Margot Fassler spent several days in Utrecht this past summer, as an advisor to the Sound Memories Project. She narrates something of the experience here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfaUoWmYywU
Sound Memories explores the relationships between past musical repertories and scholarship and performance in the present. For today’s Europeans, the existence of a collective musical past is a given. The past is heard and negotiated in the concert hall, and when we listen to or perform popular ‘oldies’; countless political and emotional narratives are attached to it, demonstrating the extent to which the musical past can be instrumentalised.
This project explores the mechanisms by which Europeans of a distant past (c. 1200-1600) used collective musical memory to shape cultural and political behaviour. Specifically, this research project asks in which ways are these mechanisms relevant to the societies of 21st-century Europe?
The research is being directed by the following PIs (Principal Investigators):
- Prof. Dr. Paweł Gancarczyk, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw
- Prof. Dr. Inga Mai Groote, Ruprecht Karl University, Heidelberg (effective 1 February 2018: University of Zurich)
- Dr. Lenka Hlávková, Charles University, Prague
- Prof. Dr. Karl Kügle, Utrecht University (Project Leader)
- Prof. Susan Rankin, University of Cambridge
To find out more about this work see the project website: http://www.soundme.eu/