Victor A. Stoichita
Centre de recherche en etnomusicologie (CREM)
Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Université Paris Ouest - Nanterre
Tuesday 19 March 2013 at 5.15 pm,
SR 15.17, (Resowi F/1)
All welcome
Most models of musical interaction regard music as a way of circulating information amongst humans. But ethnographic data from various parts of the world (including Europe) indicates that listeners' experience of music frequently involves non-human agencies. These agents may be gods, spirits or animals, but also a range of sonic characters whose ontological status is less clear: entities which "move", "shine", have "color" or “taste”, display "moral" attributes, and sometimes "dialogue" with one another. How should such intuitions be considered in musical analysis? Are they metaphors, poetic verbalizations, or core phenomena which constitute musical experience? After outlining a few ethnographic examples, I will present a tentative theoretical approach.
Victor A. Stoichiță is an anthropologist specialized in the study of music. His first book (Fabricants d'émotion, 2008) investigates the notions of "tricks", "cunning" and "slyness" used by Romanian Roma musicians in relation to musical structures. He later worked on virtuosity, intellectual property, irony and humor in live musical settings, and also published a Romani songbook for pedagogical use (Chants tsiganes de Roumanie, 2010). His current research deals with the ontological assumptions underlying musical experience and with the distributions of agency between humans and sonic structures. He is a permanent researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
