Professor Martin Stokes (King Edward Professor of Music, King’s College London)

“Media and Other Archeologies in the Upper Euphrates”

Thursday, 6 February 5-6:30 pm, Goodspeed 402

Co-hosted by Music and Sound and Ethnoise

Abstract:

Enver Demirbağ (1935-2010) is known as a latter-day master of ‘Harput Müziği’ – the urban art music in the (once major) cities of Elazığ and Palu in southeastern Anatolia (today’s Turkey/Türkiye). Owing to modal formations that tie this music more closely to neighbouring countries than Istanbul, and to improvisatory practices that have restricted efforts to notate it, this is a neglected repertory. Tied to life in a region culturally depleted by the Armenian genocide and the Kurdish tribal uprisings early in the century – and various other factors – Demirbağ failed to make much of a national career for himself. The circulation of his recordings, today amongst small groups of local afficionados on flash drives, poses some interesting challenges for a media archeology attentive to the workings of lost, obscured or damaged archives. Here, they also invite consideration alongside other – conflicted – archeologies in the region (Çelik 2016), in a landscape more recently dominated by the Keban Dam, modern Turkey’s iconic hydroelectric project. The question, then, becomes one of conceptualizing Demirbağ’s voice in a landscape marked by various kinds of ruination, various kinds of inundation, various kinds of struggle.