Anthropology of Music Lecture Series 2024

Prof. Martin Stokes, Kings College London (UK)

Lecture 1: Air

Wednesday, June 26, 5 pm, AMA Lounge, Central Library

This lecture introduces the vocal art of Enver Demirbağ (1935-2010), whose world – a borderland world in the shadow of Empire – constitutes the broad frame of these lectures. Beyond him, it concerns the matter of song as and in the circulation of air, as breath sounded and heard, as breath interrupted or delegated, as breath regulated and governed, as a poesis fashioning moral subjects and communities in relation to their worlds (both human and beyond-human).

Lecture 2: Water

Thursday, June 27, 5 pm, African Music Archives, Central Library, GFG 00.156

Musicology and ethnomusicology have a long history of thinking about music’s relationship to water (rivers, seas, oceans, deltas, islands, etc.), or, viz. Silvers 2018, lack thereof. How is song implicated in the struggle over water? And how is water implicated in the struggle over song? ‘Struggle’ here admit- ting the possibility of agencies beyond the human… and an approach we might label ‘hydopoetic’. The waters of the Euphrates are rich to think with, taking us from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the hyd- ropolitics of the modern Turkish state.

Lecture 3: Rubble

Friday, June 28, 12.30 pm, African Music Archives, Central Library, GFG 00.156

Demirbağ’s tragic death saw him memorialized in the city more as ruin than ‘heritage’ (viz. Stoller 2008), and perhaps (viz Gordillo 2014), more ‘rubble’ than ruin. Heritage, ruin and rubble blend into one another in this landscape, inviting reflection both on human efforts to separate and exploit them, and the agencies that they possess. What might sonic rubble be – placed along such a continuum? And what might we learn from it when we try to situate it in a shatter zone landscape shaped by multiple temporalities of catastrophe – geological, ecological, political?

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