Early Music, Revival Theory and Views from Ethnomusicology

Description

In this presentation I explore how the practices, discourses and debates of early music may be viewed through the related lenses of ethnomusicology (as academic discipline), ethnography (as methodology) and world music (as meta-genre entangled with the music industry), and I consider how these perspectives might offer new tools for re-envisioning the past and reimagining the future. I draw on contemporary revival theory to add nuance to processes of reclaiming, restoring, re-enacting, reinvigorating, reshaping and reimagining musics from other times and places, along a continuum from preservation to transformation. I offer examples from extant music-cultures as points of entry for thinking about performance practices and their contingencies in more diverse ways that may generate fresh lines of enquiry or suggest alternative solutions. Beyond the tangible musical clues we may find, what might we learn from problems, tensions or disputes that have arisen among performers and guardians of present-day traditions and from how they have been negotiated and theorised? I offer more detailed insights from my research into the revival of polyphonic singing in Georgia, where a core tenet is that a song should never be sung the same way twice and where radically different ways of performing the same repertoires – each with its own aesthetic and ideology – coexist as part of the contemporary musical ecology. From such vantage points, how might we best depict the early musics we take forward into a new post-revival phase that aspires to greater plurality, inclusivity and potency? What part might these musical and human encounters play in constructing a world that is more diverse and sustainable?

Period	15 Oct 2021
Event title	Early Music in the 21st Century
Event type	Conference
Location	Amsterdam, NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International