Project description
Studying musical encounters between cultures
Music and musical activities play an important role in most human societies and cultures. They set the stage for interesting interactions between different societies and groups. The EU-funded Harmony on the Edge group aims to study the effects and happenings of such musical encounters between European and South American cultures in the territory of the Viceroyalty of Peru. This project will study and research experiences on both sides of these encounters, how they affected or fit in with political, religious, or scientific agendas of the time, and the form these encounters took. The project team will draw on a vast amount of archival research and data to base their study on.
Objective
Harmony on the Edge investigates how notions of music and sound were deployed during early modern global encounters to describe, categorise, and evaluate different types of human. Focusing on the territory covered by the Viceroyalty of Per in Spanish South America, this project addresses a wide range of European authors, travellers, and missionaries who inquired into the musical customs and musical aptitudes of indigenes during the 17th and 18th centuries. It asks i) how Europeans experienced and understood the sounds and musicality of indigene South Americans, ii) how these musical experiences fitted into European scientific, political or religious agendas, and iii) which kinds of musical exchange took place between Europeans and locals. It pays special attention to the ways cross-cultural appropriations were materially expressed in the manufacture and collection of musical instruments and the physical bodies of performers and dancers. The project suggests that conceptualising the music and sound of locals was crucial in the experience of otherness, at the same time it followed a broader inquiry into the common and defining features of humankind. Building a new interdisciplinary dialogue between intellectual and colonial history, history of the human sciences, history of science, ethnomusicology, historical anthropology and material culture studies, this project proposes a novel methodology for the study of early modern encounters, and a new conceptual approach to music as a field of inquiry into the nature of human beings. This action takes place in Chile and France and involves exhaustive archival research (written, visual and material sources), academic publications, a museum exhibition, training and dissemination activities, and a secondment in the Musum National dHistoire Naturelle.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- humanitiesartsmusicologyethnomusicology
- social sciencessociologyanthropology
You need to log in or register to use this function
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
75270 Paris
France