No abstract

Recent decades have seen a growing interest in "sound studies", a field of study that addresses the role of the auditory in culture and society. Sound studies is best understood as encompassing a broad range of critical approaches to the study of sound, a category that is considered here in both its physical and cultural dimensions. The philosophical writing of R. Murray Schafer (1994) and Walter Ong (1967), as well as the theories of musicologist Jacques Attali (1985) on the political potential of noise, provided some of the most influential early work on sound studies. Since the 1990s, scholars such as Emily Thompson (2002), Douglas Kahn (1999), Brandon LaBelle (2010) and Michael Bull and Les Back (2003) have explored the relationship between sound, architecture and modernization as means of historicizing cultural moments and crises. Researchers on sound technologies and media, such as Jonathan Sterne (2003), Rick Altman (2004) and Jacob Smith (2008), have made similarly significant contributions to the field, exploring the cultural origins and development of sound technologies. Their influence has been felt in the form of the appearance of academic journals dedicated to this field, including Sound Studies, The Journal of Sonic Studies and Sound Effects. Despite the sheer variety of disciplines and scholars that loosely belong to sound studies, they are generally unified by their shared aim to disrupt the epistemological dominance of the visual in Western culture. Bull and Back, for instance, have recently called for a "democracy of the senses" in which "no sense is privileged in relation to its counterparts" (2003, 2). As scholars make this shift, sound should not so much be studied in isolation or to the exclusion of other senses, but as a means of reinvigorating our understanding of the ways in which all the senseshearing, but also touching and feelingoperate together as a whole. Contributions to sound studies come from fields as varied as sociology, anthropology, history, visual studies, musicology, architecture, literary studies and, perhaps most significantly, geography, often simultaneously bringing together elements from more than one of these fields in surprising and productive ways. If the material properties of sound are elusive and ambiguous, as it is able to pass through borders and walls, so too are the boundaries of sound studies, making the field diverse and interdisciplinary in scope. This spatial metaphor finds its richest expression in the dialogue between sound studies and geography, an area of research has been pioneered by Susan Smith (1997), Ben Highmore (2002) and John Connell and Chris Gibson (2003). This work considers the ways that sound contributes to the production of space, thereby drawing attention to how, for instance, the sonic marks out and transforms the boundaries between public and private space.

The French composer Raoul Laparra held an advanced knowledge of Spanish culture and music that was rare among French musicians. In his first opera, La habanera (Opéra-Comique, 1908), he tried to represent a Spain that was ‘different from Carmen’, focused on the ‘colder’ central region of Castile rather than southern, gypsy stereotypes. However, owing to several inconsistencies in his ideological agenda, and the weight of conventional representations of Spanish music and culture, Laparra rendered a contradictory image of Spain, which drew partly on the very southern and gypsy stereotypes he had intended to oust. Furthermore, the French critics’ lack of familiarity with Spanish traditions caused his project to be misunderstood. Those critics read La habanera in the context of French cultural struggles, mostly related to the definition of a national identity and the influence of Italian and German music.

What was the meaning of exile’s impact on Gerhard's life and music? To what extent did he experience exile as trauma, or as a “stimulus for creation” (Bartra)? To overcome the limiting dualism trauma/creativity, this chapter considers the ways in which Gerhard navigated the complex map of continuities and ruptures that forced migration placed him on. Through what acts of cultural translation did he make meaning of exile? Through recourse to Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope, this chapter analyses the impact of exile on the “connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” to which Gerhard strove through his music. I consider the extent to which exile threatened and undermined this connectedness and assess the ways in which Gerhard's music may be regarded as constitutive of a peculiar chronotope of exile. I also take advantage of literary theory's understanding(s) of the chronotope to probe the conflicting temporalities of Spanish modernity (Balibrea) and their manifestation in and through Gerhard's music. Gerhard's post-1939 music lends itself particularly well to this type of analysis because of the complex ways in which it re-creates Spain and Catalonia as multi-layered archives of memory.

No abstract