Through my work on the MigrEnAb project I established the groundbreaking theoretical intervention of “sontinuity.” Sontinuity is a way transmission is ensured through the sonic in communities facing dispersal, disruption and trauma. Sontinuity establishes a thread of continuity which remains unbroken by body-to-body connections established through ritual or vernacular singing of either simple or complex material. The bonds which are forged through shared knowledge and performance of simple pieces create the crucial nodes of social cohesion needed after migratory displacement. This is why so often songbooks were created by a writer who underwent migration themselves, later to be bequeathed to family members as they moved from one city/community/language to another. The songbooks became ‘objects of aurality’ and in their most extreme cases (such as A. Israel and B. Bentata) transmitted only the memory of a lost sonic knowledge. However, the project results demonstrate that the imprint of the memory of lost sonic knowledge still served as a manner of creating social bonds after complete memory loss. This bond-making through the object served its purpose for at least two subsequent generations.
The linkage of the use of voice – hand – type – microphone – ear provides a sort of mediatic map of the way Sephardim used technology in their “sontinuity” to ensure body to body transmission despite corporeal dislocations. This realization helped explain why most of the repertoire initially written in personal songbooks has been completely abandoned, dismissed and/or forgotten. However, the key and ground-breaking discovery that I made is that transmission and sontinuity is not based on textual transmission, nor on exact repertoire but on a sonic, gestural and timbral embedding for which the songs are but the vehicle. I found that linear memory transmitted through arborescent systems of knowledge transmission is only a piece of a larger societal system to ensure transmission of epistemologies of self which anchor the group into feasible manners of social cohesion. The other crucial element of the system relies on rhizomic multinodal and multidirectional modes of repertoire transmission which ensure that repetitive, cyclical and ritualised performative aspects of individual and group singing are enacted to embed group specific knowledge into conscious and subconscious manners of memory-making.
The project results successfully led to my arrival at a ground-breaking theoretical conclusion and formulation regarding manners of transmission in situations of migration, language loss, and diaspora. The project enabled me to coin a new theoretical term I called “sontinuity” which distils the complex way continuity is embedded within sound beyond textual and narrative basis.
Preliminary project results were disseminated to thousands of non-specialist audiences primarily through eight public interventions in a variety of formats and media.
