Conveners
"Silence and Echoes in the Archives" (SG Global History of Music)
- David Irving (ICREA – Spain)
Description
This session asks and discusses how researchers deal with the metaphorical “silences” or limitations of their source materials, grapple with unknowns, and glean traces of past musical practices or sound-worlds, while considering how the constitution of the archive and its structural exclusions can be understood. The idea of “echoes” in the archive might be understood as the circulation and narrativisation of events across different historical periods, cultural geographies, and discursive domains, including the ways in which historical events are remembered and resound in the present.
Within musicology and ethnomusicology, a number of scholars are constantly contemplating new ways of engaging with and critically interpreting records of the past, particularly those produced in the contexts of colonial and imperial histories. For example, Philip Burnett, Erin Johnson-Williams, and Yvonne Liao have recently examined the interface of sound and silence in written records of colonial interactions (“Music, Empire, Colonialism: Sounding the Archives”, Postcolonial Studies 26, no. 3 (2023): 345–59). Beyond these disciplines, the challenges of vanishing points in the historical record have also been addressed by approaches including reading against or along the archival grain (Inga Clendinnen, Ann Laura Stoler) or critical fabulation (Saidiya Hartman). Practitioners of “Historically Informed Performance” have also long engaged in practices of reconstruction and elaboration, fully aware of the transient nature of the art-form that they study – especially prior to the threshold moments of the advents of reliable sound and video recording. In all these ways, and many more, silences and echoes surround and shape scholarly engagements with the archive.
This Study Session asks the following questions (amongst others):
• What constitutes an archive or an archival source in global music history?
• How do we select our archival sources, and what kinds of factors (for example: conceptual, pragmatic, political) shape our choices?
• Are archival “silences” more likely in certain fields of research compared to others (for example, in chronological or geographical terms), and how can they be mitigated – or, in certain cases, embraced and recognised for an important message that they bring?
• What methods can be employed by global music historians in their approaches to archival research?
• How do we pace archival research, and know when or how to stop searching?
• What is the relationship between sounds in performance and their echoes in the archive?
• How do the echoes of historical voices resonate across different archives and periods, including the present?
