Amanda Harris is an ARC Future Fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney and Director of the Sydney Unit of PARADISEC.
Myfany Turpin is an Associate Professor in ethnomusicology and linguistics at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney.
Nick Thieberger is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and the Director of PARADISEC.
Sally Treloyn is an Associate Professor in ethnomusicology and intercultural research in the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development at the University of Melbourne.
Congratulations on the publication of your new essay collection, Keeping Time! Tell us a bit about how this project began.
Most papers in this volume came out of a conference organised by PARADISEC in early 2021 to celebrate both the longevity of PARADISEC and the achievements of Linda Barwick as she approached retirement. The conference, titled PARADISEC@100 (referring to the passing of 100 terabytes of storage for the collection), was held in Sydney between COVID lockdowns, and, in online and local formats, brought together a range of speakers from musicology and linguistics. The editors approached authors and crafted the papers into a cohesive thematic set.
Keeping Time is published in honour of esteemed musicologist Linda Barwick. How would you summarise Professor Barwick’s impact on your own research and professional practice?
The reach of Linda’s impact on the research and professional practice across a range of fields and disciplines is reflected in the editorship of the book, representing archiving, ethnomusicology, and linguistics.
This book features 19 chapters by 36 authors, with case studies from Australia and around the world. What challenges did you face in editing a project of this scope?
Certainly a challenge might be editing across a range of scholarly traditions and positions. Finding a balance that provides readership with a coherent volume, while honouring regional histories of scholarship, as well as contrastive positionalities in relation to research, is challenging but also one of the most successful contributions of our approach.
Can you briefly explain the significance of the book’s “triply ambiguous” title?
We owe the title to Nick Evans’s contribution where he notes the musical sense of keeping time, marking rhythm, and so making reference to Linda’s musicological work. The second sense is that it is time to keep the many priceless records of language and music, as Linda has done through her work in the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). Finally, keeping time at bay, reintroducing performance from the archive to refresh current practice and knowledge, and, in turn, to enter into dialogue with archival objects.
Keeping Time acknowledges that “context is always crucial” in music history and analysis. One example provided is that “operatic singing developed out of the necessity of being heard in large theatres at times when no amplification existed” (p 197). What are some other examples that might interest or surprise readers?
Relevant to the project as a whole, the volume speaks to many contexts, in terms of the content and archival, linguistic, and musical worlds, as well as the contexts from which authors have written. The book embraces a diversity of approaches and perspectives, including a range of disciplines and disciplinary approaches, with writers speaking from within their own cultural contexts and those who have engaged with the practices of others. Context in this sense is central to the composition of this book, as well as to the project of reading the book.
For readers who would like to learn more about ethnomusicology, archiving and repatriation, what other resources might you recommend?
Barwick, Linda, Jennifer Green and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, eds. 2020. Archival returns: Central Australia and beyond. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Gunderson, Frank D., Robert Lancefield and Bret D. Woods, eds. 2018. The Oxford handbook of musical repatriation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rice, Timothy. 2013. Ethnomusicology: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thieberger, Nick and Amanda Harris. 2022. When your data is my grandparents singing. Digitisation and access for cultural records, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). Data Science Journal 21(9): 1–7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-009
Keeping Time: Dialogues on music and archives in Honour of Linda Barwick is available now. Order your copy here.