[ANPPOM-Lista] Fwd: CFP "Music: Intangible Heritage?"

[Martha Ulhôa]

*Call for Papers*


*Transposition*
*http://transposition.revues.org/1143
<http://transposition.revues.org/1143> *

*Issue 8 (2019): Music: Intangible Heritage?*


Coordination: Elsa Broclain, Benoît Haug & Pénélope Patrix

In 2017, almost a third of the files submitted to UNESCO for inscription on
the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) lists include a significant musical
component. Greek Rebetiko could) thereby join more than seventy listed
forms of “music” - often associated with celebrations, dances, poetry and
know-how – such as the Tango of Rio de la Plata, Shashmaqam of Central
Asia, Brazilian Samba de Roda, and Tar craftsmanship and performance in
Azerbaidjan. Applications have poured in since the 2006 entry into force of
the International Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH, which established
a new heritage paradigm based on practices and communities rather than
monuments and artefacts[1], according to the perspective of “new heritages”
and their aim to cultivate more open and participatory practices[2].
Outside the realm of the United Nations, this new category of “intangible
heritage” has infused into the vocabulary and approaches taken by national
registers, and into local cultural policy, heritage-related and museum
activities, and the general discourse, generating a variety of modes of
appropriation and contention. Considering the far-reaching implications,
this issue of *Transposition* aims to explore the specific case of music in
the domain of “intangible cultural heritage”, both within and beyond the
framework used by UNESCO.

What does “intangible heritage” do to music? And inversely, what does music
do to “intangible heritage”? Despite an “editorial swell” in studies on
heritagisation since the 1980s, researchers are only now beginning to
examine the effects of this new heritage paradigm on music. Recent studies
have begun to consider inflexions in meaning and value attributed to
“heritagised” music, particularly in the English-speaking arena, where
music heritage is a field of its own[3]. In the French-speaking world,
research has focused on the transformations resulting from the ICH label on
practices, such as their making into shows and tourist attractions[4],
memorialisation, exhibition[5], and the power dynamics between the
different actors involved[6]. Music itself, however, seems to dissolve into
more general reflections on ICH, or to get lost in the gulf around
heritagisation processes, which do require to be reconsidered in light of
these recent shifts. In the wake of these studies,* Transposition* calls
for the specific interactions between music and “intangible heritage” to be
examined, with particular attention to how the notion of ICH is practised
(and contested) in the field.

Fiercely debated during the drafting of the Convention, the notion of ICH
filled, in part, a functional need to separate world heritage into three
categories (tangible, natural and intangible), in accordance with the
institutional divisions used by UNESCO[7]. However, there are consequences
to breaking heritage down in this way: a number of researchers have raised
the epistemological and practical problems posed by this new “paradoxical”
category in the field[8], especially with regard to the artificial
separation it introduces between the tangible and intangible dimensions of
culture[9]. Indeed, music affords a certain acuteness in the examination of
this division, starting with the fact that the category of “intangibility”
sends us back to a tradition that places music in the realm of the
spirit—something absolute[10] and ineffable[11]—thus tying into a Western
conception of the musical experience, whereas UNESCO’s mission concerns a
so-called “world heritage”, i.e., perceivable to all. This universalist
perspective comes into tension with the local particularities of the
practices and symbolic forms being safeguarded, tension that is further
intensified by the aim of the Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH to
preserve cultural diversity from the effects of globalisation[12]. What,
then, are the implications of enclosing within a single “intangible” system
forms of music rooted in vastly diverse bodies, instruments, objects, and
places? How do the performance, ritual, and social contexts end up being
reconfigured? In short, to what extent might the “intangible heritage”
category not only alter local imagination, conceptions and experiences of
music, but also have effects spreading into the vernacular theories and
into music creation, transmission, mediatisation and conservation?

Asking what a form of music *is* to those who live it every day—by
performing it, playing it, listening to it, transmitting it, appreciating
it, exhibiting it, archiving it and mediatising it—moves us forward in the
ontological terrain. The dialectic between tangibility and intangibility
can then be articulated to the question of physical means and media used in
musical heritagisation: UNESCO’s measures follow from a process of
collection and conservation dating back at least to the nineteenth century,
leveraging technological innovations, especially in terms of recording[13].
Far from making the musical experience “intangible”, digital tools give it
new “tangibilities”, placing it within new systems of production and
reception. At the same time, digital technologies allow asound archive to
be inscribed onto new media, renewing modes of conservation, collection and
repertorialisation, and sometimes—invertedly—creating new attachments for
objects, relics, and traces. The dialectic between tangibility and
intangibility in music exhibition, conservation, and transmission—and more
generally in the diversity of music practices—thus merit fresh examination.

*Transposition* invites the broad spectrum of social and human sciences to
take up this critical reflection on the heritagisation of music, taking the
growing dissemination of the “intangible cultural heritage” paradigm as the
starting point for a more general analysis of the interplay between music,
heritage, and intangibility. From case studies to theoretical proposals,
papers can focus on the following themes:

1.    *Music and “intangible cultural heritage”: political and aesthetic
issues.* With attention to the specific ways in which music interacts with
the ICH paradigm, authors will examine the social, political, memorial, and
aesthetic effects of the ICH label and associated measures. Possible
subjects for consideration include musicians’ careers, strategies for
appropriating, misappropriating, or contesting heritage measures, the
effects of mediatisation and “scripting” on musical practices, and their
stylistic consequences. Other topics of interest include the power dynamics
between the various actors in these processes, the effects of legitimation,
recognition, and exclusion within “communities”, and how local, national,
and global scales are redefined.

2.    *Musical heritage in question: history and renewals of heritage
conservation practices.* We intend to examine the idea of “musical
heritage” itself, what it presupposes and the values it conveys, by framing
its most recent avatar (ICH) within a historic process of conservation,
regulation, and recognition/enhancement. Proposals may address the multiple
(sometimes competing) ways of heritagising music, and consider how the
mediation, archiving, and exhibition of music have been changed by heritage
policy, regulations, ideologies, and technologies, whose protective, even
emancipatory, virtues, and the legitimacy they bring to musical practices,
will possibly be weighed against new frameworks, formats, markets, and
paradoxical injunctions to more “tangibility”.

3.   *The tangibility and intangibility of music.* Relying on a distinction
between tangible and intangible culture, the turning point of ICH invites
studies to invest the epistemological field. Indeed, heritagisation
processes are likely to both reveal and alter the vernacular theories and
categories by which music is qualified, practised, appreciated, and
transmitted. Questioning these categories and what they invoke,
particularly in relation to other strata of the experience (corporal,
instrumental, poetic, ritual, social, etc.), will allow us to consider
different music ontologies, which are not all structured around a binary
dialectic between tangible and intangible.


In addition to the scientific papers for the thematic section, which will
be reviewed and subject to the approval of the Scientific Committee,
* Transposition *is open to other formats, either original or already
having a precedent in the review, such as interviews (*see*
*https://transposition.revues.org
<https://transposition.revues.org/>*). In this case, author(s) are asked to
specify that their submission is for the category* Varia*.

*Transposition *welcomes publications in French and English. Article
proposals (~1500-2500 characters including spaces, not counting the
bibliography) must be sent by* 1 February 2018* to
*transposition.submission em gmail.com
<transposition.submission em gmail.com>*. The full articles will be required
by late spring.

Selected authors may be invited to take part in a workshop organised during
the article drafting period.



------------------------------

[1] KURIN, R., « Safeguarding intangible cultural heritage : key factors in
implementing the 2003 convention », *International journal of intangible
heritage* 2 (2007) ; BORTOLOTTO, C. (dir.), *Le Patrimoine culturel
immatériel : enjeux d’une nouvelle catégorie*, Paris, MSH, 2011.

[2] AUCLAIR, E., FAIRCLOUGH, G., *Theory and practice in heritage and
sustainability : between past and future*, Londres, Routledgen, 2015  (2e
 éd.).

[3] BRANDELLERO, A., JANSSEN, S., COHEN, S. & ROBERTS, L. (dir.), « Popular
music heritage, cultural memory and cultural identity », *International
journal of heritage studies* 20/3 (2014), p. 219-223 ; COHEN, S., KNIFTON,
R., LEONARD, M. & ROBERTS, M. (dir.), *Sites of popular music heritage*,
Londres, Routledge, 2015 ; BAKER, S., ISTVANDITY, L. & NOWAK, R., « The
sound of music heritage : curating popular music in music museums and
exhibitions », *International journal of heritage studies* 22/1 (2016).

[4] CAMPOS, L., « Sauvegarder une pratique musicale ? Une ethnographie du
samba de roda à la World Music Expo », *Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie* 24
(2011) ; DESROCHES, M., DAUPHIN, C., PICHETTE, M.-H., SMITH, G.
(dir.), *Territoires
musicaux mis en scène*, Montréal, PUM, 2011.

[5] LE GUERN, P. (dir.), « Patrimonialiser les musiques populaires et
actuelles », *Questions de communication* 22 (2012).

[6] SANDRONI, C., « Samba de roda : patrimonio cultural de humanidade
», *Estudos
avançados* 69 (2010), p. 373-388.

[7] KHAZNADAR, C., « Le  patrimoine culturel immatériel : les enjeux, les
problématiques, les pratiques », *Internationale de l’imaginaire* 17 (2004).

[8] BORTOLOTTO, *op*. *cit*.

[9] CIARCIA, G., *La perte durable : étude sur la notion de « patrimoine
immatériel »*, Paris, LAHIC / Mission à l’ethnologie, 2006.

[10] DAHLHAUS, C., *Die Idee der absoluten Musik*, Kassel, Bärenreiter,
1978 ; trad. fr., *L’idée de la musique absolue*, Genève, Contrechamps,
1997.

[11] JANKÉLÉVITCH, V., *La musique et l’ineffable*, Paris, Colin, 1961.

[12] UNESCO, 2003, *Convention pour la sauvegarde du Patrimoine Culturel
Immatériel*, Paris, 17 octobre 2003 <http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ima
ges//0013/001325/132540f.pdf>.

[13] STERNE, J., *The audible Past : cultural origins of sound reproduction*,
Durham, Duke University Press, 2003 ; trad. fr., *Une histoire de la
modernité sonore*, Paris, La Découverte/Philharmonie de Paris, 2015.


-- 
+336 77 01 08 20 <+33%206%2077%2001%2008%2020>