7^th Meeting of the ICTM Study Group:
Anthropology of Music in Mediterranean Cultures

Cosmopolitan Cities and Migrant Musics. Dedicated to the Memory of Tullia Magrini.
June 28-30, 2007

Venice (Italy) - Fondazione Olga e Ugo Levi

Report

Venice’s cosmopolitan history and past converged in and around the 7th meeting of the Study Group. From June 28-30, 2007, scholars presented diverse and diverging perspectives on “Cosmopolitan Cities and Migrant Musics” as artists, press, and spectators from across the globe displayed and discussed the exhibitions of the Venice Biennale. Both of these international events reflected and reiterated the historical significance of Venice as a crossroads for cultural exchange and patronage, the capacity for intense interaction in this Mediterranean city. The Biennale’s exhibition halls and installations directed pedestrians’ attention on the streets of the city; advertisements allured passersby into the main display platforms while larger sculptures and installations became a part of the public experience of the city for the summer months.

The confluence of a musicological and anthropological conversation with an international arts spectacle added vitality to the intimate scholarly exchange. But the meeting of the Study Group paralleled the showcase in more specifically meaningful ways as well. First, the exchange so generously hosted by the Fondazione Levi represented a return, a node in a series of regular conversations. Six of the members present at the first meeting and a number of regulars at the subsequent conferences, so that many of the papers presented explicitly developed projects previously presented to the Study Group and incorporated the interdisciplinary and international critique from conversation at the Fondazione Levi in years past. The conference’s theme confronted geographic displacement, but the community of the study group emphasized the ways in which musicological discourse on the Mediterranean has become central for the scholars presenting in Venice. Second, as the major media coverage and highly-profiled exhibitions disappeared from the Venetian streets after the first month of the festival, the conversation among friends and colleagues dwelled upon the absence of the Study Group’s founder and inspiration, Tullia Magrini. The Biennale’s vacant second-story exhibition hall above the library in which the Study Group met served as a constant reminder of the absence of her passion and presence in addition to the passing of the Biennale. The inclusivity of the theme, the brainchild of the late Magrini, recalled her investment in an international scholarly community and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Music in Mediterranean cultures. The breadth of methodologies at the conference was a reminder of the diversity of scholarship that Magrini engaged in her research and the constant attention she paid to the intersections of research.
 

Magrini’s cornerstone presence in musical scholarship on the Mediterranean emerged implicitly through the research presented, but the conference began with a series of recollections that explicitly drew attention to her significance, personal and professional. Giulio Cattin, President Emeritus of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione, reminded her friends and family of her ambition. Remembering her, he emphasized that it was her effort that connected the Study Group to the Fondazione.

Marcello Sorce Keller, in a paper surveying her professional career (“Tullia Magrini, the Scholar”), praised her pioneering role within scholarship in Italy, where she sought her own place within the academy. Her foundational influence, he summarized, was evident in her service to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001). Sorce Keller also emphasized the way in which her conceptualization of the Mediterranean represents her commitment to responding to trends in Anglo-American scholarship as well as Italian models as she wrote for an international community. She framed the realm of her anthropological inquiry as a “place in which one encounters countless diversities,”  where  communities coexist,  ignore, know, and battle.  

Marcello Sorce Keller

This Mediterranean remained present as the backdrop against which the research presented at the conference was discussed. In what ways does cosmopolitanism ignore members outside its community? What battles must migrant musicians fight?

Following a number of personal recollections among the participants that underlined the influence Magrini’s work had one their own careers, Bruno Nettl delivered a keynote address that surveyed the multivalent presence of minorities within ethnomusicology. Nettl borrowed his broad definition of minorities from sociology, claiming, “We are all members of minorities.” This provocative assertion emphasized the constant revision of  musical minorities as Nettl questioned the power  struggle inherent

Bruno Nettl

in labeling and claiming minority status. After reflecting on the role of minorities in the intellectual history of ethnomusicology, a discipline brought to the American academy by Central  European immigrants and founded on the study of Native American music, Nettl considered the significance of music for a series of minority communities in Detroit. Resisting the historical trend to study minorities in isolation, Nettl emphasized the shifting presence “American” music at Blackfoot powwows over the last century. He considered the ways in which these musical practices might be considered revival and argued that the very acts of revival ought to remind anthropologists and ethnomusicologists of the fact that music mediates throughout culture.

Philip V. Bohlman’s “Utopia/Heterotopia - Music, Migration, and the Metropolitan Imaginary” drew attention to the alluring metaphorical role Mediterranean cities have played in musical imaginations of paradise. He confronted musical renderings of utopian metropoles from popular song with the violence of the wars in the Middle East and the distopian nostalgia in literary treatment of beloved cities. 

The performative element of this paper -- Bohlman’s scholarly tone was punctuated by music, music videos, scenes from commercially-released films, and readings of poetry and excerpts from novels -- set the stage for a panel invested in the multiplicity of the Mediterranean through multimedia. Bohlman, along with the musicians and listeners in this fabric, constantly returned to a central problem: how can love manifest itself in destruction? He engaged a dialectic of local and pan-Mediterranean to structure a final consideration of heterotopian potential of Mediterranean music-making in African diasporic communities of Paris - one that “straddles” cities.

Philip V. Bohlman

The ensuing discussion, which emphasized the political and economic ramifications of models for cosmopolitanism focused attention on the main issues raised in Goffredo Plastino’s “Cosmopolitanism and Localization in Contemporary Neapolitan Jazz.” Plastino addressed Magrini’s hovering concept of the Mediterranean by considering the dialogue between Neapolitan popular music and global jazz in the 20th and 21st centuries. He argued that that Neapolitan jazz was a prime example of “concrete hybridity,” with a series of recordings at the core of staking this claim.

After recalling the resonance of Neapolitan song in Hollywood films and on race records in New York, he emphasized the influences of Italian opera and American jazz, via discs brought by the US marines during world War II, upon a local jazz scene. Migration of musical materials, then, is at the heart of what Plastino frames as the “propensity” of the Neapolitan scene to absorb the commodities of modernism. Through three fascinating musical examples, Plastino elaborated upon an interpretation of Benjamin’s Arkadenprojekt to explain the influence of free jazz improvisation and Alan Lomax’s Calabrian field recordings upon the jazz scene in the last 30 years.

Goffredo Plastino

Giuliana Fugazzotto continued the conference’s focus on popular music with her paper, “Musical Tradition and Blending among the Italian Communities in Early 20th Century America.” In order to consider the confluence of Italian immigrants on a non-Mediterranean metropole, she focused onItalian intersections with the record market in New York beginning in the 1920s. One can locate the original global popularity of “Italian style,” Fugazzotto argued, in this period. After considering the institutional history of Columbia records, she traced one song, “Speranze perdute,” through covers spanning 70 years. The use of Italian instruments to mark the song’s origins in an immigrant community shifted in various historical and geographical contexts, revealing the diverse ways in which Italianness has been popularized through the 20th century.

Giuliana Fugazzotto

Martin Stokes

Martin Stokes’s “Melancholic Cosmopolitanism and Arabesk Crossover in Contemporary Turkey” situated cosmopolitanism in musical and literary translation. Surveying contemporary Turkish writings and music, Stokes observes the presence of themes such as loss and confusion in conflict with bold assertions of cosmopolitanism. This melancholy is a critical component of the post-Ottoman global landscape that Stokes interprets in Müslüm Gürses’s 2005 album, Love Loves Coincidences. This CD, a series of covers of popular music classics by Leonard Cohen to Serge Gainsbourg, characterizes the “over seriousness” of Turkish attitudes toward  globalization.   Through  the   Arabesk  treatment  of  these  

songs,  they are  translated, an act that Stokes argues represents a Turkish claim on melancholy, one that marks a dialogue with history that casts doubt on the original text. Stokes concluded with the suggestion that this melancholy cosmopolitanism reiterates Turkey’s position on the periphery of 20th century history.

While Stokes’s paper reconsidered the scholar’s ongoing interrogation of sentimentality in Turkish popular music,  Margaret  Kartomi  presented  new  research to  the Study Group with her paper, “By

the Rivers of Babylon: The Liturgical Music of Babylonian Jews in their Colonial and Postcolonial Diasporas.” After providing an overview of the historical migrations of Baghdadi Jews in Alexandria and Cairo, Israel, the United States, and Australia, she focused on her initial fieldwork interviewing cantors in Australia and Singapore. artomi compared the historical narratives of her informants with the historical evidence from the Cairo Geniza sources and the early 20th century field recordings of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn. She concluded with claims that the stability of this tradition challenges our assumptions about some aspects of the musical disruption of forced migration.

Margaret Kartomi

Jośko Ćaleta

Jośko Ćaleta brought the multipart group singing tradition of klapa singing to the attention of the Study Group. In his paper “From Local and Traditional to Global and Popular - Klapa Singing in Zagreb” he sought not to locate cosmopolitanism in Croatia broadly. Rather, examining the many traditions of this genre, Ćaleta presented a case for considering klapa singing cosmopolitanism. This tradition, he argued, represents the Mediterranean, in the sense that Magrini posits the concept, for Croatian musical culture. The reasons for this are historical - with its origins in the islands of Dalmatia, performances in Zagreb have been instrumental in spreading the popularity of klapa singing beyond the Balkans - as well as commercial. Ćaleta noted the success of the tradition on the radio and in the national finals for the Eurovision Song Contest as well as forging connections to the sea among student vocal groups.

This paper’s rich musical examples illustrated the vitality of the singing tradition in the present while illustrating some of the tensions within contemporary practices.

In his paper, Iain Fenlon confronted sonic tensions in the soundscape of Renaissance Venice. Fenlon’s intensive anthropological engagement in the unofficial musics of the city that was, at the time, the “hinge of Europe,” focused upon the battles that typify Magrini’s Mediterranean. Through attention to one significant place at one significant time - Piazza San Marco after the victory of the Holy League over the Turkish  galleys  at  Lepanto (1571) - Fenlon  highlighted  the  extent  to  which  cacophony  must 

have typified public spaces in modern Venice. He examined the social significance of the square, which housed diverse activities. Shops and markets were  integral in bringing  the population to this “principle theater of the city,” as was the shrine at St. Mark’s, which served as the destination for tourists and pilgrims. Fenlon emphasized the presence of darker history defining Venetian cosmopolitanism, since executions took place on the waterfront. Street vendors, strolling musicians, healers, and story tellers lamenting battle losses all contributed to the musical sounds of the square. This hub of itinerant musical activity, some recorded and more lost in history, opened a discussion attempting to bridge the historical Venetian cosmopolitanism with that of the conference’s present.

Iain Fenlon

Ruth Davis

In her discussion of Robert Lachmann, Ruth Davis illustrated one individual’s imagination of the Mediterranean and the influence he had through his work at the radio studio of the Palestine Broadcasting Service. Her paper “From Diaspora to Jerusalem: Broadcasting ‘Oriental’ Music in Mandatory  Palestine”  emphasized  the  significance of  the  two  roles he  played, as collector and disseminator. His fieldwork was predicated on the sense of dying musical traditions in the Middle East; this in turn influenced the vision at the foundations of his lectures and work at the studio in 1936. He was committed to encouraging musical culture through the engagement of musicians. Davis considered this, along with the model of the BBC, a main reason for the pedagogical tone of his radio   broadcasts.   She    argued   that    his  approach, to

understand the musical  past through an examination of the present, explains his musical “portraits” of musical communities that are not predicated on religious and ethnic boundaries.

At the conclusion of the conference, the discussion returned to the memory of Tullia Magrini and the future of the Study Group in her absence. The conference’s discussions inspired recollections of her insistence that historical perspectives are instrumental to anthropological work and the foundational influence of the present on engagement with the past. As the Study Group begins a new chapter of its existence, it is clear that the rich leadership and intellectual role model Tullia Magrini lent to the organization will continue to play a role in its future.

On the more practical side it was agreed that Marcello Sorce Keller would be now Chair of the Study Group, with the task of organizing its future meetings. Upon his request, Ruth F. Davis, accepted to help him as Vice–Chair.