Let's Talk about Music

Gardner, Abigail S ORCID: 0000-0003-2994-741X (2019) Let's Talk about Music. In: Sonic Memory, September 5th 2019, University of Liverpool. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Let’s talk about music Abigail Gardner, University of Gloucestershire When we talk about music we talk about ourselves. When our selves are in conversation with others in new environments and we discuss music from our past that we want to extend into our futures, we are talking about the flow of music through our bodies and across times and spaces. This paper investigates the relationship between music, listening and memory by focusing on two projects that use methodological tools from digital storytelling to open up spaces for recollections of and subsequent conversations about the importance of music in individual lives. The first project is called ‘Troubling Inheritances’, and the second ‘Mapping the Music of Migration’, is Erasmus + funded , and involves workshops across seven European countries, an audio collection and an app of case studies from migrants’ stories of music. The field research draws on participatory media practices from digital storytelling that highlight how such methods offer ‘opportunities for new voices to speak and be heard, an increased mutual awareness flowing from a greater influence over distribution and exhibition and the potential for new intensities of listening’ (Dunford, 2017:313). Such stories of the musical self, of individual ‘song worlds’ can reveal the affectively engaged space that echoes the therapeutic narrative revealed in confessional ‘moments’ (Lefebvre, 2004; Radstone, 2007). These relate to what de Nora (2000) calls ‘priming’ and ‘co-presence’, whereby music acts as a technology of emotion and memory and a ‘device for the unfolding, the replaying and the temporal structure of the moment’ (p.67). Locational and temporal context is vital to approaching these participants’ song stories (Forman, 2002; Lefebvre, 2004) since they take ‘place’ in particularly charged geographically and temporally contextualised bodies that exist within contemporary complex political ‘traffic’. The paper explores the challenges and potentials of the use of this methodology across these two spaces.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > ML Literature of music
Divisions:	Schools and Research Institutes > School of Creative Arts
Research Priority Areas:	Creative Practice and Theory Culture, Continuity, and Transformation
Depositing User:	Abigail Gardner
Date Deposited:	12 Nov 2019 10:21
Last Modified:	08 Aug 2023 19:10
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/7537

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