Soundscapes: New challenges, new horizons

Day: Thursday 5 April

Convenors

Margit Thøfner (University of East Anglia)
Tim Shephard (Sheffield University)

Session Abstract

There is a long and fruitful scholarly tradition of exploring the relationships between art and music. Amongst other things, the study of both entails working with objects, spaces and practices that are profoundly embodied, sensory and emotional. To work with and between art and music means becoming acutely attuned to the visceral as much as to the analytical. Yet there is still more to be gained. Recently, when commenting on the relationship between art history and musicology, Jonathan Hicks speculated that ‘it may be precisely in attending to the locations of expressive culture – whether noisy, spectacular, or a combination of these and more – that our disciplines might find most common ground.’ Our strand explores this proposition.

What may be learned from focusing on how music and sound – or even the silent evocation of sound – is framed by places, spaces, objects, rituals and other performative contexts and vice versa? More broadly, how does this common ground help us to map out and explore the problems and challenges currently facing art historians who work with music and musicologists working with art? For example, is it still a problem that many of our current methods of enquiry have come from studies of European modernism? What happens when they are applied to earlier periods and/or different cultural contexts? Together, we explore this and other methodological problems by focusing on specific soundscapes from diverse locations and periods.

Speakers & Papers

Andrew J Kluth (University of California Los Angeles) Soundscape, Memory, and Meaning: Thoughts on Alan Nakagawa’s Peace Resonance

Meng-Jiao Chen (Soochow University) Cross-Cultural Creation and Crossover in ‘Chinese Folk Jazz’

Charlotte Gould (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) Recent Soundwalks in Britain: Exploring new visualities

Zachary Furste (University of Southern California) Wax Museum: Assemblage, the LP, and the Anthology of American Folk Music

Lois Oliver (University of Notre Dame (USA) in London) Manet and Music: A case study on the future of dynamic binaural sound

Daria Rose Foner (Columbia University) Sight and Sound in Santissima Annunziata’s Chiostrino dei Voti

Laura Stefanescu (University of Sheffield) Silent Soundscapes: Visual heavenly music in the chapels of the Ducal Palace in Urbino

Laura Slater (Somerville College, University of Oxford) Devotional Soundscapes in the Psalter of Queen Philippa