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Chinese Traditional Instruments of the Han People

March 21, 28, and April, 4 2022

As part of the teaching workshop Traditional Instruments Playing Techniques (prof. Nicola Scaldaferri), Shan Du (PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Bologna) hold three lectures on the Chinese traditional instruments of the Han people. The first meeting focused on the plucked string instruments guqin and guzheng; the second delved into the role of instruments in the Taoists rituals; the third was dedicated to the musical aspects of the Qingming Festival and the funeral rites.

All three lectures were enriched by live musical performances. Young Chinese players Wanying Fu (guzheng) and Jingzhi Zhao (guqin) performed original repertoire for their instruments, while Nicola Scaldaferri and Shan Du played a Chinese arrangement of a traditional tune for violin and piano.

This lecture series has been supported by the Istituto Confucio of the University of Milan.


在Nicola Scaldaferri教授的“民间乐器演奏技巧”研讨课程期间,来自博洛尼亚大学民族音乐学专业的博士生杜杉主讲了三场关于汉族民间乐器的专题讲座。第一场的主题是拨弦乐器古琴和古筝;第二场的主题是道教仪式中所使用的乐器;第三场则是以清明节及丧葬仪式中的音乐现象为主要论题。

三场讲座都伴有现场音乐展示。中国青年乐手付婉莹(古筝)和赵静之(古琴)为大家演奏了乐器的传统曲目;Nicola Scaldaferri和杜杉则以小提琴和钢琴合奏的形式为大家呈现了传统曲目的改编版本。 

本期的三场讲座由米兰大学孔子学院支持并赞助


Poster

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Photos

Music Performances

March 21, 2022 – Wanying Fu, guzheng • Shan Du, piano
March 28, 2022 – Jingzhi Zhao, guqin
April 4, 2022 – Nicola Scaldaferri, violin • Shan Du, piano

Exploring Rurality in Southern Italy

April 17, 2021

As part of MaMo. Materializing Modernity, an interdisciplinary webinar on modernist rurality organised by Federica Pompejano and co-partnered by LEAV, Nicola Scaldaferri (LEAV, University of Milan) and Lorenzo Ferrarini (Manchester University) will held a lecture on rurality in Basilicata, centered on their recent book Sonic Ethnography.

The event is part of Nicola Scaldaferri’s course in Anthropology of Music, and will take place on Zoom at 5:30pm (CEST).

ID meeting and Passcode here.

Listening and Recording Vienna “Super Librum”

October 17, 2019

As part of the II Historical Soundscapes Meeting – Évora 2019, Giovanni Cestino (LEAV) will present a paper on his Evening in the Old Town (2019), an audiovisual soundwalk of the Vienna city center based on European Sound Diary (1977). The presentation will take place at Auditório of Colégio Mateus de Aranda of the University of Évora, at 3:20pm.

Abstract

In 1975, Raymond Murray Schafer and his research group, the World Soundscape Project, toured in Northern Europe to study different rural and city soundscapes. A narrative account of the trip entitled European Sound Diary was among the results of that trip. The book combined excerpts from diaries by Schafer’s collaborators with city soundwalks to be performed by future readers. The soundwalk is an «excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment» (Westerkamp), «a form of active participation in the soundscape» (Truax) introduced by the World Soundscape Project to promote critical listening. A soundwalk often comes, in its written form, as a map with verbal instructions, and may also prescribe soundmaking practice.
Nearly 45 years after the World Soundscape Project trip, I performed the Vienna soundwalk again, documenting my experience in a 17’ video realized with the support of the LEAV (Ethnomusicology and Visual Anthropology Lab, University of Milan). To enhance a first-person perspective, I shot a video with an action camera fastened on my head, and also wore DSM microphones as earphones. Subtitles, elicited from the original soundwalk, have been added in post-production as a step-by-step commentary, and serve as a touchstone of how the Vienna soundscape transformed through time. The result is an audiovisual product which works on multiple levels: while the audiovisual level mediates the researcher’s experience, subtitles stimulate the audience’s response to what they see/hear and what they read.
In this paper I will illustrate the case study, touching on the technical choices and narrative strategies I adopted. Particularly, I will dwell on how certain concrete problems – which arose in the making of – prompted a reflection on some theoretical concerns. This audiovisual soundwalk, based on a previous experience, revealed how the 1977 text can not only work as a prescriptive device, but also as an historical source and a script. Moreover, this multimedia product might provide an additional educational practice in acoustic ecology which joins Schafer’s historical ones. Lastly, this case study contributes to the discussion on the authenticity of documentary practice, and links with the actual debate on the concept of soundscape.

Music and Genocides

September 10, 2019

As part of an event organized by the association Nomus, Nicola Scaldaferri will held a conference on the relationship between music and genocides in the Ottoman Empire area. The conference will delve into some lesser-known (or completely unknown) cases, in which tragical historical events affected entire populations, discriminated against religious or ethnic basis. Musical practices bear traces of those stories, still echoing over the centuries in diasporic contexts. Visual and audio documentation – partly from the LEAV archives –  will help contextualising those cultural phenomena.
During the conference, an excerpt of Radio Genocide by Yuval Avital will be presented for the first time. In this work, the composer reworked archival sound and visual materials and propaganda broadcastings related to cases of genocide.

The event will take place in the Sala Conferenze of the Museo del Novecento at 5pm. A concert of rebetiko music will follow, featuring Emanuele Skoufas (tsouras, voice), Laura Pronestì (guitar), and Matteo Concina (percussions).

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The Craft of an Affective Space

March 19, 2019

As part of the course in Anthropology of Music, Giulia Accornero (Harvard University) will hold a lecture on the effects of certain audio-visual stimuli as perceived and shaped both by the web community and by the academic discourse. The lecture will take place at the Department of Cultural Heritage and Environment, University of Milan (via Noto 8, aula K32), at 16:30.

Abstract

Search for “ASMR” on Google Videos right now and you will get an astonishing forty million results; check again a minute from now, and you may get even more. ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, labels the effect that a certain category of audio-visual stimuli produces on their listeners: a “pleasurable, tingly sensation that begins in the head and scalp and moves throughout the limbs of the body, causing them to relax” (Young, 2015.)
An international, internet-based community meets and grows mainly around You Tube videos whose audio-visual content is designed to trigger the ASMR. But Wikipedia pages, websites, blogs, Facebook groups, podcasts, and iPhone applications also proliferate, sustaining a community that is not only ‘consuming’ but also inquiring, giving feedback, learning, and promoting. They provide us with what I would call a ‘vernacular theory’ of its peculiar sounds.
At the same time, the ASMR community has triggered an academic response, particularly in neuropsychology. The focus of this field on the mind-body effects that audio-visual stimuli can elicit ultimately narrows down a complex phenomenon to an automatic bodily response.
In this paper I focus primarily on the community and the academic response, concentrating on their agency in shaping this phenomenon. I ask: is ASMR a truly new feeling? How can the discourse and vocabulary around a certain sensation determines it? How has the online content given rise to a particular ASMR aesthetic that is now characteristic of a certain sonic quality? How do the visual and auditory components work together to determine how we hear?
I argue that we cannot fully account for the affective space crafted around the ASMR, as both a bodily sensation and sonic quality—and how the two might interact, unless we reconsider how the community “vernacular theories” work with academic discourse to inform the ways in which we hear and feel sound.

 

Born in 1987, Giulia Accornero graduated in Economics (BA, Università “L. Bocconi”, Milano, 2010),  Musicology (BA, Conservatorio “G. Verdi”, Milano, 2013), and Discipline Storiche Critiche e Analitiche della Musica (MA, Conservatorio “G. Verdi”, Milano 2016). She is a doctoral candidate in Music Theory at Harvard University. Her dissertation situates the developments in measured music witnessed in Italy and France in the late Middle Ages within the broader history of mathematics. Her secondary research area focuses on the technology and aesthetics of sound amplification in ASMR and Contemporary Music. Her articles are published by Pisa University Press (forthcoming), Edizioni ETS and Edizioni del Teatro alla Scala. In 2014 she founded Sound of Wander, a contemporary music season in Milan. In 2018 she founded the GEM Lab, a workshop in which Harvard GSAS students meet regularly to sing and study early musical notations.

Gestualità, sapori, suoni e sentimenti

May 3, 2018

As part of the course in Anthropology of Music, prof. Michael Herzfeld (Harvard University) will hold a lecture with screening of some excerpts of his film Roman Restaurant Rhythms. The lecture will take place at the Department of Cultural Heritage and Environment, University of Milan (via Noto 8, aula K32), at 16:30.

Poster

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Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where has taught since 1991, and is Director of the Asia Center’s Thai Studies Program at Harvard.  He is also Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne; IIAS Visiting Professor of Critical Heritage Studies, Leiden University; Senior Advisor, Critical Heritage Studies Initiative, International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden; and Chang Jiang Scholar, Shanghai International Studies University.  He is the author of eleven books (most recently Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok, 2016), two films (Monti Moments, 2007, and Roman Restaurant Rhythms, 2011), and numerous articles and reviews, and his honors include the J.I. Staley Prize and the Rivers Memorial Medal (both in 1994).  In addition to a D.Phil. from Oxford University (1976) and a D.Litt. from the University of Birmingham (1989), he holds honorary doctorates from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2005), the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki (2011), and the University of Crete (2013), and has been named an Honorary Professor of Shandong University (P.R.C.) for 2013-2018 and of the Southwestern University of Nationalities (Chengdu, P.R. China) for 2014-17.  In the autumn of 2013 held a Visiting Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, and served as Visiting William Wyse Professor at Cambridge University. A former president of the Modern Greek Studies Association and of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, he is affiliated with the anthropology programs at Thammasat University, Bangkok and Università “La Sapienza,” Rome, and has held various visiting appointments at the universities of Manchester, Paris-X (Nanterre), Ecole des Hautes Etudes (Paris), Melbourne, Padova, Cagliari, Messina, and Malta.  A member of the editorial boards of American Ethnologist,Ethnologie Française, and International Journal of Heritage Studies and several other journals, he has served as editor of American Ethnologist(1995-98) and is currently editor-at-large (responsible for “Polyglot Perspectives”) at Anthropological Quarterly.  His research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand has most recently addressed the social and political impact of historic conservation and gentrification, the dynamics of nationalism and bureaucracy, and the ethnography of knowledge among artisans and intellectuals.