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Seminar

The wall inside Saba: Music, imagination and acoustic possession

Data
02 Apr, 2025
4:00
Location
NOVA FCSH, Colégio Almada Negreiros, Campolide (Lisboa) | Room 208 - Floor 2 | Zoom Room
Institution
NOVA FCSH
Research Groups
EPMS

PERMANENT SEMINAR OF THE RESEARCH GROUP ON ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AND STUDIES IN POPULAR MUSIC

02.04.2025 | 4:00 PM | NOVA FCSH, Colégio Almada Negreiros, Campolide (Lisboa) | Room 208 – Floor 2 | Zoom Room 

Free access, in person and online.

The wall inside Saba: Music, imagination and acoustic possession

Victor A. Stoichiţă | CREM-LESC, CNRS – Université Paris Nanterre

Musical experience involves a particular combination of perception and imagination. One might call this “metaphorical” listening (Peacocke 2009), in the sense that listeners map on what they hear dimensions which are not normally heard. I will contend that many people in the world go beyond mere metaphor and actually encounter in sound things that they couldn’t encounter otherwise. They often attribute agency as well to these things, which I call sonic beings. I will present an example from a class of Greek popular music in southern France. The participants were trying to grasp the concept of makam. Makam is a cornerstone of the ottoman legacy that some Greek musicians seek to revive in their music. We will see how makam Saba was approached by the participants through verbal images, sung examples and instrumental attempts. I will propose that “possession” is more effective than “metaphor” to capture the sense of presence that characterizes successful renditions of makam Saba. The horizon for this discussion is a better understanding of how sonic beings come to feature as social agents in human interactions.

Victor A. Stoichiţă  | Investigates musical interactions at the crossroads of anthropology, ethnomusicology and cognitive science. He worked with Roma professional musicians in Romania to understand why they relate the effects of their music to concepts like “cunning” and “slyness”. This led him to broader investigations of virtuosity, musical irony, and techniques of enchantment through sound. Victor A. Stoichiţă is the current director of the Center for Research in Ethnomusicology at the Ethnology and Comparative Sociology lab of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CREM-LESC, CNRS – Université Paris Nanterre).

This event was financed by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under project UID 004472 – INET-md – Instituto de Etnomusicologia – Centro de Estudos em Dança.

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