Prof Dr Birgit Abels
Musicology | Georg August University Göttingen
Kurze Geismarstr. 1 37073 Göttingen
GERMANY
babels_@_gwdg.de (remove underscores)
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Birgit Abels
ORCID ID 0000-0003-0400-137X
As a cultural musicologist, I’m interested in the meaningfulness of music-making. What makes sound significant? How does music make us choose to engage with it every day by listening to it; liking, disliking, patronizing, or rejecting it; tapping our feet along with it; dancing to it; making it; being moved emotionally by it; and, finally, identifying with it?
Music occupies a space where our ideas about culture, society, place, history, and life meet. It’s a space where we think emotionally, and feel reflectively, about who we are and who we would like to be; in the ephemerality of sound, we transform and co-become with our environment. This is why I believe it is fundamentally important that we try to understand the many ways music means: because they tell us things about who we are that we might not know otherwise. As we make sense of music, it can help us make sense of ourselves.
What, then, is cultural musicology? It is much more than a post-colonial incarnation of the academic disciplines historically known as comparative musicology, ethnomusicology, and ethnochoreology. A “disquieting relation between the old and the new”(1) exists in musicology, which “stands at an [...] important historical juncture.”(2) With the ideal of a truly de-colonized approach, cultural musicology seeks to reflect on and provide the analytical tools that enable a holistic study of the world’s music. By holistic, I mean here an approach that is open to integrating methodologies and techniques characteristic of each of the three customary subdisciplines of musicology: namely, historical, systematic, and “ethno”musicology. The term cultural musicology can be seen in analogy with cultural anthropology and more importantly, cultural studies, both of which inform cultural musicology. Through easing the somewhat unconstructive debates around the scope of ethnomusicology, and facing the realities of the 21st century, cultural musicology is able to identify a way out of the disciplinary frustration apparent in a lot of recent literature without falling back on an artificial distinction between “modern,” “popular,” and “classical” music.
Some boundaries between "musics" have become more and more blurred in the last decades, while others have shifted - in any case, these boundaries are in constant flux. This is by no means a new development, but it is evolving at a more rapid pace. I believe that the various branches of musicology should primarily offer different perspectives, rather than different methodologies, on music in order to do justice to these changes. Cultural musicology is one such set of perspectives.
I studied Musicology (Christian Ahrens, Richard Widdess, Owen Wright) and Arabic and Islamic Studies (Gerhard Endress, Stefan Reichmuth) at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany) and London's School of Oriental and African Studies (UK). Following fieldwork in North India and the completion of my master's degree at Bochum in 2004, I received my doctoral degree from Ruhr University Bochum in 2007 for a PhD dissertation on the music and dance of Palau (Micronesia). For this, I lived and worked in Palau from 2005 to 2007. I then implemented a research project on the performing arts of the so-called sea-nomadic communities of the Southeast Asian island world, primarily the Sama Dilaut (Bajau Laut) in the Celebes and South China Seas. I worked mostly from Borneo; my institutional affiliation was first with the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden (The Netherlands), and later with the University of Amsterdam. Since March 2011, I am full professor at Georg August University Goetttingen (Germany).
(1) Philip Bohlman & Martin Stokes, Foreword, in: Henry Stobart (ed.), The New (Ethno)Musicologies. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press 2008:viii.
(2) Henry Stobart, Introduction, in: Henry Stobart (ed.), The New (Ethno)Musicologies. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press 2008:1.
Research foci
The geographic foci of my research are the Pacific Ocean (particularly Micronesia), North India, and the Southeast Asian island world.
Vita
I studied Musicology (Christian Ahrens, Richard Widdess, Owen Wright) and Arabic and Islamic Studies (Gerhard Endreß, Stefan Reichmuth) at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany) and London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Following the completion of my master’s degree at Bochum in 2004 and fieldwork in North India, I took up my doctoral studies. I received my doctoral degree from Ruhr University Bochum in 2007, having written my dissertation on the music and dance of Palau (Micronesia). I lived and conducted fieldwork in Palau from 2005 to 2008, after which I implemented a research project on the performing arts of the so-called sea-nomadic communities of the Southeast Asian island world, primarily the Sama Dilaut (Bajau Laut). I worked mostly from Borneo; my institutional affiliation was first with the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden (The Netherlands), and later with the University of Amsterdam. In March 2011, I was appointed full professor of cultural musicology at the Georg August University Göttingen (Germany). As of January 2012, I'm editor-in-chief of the world of music (new series).
Last update: November 2019.