“LIVING RELATIONSHIPS, PRACTISING SINGING”
Notes for an ethnomusicology of resonance
Conference talk
Wednesday 9 April 2025, from 9:00 a.m.
Room 1 Didactic Pole
“Gabriele D’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara
Department of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Via Colle dell’Ara 21
Chieti
As part of the conference “ABRUZZO (RE)COMPOSED. Musiche tradizionali d’Abruzzo, tra sfide e opportunità”, Marco Magistrali (La leggera aps, Tramontana Network) and Gianfranco Spitilli (Bambun aps, Tramontana Network and Università degli Studi del Molise) took part in the opening session with a speech entitled “Living relationships, practising singing. Notes for an ethnomusicology of resonance”. On the basis of a long experience of research and participatory work, carried out since 2012, for a significant part, within the Tramontana Network project, their speech highlighted the need to understand research – particularly ethnomusicological research – as an interminable process of apprenticeship, based on the centrality of the person, on relationships and on the experience of resonance, a form “of identification, projection, residence of the subject in the object” that acts by absorption and incorporation, in direct contact with witnesses. Only in this perspective is it possible to generate the interiorization of musical practices, on a social, cultural and bodily level at the same time: to build and nurture the (social) relationship that underlies them, that determines and sustains them; to understand and acquire the aspects and elements that constitute them – not only the forms, but the (cultural) qualities –; to be disposed to bodily modifications, to identify them and act on them by experiencing them in the first person.
That is, what applies to the “ethnomusicological” encounter is what applies to ethnographic knowledge, which can be experienced through a form of “reception”, an effort to participate and a willingness to remain in a particular condition of openness and “porosity”, described by anthropologists in terms of the emotional interactions, syntony, contagion, impregnation, empathy and resonance generated in the ethnographic encounter.