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Björn Schmelzer:
The Chronopolitics of Early Music

Lecture | Thinking Together 2017 – Decolonizing Time | Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Berlin | 19.3.2017

“Early Music”, a generalized notion for a (musicological) focus on musical repertoires of the past and their (eventual) performance, is a concept born with Western modernity and the idea of historicity.
However, the fascination for “voices of the past” since modernity and even long before, has always been somehow ambiguous: on the one hand there is an almost spiritualist and re-enacting desire of evoking those voices, on the other hand they are exorcized or at least put into a neutralizing framework which excludes any anachronistic eruption of time, giving rise to the paradox of the impossible embodiment of past sounds.
As soon as we start to believe in the coexistence or subsistence of the past in the present, “Early Music” becomes an act of listening and evocation of past voices, not so far from many practices outside Western, rationalizing modernity.

Is it in this way that the performance of “Early Music” could be a chance or potential for musicology, leaving its philological and modernist heritage behind in favor of a practice “in the midst of things” where analysis can not exist without affective and exegetic performance? The performance of “Early Music” would be a way of politicizing musicology, where the musical event is at the same time a listening, a negotiation and a transference, opening up the historicist representation of musical repertoires.

It would be necessary to show that it is the musical repertoires and practices themselves that have been always intrinsically resisting a proper place and origin in time and space, and that they are machinized with the help of affective diagrams in order to transform the things around them and guarantee the animation of an “after-life”.


SOURCE: Berliner Festspiele / MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues
YEAR: 2017
AUTHOR PAGE: www.graindelavoix.org