Friday, 27 November 2020

Ana Hofman¹・Mojca Kovačič²・Urša Šivic³

Institute of Cultural and Memory Studies¹・Institute of Ethnomusicology^{2, 3}, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana^{1, 2, 3}

hofman.ana@gmail.com・mojca.kovacic@zrc-sazu.si・ursa.sivic@zrc-sazu.si

Where Would We Go with this Ethnomusicology?

About Institutional Status, Disciplinary Divisions and Neoliberalisation of Academic Labour in Slovenia

The famous quote of Zmaga Kumer “Where would we go with this folklore?” in her article in 1975, reminds us of the necessity of constant (self-)reflection on the position of ethnomusicology in Slovenia. Drawing on her call, we examine the position of ethnomusicology as a research field and institutionalised scholarly practice in relation to other related fields, such as musicology, ethnology, and cultural anthropology. We place special attention on the practices of institutionalisation ethnomu­sicol­ogy as a discipline and treatment of ethnomusicology by historical musicology and other more “mainstream” disciplines. We observe its position revealing, on the one hand, a close historical attachment to musi­col­ogy and, on the other, a methodological and theoretical independent definition of our own fields of research.

We examine issues presented within the context of current struggles for institutional support and financing of ethnomusicology and general pre­carisation of academic labour in today’s Slovenia. As we deeply believe that these conditions are not merely national or Europe-specific, but re­flect global tendencies in reshaping the academic environment related to: less governmental funding, especially in the arts and humanities; the pre­car­isation of the academic labour force; competitiveness due to the lack of funding; the accelerating pace of work; scientific production governed by funding structures and consequently the loss of autonomy, we hope to open wider debate about ethnomusicology and its sister disciplines in the uncertain times of global neoliberalism.

Key words: academic labour, ethnomusicology, funding, neoliberalisation

Ana Hofman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts in Ljubljana. She uses both archival and ethnographic methods to examine musical sound during socialism and the present-day conjuncture of neoliberalism and post-socialism in the area of former Yugoslavia. She has published many articles and book chapters, including two monographs: Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Poli­tics and Folklore Performances in Serbia(2011) and Music, Poli­tics, Affect: New Lives of Partisan Songs in Slovenia (2016). She is currently working on the mono­graph Socialism, Now! Singing Activism after Yugoslavia (OUP).

Mojca Kovačič is the head of the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the Re­search Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and an ethno­musicologist with the main research focus in traditional music and its con­tem­porary transformations, various current musical practices and sound phenomena. She is interested in relationship between sound/mu­sical, so­cial and political contexts such as music and gender, music and nation­alism, cultural policy, music and identification, acoustemology. Cur­rently she is involved in different projects related to music and affect, cultural dinamics in migrant contexts and bilingual expression in popular music practices.

Urša Šivic, PhD, is an ethnomusicologist employed at the Institute of Ethno­musicology at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her scientific focus is researching vocal folk music, its structural features, the role and influence of the institutional policies and criteria on folk music. She analytically studies arrangements of folk songs in choral and popular music, observes the relationship between past and present in musi­cal fields such as carol singing, funeral music, etc.

Mojca Piškor

Academy of Music, Department of Musicology, University of Zagreb

mpiskor@muza.hr

Slow Science Utopia: Privatised Anxieties, Gender and Academic Labour in Contemporary Croatian (Ethno)Musicology

“Science needs time. Bear with us, while we think”. The two closing, concise and direct, sentences of The Slow Science Manifesto (2010) seem to resonate with pages upon pages of critical academic publications writ­ten in the last decade, reflecting on the crisis of academic labour within the increasingly faster contemporary academia. This vast literature is preg­nant with references to ever-increasing institutional demands, pre­carious conditions of labour, intensification and extensification of work, endangered academic solidarity, increasingly competitive environ­ments, as well as to the hidden and rarely discussed “injuries” that the new neo­lib­eral academia inflicts upon the bodies and minds of those working in it (Gill 2010). Critical reflections on the changing conditions of academic la­bour in (ethno)musicology are, however, still relatively scarce (cf. Vágne­rová & García Molina 2018). In this presentation – based on autoeth­nog­raphy and ethnographic research carried out through interviews, group discussions and solicited personal diaries – the author will try to provide insight into the intricacies of professional lives and challenges of academic labour of early- and mid-career women academics working in the field of (ethno)musicology in Croatia today. Although based on a relatively small number of participants, this initial research hopes to offer the starting point for reflection on hitherto unexamined, invisible and under-repre­sented gendered experiences of “doing (ethno)musicology” in the context of contemporary university/academia.

Key words: neoliberal academia, academic labour, (ethno)musi­col­ogy, gender

Mojca Piškor earned her PhD in ethnology and cultural anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb with the thesis Politics and Poetics of Spaces of Music: Ethnomusicological and Anthropological Per­spectives (2010). Since 2001 she has been affiliated with the Institute of Ethnol­ogy and Folklore Research in Zagreb and since 2013 permanently employed as an assistant professor of Ethnomusicology at the Department of Musicology at the Academy of Music in Zagreb. Her field of interest includes issues pertaining to the nexus of music and politics (racial imagination, gen­der, migration) and intersections of music and discourse on music. In the recent years she has focussed her research interests on the use of music as a tool of torture in socialist political labour camps and has currently started new research on auditory regimes of irregularised migrations, which is part of a wider international research project The European Irregularized Migra­tion Regime in the Periphery of the EU (ERIM).

Bianca Ţiplea Temeş

Gheorghe Dima National Music Academy, Cluj-Napoca

filarmonica_cluj_bianca@yahoo.com

“Make Romanian Musicology Great Again!” …

Working in the Doctorate Factory

Music academies and universities form the ‘laboratories’ in which musi­cology as a scientific discipline is moulded and where the professional identity of the young musicologist is shaped.

For more than four decades, such institutions within the Eastern Euro­pean bloc were placed under rigid state control and tuned their curricula to the aesthetic goals of the regime. Despite the strict isolation from the Western world and imposed rejection of most contemporary trends, in Romania the teaching system for musicologists was defined by extreme rigor and solid preparation. Each year, very few candidates were admitted to each institution after an exceedingly difficult entrance exam, having to conduct their research afterwards based on limited sources, approaching only certain topics, in a politically correct way.

A complete paradigm shift occurred in 1989, after the fall of Ceaușescu, when the selection criteria for admission relaxed significantly. The aid of technology, the freedom to choose their preferred topics, and to express themselves, demonstrate the contrast between musicological study pre-and-post the watershed of 1989. Unfortunately, many students display a decreased ability to write, and a decline in enthusiasm for contemporary artistic phenomena, yet many of them are awarded their PhD title not long after their graduation.

The Romanian system of teaching musicology stays at a crossroads: from being socially isolated, yet culturally connected in the most profound way to the rest of the world until 1989, when we became part of the global network, yet alienated. The focus, then, considering this paradox, is how to proceed today.

KEY WORDS: (POST)COMMUNISM, TEACHING SYSTEM, ENTRANCE EXAMS, DOCTORATES

Bianca Ţiplea Temeş is a musicologist and Reader at Gheorghe Dima National Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca. She earned two doctorates from both the University of Music in Bucharest (2002) and the University of Oviedo, Spain (2015). She also holds a degree in business management (MBA granted by the Babeş-Bolyai University), combining her academic career with her post at the Transylvania Philharmonic, where she was head of the Artistic Depart­ment.

Her books have been published in Romania, the most recent being Seeing Sound, Hearing Images (2017) and Folk Music as Fermenting Agent for Com­position. Past and Present (2019), and A Tribute to György Ligeti in His Native Transylvania (2020) edited together with Nicholas Cook, William Kinderman, and Kofi Agawu, respectively.

She was awarded several Erasmus grants to study at the University of Cam­bridge (UK), obtained two DAAD Scholarships in Berlin, Hamburg, and Heidel­berg, and received a research grant from the Paul Sacher Foundation, where she explored the Ligeti collection. In 2016 she became the founder and the director of the Festival A Tribute to György Ligeti in his Native Transyl­vania.

Iva Nenić

Faculty of Music, University of Arts, Belgrade

genije@gmail.com

“The Winds of Change”:

Paradigm Shifts in Contemporary (Serbian) Ethnomusicology

In this paper I want to address the nature and complexities of ‘double/ mul­tiple burden’ that characterises scholarly labour within the discipline of Ser­bian (and probably post-Yugoslav) ethnomusicology, and also to discuss a pos­si­ble development of future ethnomusicologies in the local/ regional con­text. In Serbia, contemporary scholars in the field of ethno­musicology are often sup­posed to produce and transfer knowledge both within universities and through the prevalent neoliberal mecha­nisms of dissem­ination of scientific work, with a significant asymmetry between the demands of the local knowl­edge market and global field of academic knowledge production.

Amidst the ongoing clashing of paradigms of former folklore-oriented na­tional research and contemporary trends stemming from the field of global ethnomu­si­col­ogy, a huge gap of a consensus regarding the very na­ture and aim of aca­dem­ic labour in regard to local needs and troubles, opens both within aca­dem­ia and in a wider social framework. In the con­text of Serbian ethnomusi­col­ogy, this demand is further complicated by the paradigm of ap­plied sci­ence that is increasingly perceived as a legit­i­mate demand, and yet uncer­tainly positioned in-between the attempt to par­tially preserve the his­torical leg­acy of folk music research, and an urge to answer to the (slowly re­ceding) post­modern explosion of directions within the international aca­demia. One can observe that the very nature of inter­sectionalised and by all means gen­dered labour is seldom taken into account, while the construct of a suppos­edly neu­tral researcher fig­ure still pervades local popular and scientific discourses.

I would argue that the gesture to rejuvenate (Serbian) ethnomusicology should be coming from two directions: firstly, by shifting the focus from the change of study object to the change of approach that strongly relies on the notion of interconnected scholarly activism, and, secondly, by tak­ing into account real (material) conditions of academic workers who should reflect more profoundly upon the relation between personal and political.

Key words: ethnomusicology, academic labour, Serbian ethnomusicology, paradigm shift, gender, intersectionality

Iva Nenić is an ethnomusicologist and cultural theorist who teaches at the Dpt. of ethnomusicology at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade. She frequently collaborates with the postgraduate programme of Interdisciplinary studies at the University of Arts in Belgrade, Belgrade Open School, Women’s Studies Centre in Belgrade, as well as other Serbian and international academic institutions. Her invited lectures have taken place at universities in UK, Austria, Slovenia, Italy and Japan.

Iva’s research is concerned with the way music practices give rise to ideology and help enact social identities, with a focus on gender reproduction/ contestation and the politics of intersec­tionality. Her field experience stretches from folk music of Serbia to the issues of local and global world music, female musicianship in Serbian and regional independent music scenes, Balkan-based hip hop and the shared vernacular culture of post-Yugoslav pop folk. Iva’s book Gusle players and other female traditional instrumentalists in Serbia: identification by sound (Belgrade, 2019) received the “Anđelka Milić” award granted by the Section for Feminist Re­search and Critical Studies on Masculinities (SeFeM), in the category of scholarly work critically contributing to the study of gender relations.