I have been invited to deliver a keynote lecture at the thirteenth conference of SIBE (Sociedad de Etnomusicología), which is taking place in Cuenca, Spain from the 23rd to the 25th October. The title of my talk is 'Familiar Futures, Strange Pasts: Popular Music and the Art of Storytelling'. This lecture engages with aspects of… Continue reading Upcoming keynote lecture: ‘Familiar Futures, Strange Pasts’
Tag: time
Upcoming talk: Won’t You Spare Me Over Til Another Year?
'Won't You Spare Me Over Til Another Year?: Age, Death and Deferral in Old-Time Music'I'll be presenting current work as part of the Research in Progress series at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex, on Wednesday 26 February at 4pm. Details here. In this talk I'll present material from the book… Continue reading Upcoming talk: Won’t You Spare Me Over Til Another Year?
grief reconfigures time
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names? It also reconfigues space. You have entered a new geography, mapped by a new cartography. You seem to be taking your bearings from one of those seventeenth-century… Continue reading grief reconfigures time
the emotivity of mourning
It is said … that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass. Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, March 20, 1978
On transience
The proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect can, as we know, give rise to two different impulses in the mind. The one leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to rebellion against the fact asserted. No! It is impossible that all this loveliness of… Continue reading On transience
to be young
To be young is to throw one's body out into a time that is no time at all, but life, world, and space. Améry, On Aging, 15
time gathered up
Those who say that even the young posess and know time, even though they thoughtlessly live for the future dimension, which is also time, such persons have never yet had the experience of feeling for themselves that time is nothing-but-time. This future into which the young tumble ... is, to be sure, not time at… Continue reading time gathered up
the quanta of the past
Grass has been growing over the entire past, which sudenly appears now to be leveled, no longer having any time value at all. Until - one usually discovers it with a blow - the displacement of the quanta of the past, which has continued to take place under the grass, becomes manifest: then the time… Continue reading the quanta of the past
like smoke in a strong wind
Time has passed, flowed by, rolled on, blown away, and we pass with it - what am I saying? - like smoke in a strong wind. We ask ourselves what time might actually be, about which we say that everything glides and runs by with it - ask ourselves with a tenacious naïveté that borders… Continue reading like smoke in a strong wind
dust
Dust is what connects the dreams of yesteryear with the touch of nowadays. It is the aftermath of the collapse of illusions, a powdery cloud that rises abruptly and then begins fallingon things, gently covering theirbright, polished surfaces ... Dust makes plapable the elusive passing ot ime, the infinite pulverized particles that constitute its volatile… Continue reading dust
