The University of Virginia Department of Music presents a colloquium by Martin Stokes on Tuesday, February 4th at 3:30pm in room 231 Bryan Hall. This event is free and open to the public.

This colloquium is co-sponsored by UVA Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages and Cultures

Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at King’s College London. His work focuses on modern Turkey and Egypt, with broader interests across the Mediterranean and Europe, and with a thematic emphasis on ethnicity and identity, space and place, globalization and religion. He has taught at The Queen's University of Belfast (1989-1997), The University of Chicago (1997-2007) and Oxford University (2007-2012). He gave the Bloch Lectures at Berkeley, The University of California in 2013 and has been a visiting professor at Bogazici University in Istanbul on two occasions. He was awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association in 2010 and was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012.

Media and Other Archaeologies in the Upper Euphrates

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 archaeology attentive to the workings of lost, obscured or damaged archives. Here, they also invite consideration alongside other - conflicted - archaeologies 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.

Bryan Hall is located behind the Ampitheater on Central Grounds. (map) Parking is available in the central grounds parking garage on Emmet Street, in the C1 parking lot off McCormick Rd, and in the parking lots at the UVA Corner.

To see all events in our colloquium series visit https://music.virginia.edu/colloquia.

All events are subject to change.