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- Title
"S he Played the Harp and Sang a New Song": The Sea, the Wall, and the Aesthetic Topography of Mediterranean Migration.
- Authors
Bohlman, Philip V.
- Abstract
In the historical longue durée of European history and increasingly of the twenty-first century, walls have been built to block the paths of migrants fleeing violence and poverty, and to divert and silence the transnational circulation of music. The conflict between walls and migration has generated the shifting soundscapes of what in this article form an aesthetic topography represented by the contradictory conditions of archaeology and architecture, which over time unfold as the contrapuntal chronotopes of sound and silence. The music historical path I trace through the article begins with the metaphors of walls in medieval ballads and the materiality of ghetto walls, expanding in modernity toward the transformation of walls, even in their most restrictive forms, into aesthetic objects. The destructive silencing afforded by border and city walls notwithstanding, they often express beauty and civic pride. The forced migration of European Jews represents a leitmotif throughout the article, from the exile that followed expulsion from Mediterranean lands in early modern Europe to the musical chronicle of flight and death in the Holocaust. Specific genres of song - ballads in oral and written tradition, corridos, ghetto music, the songs of pilgrimage, music from concentration camps - converge in the voices of a historical counterpoint providing critical new perspectives on the aesthetic topography of modern Europe, especially during the migration crisis of our own day.
- Subjects
EUROPE; TOPOGRAPHY; AESTHETICS; CHRONOTOPE; FORCED migration; JEWISH migrations; HARP; MEDIEVAL music; MUSICAL criticism
- Publication
Puls, 2020, Vol 5, p7
- ISSN
2002-2972
- Publication type
Article