This online conference organised by Lola San Martín Arbide (CRAL-EHESS) will take place from 5th to 7th of July 2020.

Scientific committee: Esteban Buch (CRAL / EHESS, Paris); Jonathan Hicks (University of Aberdeen); Gascia Ouzounian (University of Oxford); Lola San Martín Arbide (CRAL / EHESS, Paris); Christabel Sterling (University of Westminster); Justinien Tribillon (Theatrum Mundi).

Keynote : Richard Elliott (Newcastle University, UK)

• Online Registrations : https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tRo1a9djSh2EIaPN7NWs0Q

• Contact : musical.cities.2020@gmail.com

The aim of this workshop is to explore space through music, approaching the history of the city via the notion of nostalgia. Often described as a form of homesickness, nostalgia is, by definition, the feeling that makes us wish to repossess or reoccupy a space. Such spaces appear to us as both near and distant, tangible and remote, and it seems that attempts at reclaiming them are frequently musical in nature. We know, for instance, that particular compositions have played important roles in helping people to navigate or mitigate a sense of displacement. In these circumstances, affective experiences may be bound up with trauma or joy, as is the case of song during wartime or musical imaginaries among migrants. Under other conditions, we might identify a ‘second-hand nostalgia’ in the guise of a musicallyinflected tourism that seeks to reactivate (for pleasure and/or profit) the historical aura of an urban site. What are we to make of the abundance of personal, interpersonal, and propositional episodes that posit music as some kind of a bridge to the urban past?

 

Programme (Central European Summer Time)

Urban Nostalgia: The Musical City in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

SUNDAY JULY 5

16:00 > 16:30 Welcome and Introduction

Lola San Martín Arbide, EHESS, Paris

16.30>18.45

From Fin-de-siècle to Retromania

Chair: Jonathan Hicks

 Part One. Beirut­–Rome: The Written Discourses of Urban Modernity

• Beirut in the musical discourse

 Diana Abbani, Freie Universität Berlin

• In memory of Rome. Topographical and musical proofs in Il piacere by Gabriele D'Annunzio

 Raffaela Carluccio, Universita di Parma

(15 minute pause, 17.30 > 17.45)

Part Two. Beirut–Japan in the 1960s

• Beirut the Ancient City of the Future: On Hauntology, Vaporwave, and the Sounds of Nostalgia for Lost Futures

 Ali Jaber, Lebanese University of Fine Arts /American University of Beirut

• From Rustic Hometowns to Dazzling Skylines: Nostalgia, Healing and the Negotiation of Identity in the Urban Cityscapes of Japanese New Music (nyū _myūjikku)

 Anita Drexler, independent scholar

MONDAY JULY 6

16.00>17.30

The City’s Rural Idyll

Chair: Justinien Tribillon

• Heimatsmusik in Prague: Rural nostalgia in the capital?

 Ondřej Daniel, Charles University Prague, and Jakub Machek, Metropolitan University Prague

• The transposition of the musical landscape of the Brazilian sertão to the urban environment through Armorial music

 Cecília Pires, CRAL – EHESS (Paris)

• ‘Those Old Melodies Touch Home’: Nostalgia Rurality in Old-Time Music’s Urban Audience (United-States, 1920-1945)

     Manuel Bocquier, EHESS, Paris 

17.45>19.15

Paris: Old, New and Déco

Chair: Gascia Ouzounian

• Nineteenth-Century Popular Song and the Invention of Le nouveau Paris

 Jack Blaszkiewicz, Wayne State University

• Mal de Paris: Singing and dancing nostalgia in the late nineteenth-century city

Tristan Paré-Morin, University of Pennsylvania

• Paris, art déco, and the spirit of Apollo

Jonathan Cross, University of Oxford

TUESDAY JULY 7 

16.00>17.30

Musical Palimpsests

Chair: Christabel Stirling

• ‘Deine alten Melodien von der schönen Stadt Berlin’. Popular Song and Urban Nostalgia in Berlin, 1880-1930

Daniel Morat, Freie Universität Berlin

•  Longing for a Disappearing City: Urban Transformation and Nostalgia in Costumbrista Music Theatre in Late Nineteenth Century San Sebastian

 Asier Odriozola Otamendi, Universidad Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)

•  The production of urban nostalgias. Montevideo and Buenos Aires’ shared histories of tango

 Daniel Richter, University of Maryland

17.45>18.45

Keynote lecture by Richard Elliott

Respondent: Esteban Buch

Revisiting Old Haunts in a Time of Lockdown:  Holiday Records, Virtuality and the Nostalgia Gap

19.00>19.30

Concluding thoughts

Funded by the Aural Paris project (Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 750086); organised by Lola San Martín Arbide (CRAL / EHESS, Paris).