an urban site. What are we to make of the abundance of personal, inter-personal, and propositional episodes that posit music as some kind of a bridge to the urban past?
SUNDAY JULY 5
16:00 > 16:30 Welcome and Introduction
Lola San Martín Arbide, CRAL / EHESS, Paris
16.30>18.45
From Fin-de-siècle to Retromania
Chair: Jonathan Hicks, University of Aberdeen
Part One. Beirut–Rome: The Written Discourses of Urban Modernity
—Beirut in the musical discourse
Diana Abbani, Freie Universität Berlin
—In memory of Rome. Topographical and musical proofs in Il piacere by Gabriele D'Annunzio
Raffaella Carluccio, Università di Parma
(15 minute pause, 17.30 > 17.45)
Part Two. Beirut–Japan in the 1960s
—Beirut the Ancient City of the Future: On Hauntology, Vaporwave, and the Sounds of Nostalgia for Lost Futures
Ali Jaber, Lebanese University of Fine Arts /American University of Beirut
—From Rustic Hometowns to Dazzling Skylines: Nostalgia, Healing and the Negotiation of Identity in the Urban Cityscapes of Japanese New Music (nyū _myūjikku)
Anita Drexler, independent scholar
MONDAY JULY 6
16.00>17.30
The City’s Rural Idyll
Chair: Justinien Tribillon, Theatrum Mundi
—Heimatsmusik in Prague: Rural nostalgia in the capital?
Ondřej Daniel, Charles University Prague, and Jakub Machek, Metropolitan University Prague
—The transposition of the musical landscape of the Brazilian sertão to the urban environment through Armorial music
Cecília Pires, CRAL / EHESS, Paris
—‘Those Old Melodies Touch Home’: Nostalgia Rurality in Old-Time Music’s Urban Audience (United-States, 1920-1945)
Manuel Bocquier, Mondes Américains / Centre d’Études Nord-Américaines, EHESS, Paris
17.45>19.15
Paris: Old, New and Déco
Chair: Gascia Ouzounian, University of Oxford
—Nineteenth-Century Popular Song and the Invention of Le nouveau Paris
Jack Blaszkiewicz, Wayne State University
—Mal de Paris: Singing and dancing nostalgia in the late nineteenth-century city
Tristan Paré-Morin, University of Pennsylvania
—Paris, art déco, and the spirit of Apollo
Jonathan Cross, University of Oxford
TUESDAY JULY 7
16.00>17.30
Musical Palimpsests
Chair: Christabel Stirling, University of Westminster
—‘Deine alten Melodien von der schönen Stadt Berlin’. Popular Song and Urban Nostalgia in Berlin, 1880-1930
Daniel Morat, Freie Universität Berlin
—Longing for a Disappearing City: Urban Transformation and Nostalgia in Costumbrista Music Theatre in Late Nineteenth Century San Sebastian
Asier Odriozola Otamendi, Universidad Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)
—The production of urban nostalgias. Montevideo and Buenos Aires’ shared histories of tango
Daniel Richter, University of Maryland
17.45>18.45
Keynote lecture by Richard Elliott, University of Newcastle
Revisiting Old Haunts in a Time of Lockdown: Holiday Records, Virtuality and the Nostalgia Gap
Respondent: Esteban Buch, CRAL / EHESS, Paris
19.00>19.30
Concluding thoughts
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Scientific committee: Esteban Buch (CRAL / EHESS, Paris); Jonathan Hicks (University of Aberdeen); Gascia Ouzounian (University of Oxford); Lola San Martín Arbide (CRAL / EHESS, Paris); Christabel Sterling (University of Westminster); Justinien Tribillon (Theatrum Mundi).