The Institute of Musicology of the University of Wrocław would like to invite you to a lecture by Prof. Andrea F. Bohlman (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) on Tuesday, June 20th at 17:00 “Hearing Lwów Out of War, 1939: Singing and the Limits of Sonic Evidence”
Institute of Musicology UWr, ul. Szewska 36, room 107. The lecture will be held in English.
On 20.06 and 21.06 there will be seminars with Andrea F. Bohlmann – if you are interested in attending, please email: warsztaty.muzykologia@gmail.com
Lecture Abstract:
This talk draws attention to a three-and-a-half-minute sound recording made December 1939 in Prenzlau, Germany. In detention at the POW barracks for Polish officers, Kazimierz Dziubek shared a song with two linguists who were collecting his voice to preserve the urban Polish dialect distinctive to the multiethnic city, Lwów. Two verses that were classified as speech were in fact a hit song from Polish cinema, “Only in Lwów” (Tylko we Lwowie, 1939) by the prolific composer Henryk Wars and his frequent lyricist-collaborator Emanuel Szlechter. Even though this recording has hardly been heard, it cues my attention to the lives of those invested in its circulation: the song’s Polish Jewish authors, the Polish Catholic dance instructor who sang it, and the Ukrainian linguist who pulled it from the archive, listened, and transcribed it in 1942. My analysis insists on a connection between wartime recording and the afterlives of Nazi genocide and German colonial expansion as I explore the recording’s connection to Hollywood as well as Canada’s state policy of multiculturalism (1971– ).
Bio:
Andrea F. Bohlman (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) is interested in the political relations between music and sound in the 20th and 21st centuries. In her work on the cultural history of music, migration and wars, sound and media studies, and social movements, she is interested in the methodological challenges posed by research on the recent past and tries to combine archival work with ethnomusicological methods. She is engaged in the study of diverse music that permeates past and present musical cultures, whether we define them as popular, sacred, artistic, or experimental. Her first book titled “Musical Solidarities. Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland” was published by Oxford University Press in 2000 and concerns the soundscape and music associated with the Solidarność ruch (Solidarity movement).
She is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of London. She received her PhD in 2012 at Harvard University. She has worked at the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science and the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, as well as the School of Historical Studies at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton as a Visiting Professor. She is currently the chief editor of the American Musicology Society’s online publication “Musicology Now”.
The visit of Professor Andrea F. Bohlman will take place as part of the program of visits of visiting professors from the funds of the “Excellence Initiative – Research University at the University of Wrocław.
Translated by Martyna Szmyt (student of English Studies at the University of Wrocław) as part of the translation practice.
