Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group

Archives and archival work hold a contested position within music studies, especially given recent attempts to redress the forms of exclusion that have traditionally structured the field’s intellectual commitments. As much as they have functioned as the guarantors of scholarly legitimacy and objectivity, archives present a fruitful site to reflect on the larger historiographic, epistemological, and political aporias that accompany their existence. To this end, a growing body of literature has theorized “the archive” to better account for the ways that minoritized lives and practices have been obscured, rendered unruly, or simply forgotten within hegemonic narratives. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Diana Taylor, Ann Laura Stoler, Ann Cvetkovich, and Robin Gray have thus articulated new critical perspectives on and from within the archive that productively sit alongside previous accounts from the likes of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. This panel seeks to continue these efforts with papers that that conceptualize, critique, or generally reflect on archives or archival theory in relationship to music studies. Given the multiple “archival turns” that have been staged across the humanities, our contributors engage myriad critical traditions and engage both the theory and praxis involved in archival work.

Do archives need humans to exist? Recent archival studies (e.g., post/decolonial studies, media archaeology) highlight the significant gaps caused by the various political and social contexts in which they were established. But even in these critiques of archival ontologies, humans play a central role in establishing and maintaining archives and their holdings. Yet in this moment of anthropocenic reckoning, it seems equally viable to reflect on archives beyond the human, and particularly what historian of science David Sepkoski has called “the earth as archive.” In this paper, I consider three different instances of geological listening in which the earth functions as a kind of sound archive: first, the noise of boulders being pushed by mountain rivers until they become sand in the ocean, an auditory experience Charles Darwin used to conceptualize the deep time of the earth; second, the emission of sound from bubbles in glacial ice which have recently been recorded and analyzed as a way to measure the rate of ice melt (Tegowski et al, 2014); and finally, in a slightly different configuration, the increasing use of sound (and ultrasound) waves in oil extraction, both to query the earth-as-archive in order to locate oil wells and also to extract oil more efficiently. Listening to the earth-as-archive offers affective and geological insight, yet it also suggests the ways listening itself can easily become co-opted as a tool of environmental destruction, contrary to a long history of sentimental listeners from the Romantics to the World Soundscape Project.

Throughout the early modern period, Spanish overseers of the city of Naples maintained a fleet of galley ships that provided military protection to its busy port and patrolled the coasts of the wider kingdom. As was typical throughout the Mediterranean, these ships relied on rowing labor from enslaved men (mostly north Africans and Ottoman Turks) and local convicts, identified collectively by contemporaries as galeotti. Given the constant provisioning these ships required, Spanish bureaucratic officials called veedores kept meticulous records of rations, munitions, equipment, and the crews themselves. Today held in the military section of the Archivio di Stato di Napoli, the archive of this fleet preserves traces of musical life in a maritime carceral space. Alongside contents ranging from cannons to coils of rope, surviving inventories document the presence of musical instruments and the galeotti musicians who would have played them.

This paper examines how Spanish state agents monitored the movements of people and objects within an internal economy dependent upon forms of unfree labor, including music-making. Drawing from recent discussions in early modern studies, I consider these inventories as subjective records of space that index contemporary material associations between objects and their functions. The organizing principles of veedores allude to idiosyncratic notions of material and aesthetic value that temper the Foucauldian vision of panoptic state surveillance. Taking up Ann Stoler’s call to think along as well as against the archival grain, I argue that the maritime archive of the Mediterranean galley reveals music’s circulation within a fluid, contingent space.

The music archive has long favoured collections produced by a single creator, be it a composer, performer, collector. However, continuing to produce archival collections based on the primacy of individual creators is not enough to record the complex assemblages of many musical experiences of the last century. This paper mobilizes the concept of post-custodial archival paradigms, community ownership and long-term sustainability of these models in the case of the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments (AUMI) ideated by Pauline Oliveros, Leif Miller and Jackie Heyen in the early 2000s and the consortium created around AUMI (http://aumiapp.com/).

The diversity and dispersion of AUMI documentation (e.g., coding of various versions of the program; paper-based and digital documentation such as meeting minutes, email exchanges; performance documentation such as video; and traces of online presence) makes it a perfect candidate to apply post-custodial archival principles. Indeed, the post-custodial archive, theorised by Terry Cook (1994), articulates ‘a turn from “archives” as collection or location to “archiving as practice”’ (Zavala et al. 2017, 204). The work presented in this paper is based on interviews with members of the consortium and a survey of existing materials and it will propose possible ways forward on how to archive an experience such as the AUMI consortium. This case study can offer a paradigm for many other musical experiences since WWII in which the communal aspect is paramount (e.g., the Deep Listening community also started by Pauline Oliveros, improvising collectives, the live-coding community).

In 2008, a massive fire tore through Building 6197 of the Universal Music Group in Hollywood, a building known to employees as the “Video Vault.” This structure was a storage facility containing over a half-million master tapes recorded by luminaries of American music. While reports vary, the blaze likely destroyed over one hundred thousand tapes, a devastating loss of cultural artifacts documenting American popular music. The list of artists affected is sobering: Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Patsy Cline, Mary J. Blige, Elton John, Slayer, on and on. Yet this was hardly the first tragedy of its kind. Earlier fires had destroyed storage facilities of Atlantic and MGM Records, and in other instances record executives have intentionally destroyed archival materials in order to save money on storage costs.

This presentation considers what it means to preserve massive holdings of cultural history in the storage facilities of commercial record companies, facilities that have been repeatedly shown to be both inaccessible and fragile. In particular, it examines the fuzzy epistemological boundary between archives and vaults. While the two are often conflated in news stories about tape losses, in practice their missions can differ widely in regard to user access, preservational priorities, and conceptions of perceived value (economic, cultural, and otherwise). The presentation draws on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics to ruminate on the status of vaulted tapes, as objects which are perceived as having tremendous value, yet are intentionally shunted away from listening ears for decades, until they are (sometimes) destroyed.