Name: Kate van Orden | Mapping Music and Migration: Questions of Scale
Start: 2024-04-16T11:00:00
Location: The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life

Kate  van Orden

UC Berkeley Department of Music

Musicology’s embrace of what is being called global music history is proving extremely useful as a place from which to contest Eurocentric histories of music and develop new working methods equipped to address the meaningfulness of music in places where cultures, languages, and people were in constant contact. In this talk, 1.) I begin by outlining the analytic categories employed in migration studies and underscoring their usefulness to music historians. 2.) I go on to ask some larger questions designed to incite discussions concerning matters of scale. What is the relationship between micro and macro history in musicological research? How can musicology best operate at the scale of seas and oceans? 3.) I wrap up by setting musicological research in perspective by comparing it to hard forms of world history designed to discover global unities created by economic, colonial, and—eventually—industrial processes. Case studies drawn from recent scholarship are threaded throughout.