Évènements

Avec Martin Stokes*
The case of Enver Demirbağ (1935-2010), a noted vocalist in the ‘Harput Music’ (‘Harput Müziği’) tradition of South East Anatolia, invites thinking about the relationships between vocal production and geological deep time. This is, indeed, a catastrophic landscape, marked by inundations and earthquakes, deeply etched in local myth and mysticism. And by human and more recent ecological catastrophes, too. One is the nearby Keban dam,
completed in 1974, intended to supply the Turkish state with a quarter of its electricity needs. Demirbağ’s voice is coterminous with the dam, with the wealth it bought, briefly, to the region, and with the decline that followed. We might want to think, however, about the entanglement of this voice and its poetry with the landscape on a much broader scale. With reference to some recent ethnographic thinking, notably that of Gordon Gastillo on rubble (Gastillo 2014), David Irvine on anthropology and geological deep time (Irvine 2022), and the 'environmental humanities' touching ethnomusicology at the moment, I will explore the ‘hydropoetic’ entanglement of voice, water and landscape in this - and broader - contexts.

* Martin Stokes is King Edwards Professor of Music at Kings College London. His most recent book is Music and Citizenship (Oxford, 2023). Currently he is PI of the ERC/UKRI project 'Beyond 1932: Rethinking Musical Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa'.