This article summarizes the research creation activities as part of Singing Storytellers in 2014, and subsequently the development of knowledge dissemination outputs through deep collaboration with scholars and artists. Over the past decade, the field of research creation has brought together academics and practitioners across institutes of higher education, the arts sector, and the creative industry in Canada and internationally. My work as a documentary filmmaker and sound artist has expanded to a curatorial practice that centers community engagement, in no small part due to the connections with artists and scholars, training opportunities, and mentorship from which I benefited during this project while I was a graduate student. While collaborations between the musicians and scholars involved in Singing Storytellers have thrived since and resulted in multiple initiatives, this article reflects on the initial collaboration that brought a novel approach to the Sunjata epic performance accompanied by poetic translation to the public through multimedia. Here, I reflect on the process of filming, editing, and presenting The Sunjata Story & ETH; Glimpse of a Mande Epic drawing on methods from visual anthropology and ethnomusicology. I conclude with a consideration of how acts of reciprocity can create more sustainable relationships between artists and scholars-a practice I now incorporate into my own scholarship today.
This article presents a conversation between Afua Cooper and Marcia Ostashewski. Cooper is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar, and a celebrated Jamaican-born Canadian historian who specializes in Caribbean studies, women's studies, history, and Black studies. Cooper became involved in the Sunjata Project in 2019 after witnessing Lassana Diabat & eacute; share music and stories about Mande culture and history at a public library in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. This conversation represented in the curated transcript below was conducted via video call in 2022, in preparation for the community-engaged research-creation project TransAtlantic Pilgrimage: African History, Poetry, and Music, a collaboration involving Cooper, Diabat & eacute; and Ostashewski. Cooper discusses how elements of the Sunjata narrative-such as the themes of exile and the overcoming of obstacles and challenges-relate to her own experiences as a dub poet and a woman of African ancestry living in Nova Scotia. Cooper also discusses the power that public performances of the Sunjata Fasa and other aspects of Mande music and culture have in promoting cross-cultural dialogue and exchange.
This article examines the centuries-old tradition of "griot" or djeli-musicians, historians, and keepers of the ancient stories of the Mande-as a current global phenomenon, where collaborative works between "global griots" incorporate elements of this tradition into new and emergent contexts. Situating the group Trio de Kali (founded by balafonist Fode Lassana Diabat & eacute;) within a framework of applied ethnomusicology, this article canvasses the history of a growing movement of Malian griots who are able to engage with diverse audiences across the world through a network of artists, scholars, and institutions. In doing so, this article investigates the challenges and benefits involved in such collaborative endeavors; how such projects both preserve and progress musical tradition and practice; and, how emergent performative contexts for professional global griots at collaborative events-such as the Sunjata Project Singing Storytellers Symposium at Cape Breton University-contribute to the development of traditional griot practice.
The British Library mounted a major hibition entitled West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song from October 2015 to February 2016. It brought together the intellectual traditions of literature, music and art from across 17 countries, referencing 1000 years of history to offer insight into a profound, engaging and current literary culture with centuries-old written heritage existing alongside ancient oral traditions that persist to this day. This paper describes the intentions of the exhibition-to dispel misconception and to encourage engagement with West African intellectual traditions-foregrounding the place of oral traditions in descriptions of each of the five primary sections, with a focus on forms of oral traditions, and on the Sunjata epic specifically. The final section of the paper evaluates the impact and legacy of the exhibition, demonstrating how it engaged teams across the institution by invoking the British Library "machine," and, most importantly, young visitors of West African backgrounds as they "reclaimed" and took pride in their histories.
This article presents an interview with Hawa Kasse Mady Diabate, Lassana Diabate, and Cherif Keita-a conversation facilitated by Ely Lyonblum, at the time a Research Assistant with Marcia Ostashewski at Cape Breton University's for the Singing Storytellers Symposium. Hawa Kasse Mady Diabate is a jalimuso (female griot) who descends from a prestigious lineage of oral performers and wordsmiths from the village of Kela in Southern Mali. Lassana Diabate is a balafon player originally from Republic of Guinea who moved to Mali at a young age and is recognized as one of the best players of jali bala (the balafon of the Mande griots). Jali/ Djeli and jalimuso often learn techniques and repertoire through extended familial networks of musicians within Mande society that often cross national boundaries. The two musicians discuss their musical upbringings, the importance of epics like the Sunjata Fasa in Mande culture, and the effect that new technologies have on musical performance and historical narrative. Cherif Keita acted as translator for the interview and provides an introduction to this article.
The Sunjata Fasa is a heroic song narrative celebrating the medieval ruler Soundiata Keita, who unified the Mande empire. This article explores how the performance of this narrative by jaliw/djeliw (griots) reflects and renews the philosophy of a precolonial society that has learned to maintain a sense of itself and its origins while also allowing the space for individual expression and artistic development and change. These performances of the Sunjata Fasa are a critical method through which Mande culture and language is dispersed throughout the Mande diaspora. Through the spreading of the epic, the borders of the Mande kingdom are expanded and renewed, unlocking elements of social dynamism within individuals and creating a larger sense of community among the Mande diaspora. Through the examination of the Sunjata Fasa and its relationship to Mande society, language, and history, this article examines the dynamic relationship between Indigenous languages, social institutions, and musical performances.
This article summarizes the methods and concepts of the Sunjata Project in collaborative, practice-based, community-engaged ethnomusicology, and describes some further collaborative interventions it has nurtured over the subsequent decade. Situating the project within its community and academic contexts, the article reflects on the Sunjata Project within the larger scope of the Singing Storytellers Project and its multifaceted approach of using transformative education and community engagement to raise awareness, develop capacities in, and celebrate cultural diversity in Cape Breton and beyond. This collaborative dynamic facilitated creative processes that produced critically informed work through a variety of media and artistic practices, and encouraged interdisciplinary, socially-engaged arts practices among collaborative teams. These relationships, rooted in practice-based arts-creation, are critical to the longevity and sustainability of the Singing Storytellers, Sunjata Project and other such community-oriented projects dedicated to the sharing of knowledge between diverse communities across the globe through the development of educational programs, events, and varieties of media.
Berlin has special archives that are of considerable importance not only historically but also politically, especially in present times. The Sound Archive of the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (hereafter BPhA) contain voice recordings from the beginning of the twentieth century as well as sound recordings from prisoner of war camps of the German army in World War I and World War II. These recordings can be described as rather "sensitive" (Timurgalieva et al. 2015:34). They are, thus, archives with the earliest sound recordings in Europe. This can play an important role particularly in view of the discussions about looted art and the restitution of works of art that came to Germany in connection with the colonial period. The unique shared history of the Sound Archive and BPhA in the context of the recording activities of the Phonographic Commission from 1915 to 1918 will create opportunities for cooperation (Humboldt n.d.b). Legal aspects are becoming increasingly important in the context of the possible use of the recordings with a view to further, future university research and teaching as part of the culture of remembrance (Humboldt n.d.c). For these reasons, it is also worth taking a look at the copyright assessment of these recordings.
The voices of multiple agents involved in the process of Ottoman urban popular music-making have been largely omitted, if not restricted by traditional music historiography of the Ottoman long nineteenth century, thus downplaying the local dynamics of this very transitional era. Drawing on Ottoman Turkish, Greek, and Greco-Turkish sources, this article analyzes samples of nineteenth-century songs in the popular & scedil;arks form as "sonic assemblages" that are formed by complementary and antagonistic social relations that developed both on the intercommunal level and internally within the various communities. In this analysis the notions of "musical exile" and "musical estrangement" are used to explore the multiplicity and multiaccentuality of the spatialities of the song-writing process and their consequent implications and impact on subjecthood formation.
This afterword considers Istanbul as a site of translation (architectural, acoustic, sonic, musical, poetic) - an approach to the city richly suggested in all of the articles in this themed issue. Might we consider the matter of translation in terms of the kinds of (radically opposed) comparative epistemologies that were being developed in Istanbul by Auerbach and Spitzer (principally, but other refugee scholars too, considering the work of Emily Apter) in the 1930s? How - viewed through such a lens - has Istanbul been configured as a global site of translation "between East and West," and how have Istanbul's intellectual worlds themselves forged the very terms with which we think "between East and West" (or "globally")? And what happens when we replace or enhance "comparative literature" with "comparative music/sound studies" as our framework? Does this make Istanbul "special," in historical terms?
In this article, I argue that gramophone records by first-generation Armenian immigrants in the United States can be considered some of the earliest field recordings, so much so as if they had been collected from local people in Anatolia. Although such 78-rpm records have not received sufficient disciplinary interest as field recordings in ethnomusicology due to their commercial nature, they are among the earliest sound recordings from any region of the world. Not only because they are commercial, but also because they constructed counternarratives against the "national music" project of the Republican era, these recordings have also been ignored in the music historiography of Turkey. The content of the folk songs recorded in the diaspora is very similar to those collected by state-led recording expeditions in Turkey from the 1920s to 1950s. However, the diasporic recordings are more multilingual, reflecting the ethnic, religious, and cultural plurality of the Ottoman Empire. Emphasizing their performative and relational nature, I propose that 78-rpm records of the Ottoman diaspora (focusing especially on recordings of Armenian migrants from Harput/Kharpert) reconstruct the local space and function as sites of transcultural memory as defined by multilingualism and the effective use of makam music.
The critique of Orientalism in music studies has tended to focus on European Orientalism rather than the Orientalism of " Orientals." The purpose of this study is to explore how Turkish classical music (TCM) was represented in self-Orientalist discourses of R epublican Turkey as part of competing strategies to define Turkish musical identity. These dis-courses not only perpetuate and reproduce the essentialist conceptions of European Orientalism, but also reformulate them in a different setting, sometimes contrasting their own interpretation with that of the Europeans. Whether they otherize or embrace the "non-Western" elements in Turkish music, most of these competing discourses share the same system of representation based on an essentialized and de-historicized conceptualization of culture. This also applies to some of the counter-dis-courses which emerged as a reaction to the symbolic violence imposed by Westernizing music policies in Republican Turkey. Despite their criticism of European Orientalism, they merely reverse its essentialist ontology to favor TCM. Using a wide range of sources, including the writings of influential Turkish thinkers, officials, and musicologists as well as periodicals and newspapers, this study aims to show the common conceptual background in the negative and positive representations of TCM from the 1920s to the present
When analyzing the period of "music reform" in Turkey, researchers are grouped around two main tendencies. Those in the first group focus on laws and rules, while those in the second focus on the composers known as the Turkish Five. Yet, there is a body of source material that can break the monotony of existing studies, reveal new knowledge relating to private documents, and illuminate the political dimension of the cultural relations between Turkey and Germany during the 1930s and 1940s and the conflicts between European and Turkish musicians. This body of material consists of the reports and letters of the European experts who worked on the institutionalization of music in Ankara between the years 1935 and 1947. This article focuses on one of these experts, Carl Ebert (1887-1980), in the context of his work in Ankara between 1936 and 1947. It aims to provide new insights into the institutionalization of opera in Turkey and the cultural life of Turkey during the 1930s and 1940s through the study of an important actor who has so far been neglected. Ultimately, the article highlights the need to expand the source material for a critical evaluation of the established historical narrative of music reform that has been dominant as well as highly functional and coherent for the political orientation of Turkey since 1950.
In recent decades, churches and other spaces left over from Istanbul's multi-confessional and multi-ethnic past have grown increasingly popular as concert venues for performances of Western classical music favored among Istanbul secularists. The popularity of this alternative acoustic infrastructure is often attributed to the ostensibly appropriate atmosphere and "good" acoustics of such spaces. Taking up Istanbul discourses of acoustics and atmosphere as novel sites of ethnographic inquiry, in this article I ask: What is the relationship between atmosphere and acoustics? Which modes of perception are afforded by good acoustics in Istanbul? What makes them good? What is the relationship between these discourses and acoustic spaces linked to non-Turkish and non-Muslim communities? I examine how acoustics in this context is less an objective, technical discourse of material and spatial qualities enabling clear aural perception, than a local discursive concept anchored by the multi-sensory affordances of certain spaces - in particular, Levantine churches in Istanbul's staunchly secularist Kad & imath;k & ouml;y district. I demonstrate that good acoustics in this case are emergent from sonic atmospheres in which tuned bodies and spaces from Istanbul's non-Muslim past are brought into dynamic relation. In this way, sonic atmosphere becomes a particularly clear instance of heritage as cultural process through which Europe comes to be felt, and attributions of good acoustics become a demotic discursive concept for referring to and evaluating that "feel." I thus provincialize acoustics by elucidating the way in which it is not a universal concept of (social) scientific analysis but rather a local and colloquial, demotic concept for discussing how Europe comes to be felt in particular Istanbul spaces.
This paper argues in favor of an open access publication of the holdings of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, which have so far received little attention from lawyers despite their status as World Documentary Heritage. Firstly, it is argued that the public international legal obligations of Germany under the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage which require efforts to preserve intangible cultural heritage and make it accessible, are indirectly relevant for the historical sound recordings. Secondly, making the historical sound recordings accessible through digitization is - in addition to the legal perspective - a cultural-ethical imperative in the restitution debate. Read together, it seems that the open access publication of the historical sound recordings would be a pragmatic way to address both the legal and ethical perspectives.
The digitization of the collections from the Arab world o f the Berlin P honogramm-Archiv launched a debate r egarding the rights connected to its recordings and their right holders. This paper discusses the nature and coverage o f these rights, and questions their applicability and validity in the Arab countries concerned in light o f existing legal frame-works and "problematic" conditions under which they w ere obtained. The paper concludes with the necessity o f adopting the appropriate regime that preserves the recordings and ensures their accessibility to the public, such as through the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage to which most Arab countries are members.
The introduction provides an overview of the concepts and topics explored in this themed issue. It begins by reflecting on practices of commemoration and the significance of 1923 in modern Turkish history. It then discusses the concept of "modernities" in relation to the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman nation-states, both in terms of musical developments and broader political and cultural processes. It emphasizes continuities and interactions between Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods, as well as between Europe and Turkey, and highlights the global diversity of experiences of modernity as demonstrated by a range of scholarship in musicology and other fields. The final section summarizes the contributions to the themed issue.
The participation of the Turkish musicologist Rauf Yekta (1871-1935) in the Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932 and his rejection of the proposed 24-tone equal-tempered scale are well-known facts in musicological literature. However, due to the dearth of primary sources, Yekta's influential role in the discussions remains largely unknown. Recently discovered notes, published in the periodical Mukhadana/ Muhadenet following the Congress, provide new insights into Yekta's musicological approach and his position relative to other participants at the Congress. Based on these notes, this article provides the first comprehensive analysis of Yekta's opinions on the Congress. Yekta's stance cannot be fully understood without considering Turkey's position between the "Arab" and "Western" worlds at the time. However, his views, particularly as a scholar defending the Turkish makam tradition against the musical revolution of the Republic, did not align with those of Turkish state representatives. Taking a unique position, Yekta envisioned a dual musical universe and saw himself as a mediator capable of reconciling the distinct qualities of these two worlds.
In this article, I examine humorous portrayals of European music in satirical journals published in Istanbul during the 1870s. Drawing on theories of humor as a means of expressing ambiguity, I analyze a description of a private salon concert as well as polemical debates about the public performance and reception of Turkish-language operetta. Through the strategic use of irony and mistranslation, Ottoman satirists exposed the incongruities of being modern while playfully undermining perceptions of distance and proximity between "Istanbul" and "Europe." Modernity produced a sense of dislocation, a being out of place, that was heightened by listening to unfamiliar sonic practices as part of a broader assemblage of civilized behaviors. Yet by making light of such disconcerting experiences, Ottoman satirists produced a form of cultural intimacy that relocated modernity itself within a more familiar and accessible space - as long as their readers got the joke.
