Project acronym DTHPS
Project Sound and Materialism in the 19th Century
Researcher (PI) David John Trippett
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2014-STG
Summary This research project aims to enlarge substantially our understanding of the dialogue between 19th-century music and natural science. It examines in particular how a scientific-materialist conception of sound was formed alongside a dominant culture of romantic idealism. Placing itself at the intersection of historical musicology and the history and philosophy of science, the project will investigate the view that musical sound, ostensibly the property of metaphysics, was also regarded by writers, composers, scientists and engineers as tangible, material and subject to physical laws; that scientific thinking was not anathema but—at key moments—intrinsic to music aesthetics and criticism; that philosophies of mind and theories of the creative process also drew on mechanical rules of causality and associative ‘laws’; and that the technological innovations brought about by scientific research—from steam trains to stethoscopes—were accompanied by new concepts and new ways of listening that radically impacted the sound world of composers, critics, and performers. It seeks, in short, to uncover for the first time a fully integrated view of the musical and scientific culture of the 19th century. The research will be broken down into four areas, each of which circumscribes a particular set of discourses: machines and mechanism; forms of nature; technologies for sound; and music medicalised. Drawing on a range of archival and printed sources in Great Britain, France and Germany, the project offers an innovative approach by examining historical soundscapes and new listening practices, by adopting a media perspective on scientific and musical instruments, and by investigating the interrelations between artistic sounds and non-artistic, industrial technologies. The cross-disciplinary research, divided between the PI and four postdoctoral scholars, will open up new interactions between music and materialism as a concealed site of knowledge and historically significant nexus.
Summary
This research project aims to enlarge substantially our understanding of the dialogue between 19th-century music and natural science. It examines in particular how a scientific-materialist conception of sound was formed alongside a dominant culture of romantic idealism. Placing itself at the intersection of historical musicology and the history and philosophy of science, the project will investigate the view that musical sound, ostensibly the property of metaphysics, was also regarded by writers, composers, scientists and engineers as tangible, material and subject to physical laws; that scientific thinking was not anathema but—at key moments—intrinsic to music aesthetics and criticism; that philosophies of mind and theories of the creative process also drew on mechanical rules of causality and associative ‘laws’; and that the technological innovations brought about by scientific research—from steam trains to stethoscopes—were accompanied by new concepts and new ways of listening that radically impacted the sound world of composers, critics, and performers. It seeks, in short, to uncover for the first time a fully integrated view of the musical and scientific culture of the 19th century. The research will be broken down into four areas, each of which circumscribes a particular set of discourses: machines and mechanism; forms of nature; technologies for sound; and music medicalised. Drawing on a range of archival and printed sources in Great Britain, France and Germany, the project offers an innovative approach by examining historical soundscapes and new listening practices, by adopting a media perspective on scientific and musical instruments, and by investigating the interrelations between artistic sounds and non-artistic, industrial technologies. The cross-disciplinary research, divided between the PI and four postdoctoral scholars, will open up new interactions between music and materialism as a concealed site of knowledge and historically significant nexus.
Max ERC Funding
1 496 345 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31
Project acronym HYP
Project The Hatha Yoga Project: Mapping Indian and Transnational Traditions of Physical Yoga through Philology and Ethnography
Researcher (PI) William James William Mallinson
Host Institution (HI) SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES ROYAL CHARTER
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2014-CoG
Summary Hatha was the name given in medieval India to a method of yoga in which physical practices predominate. Its origins are unclear, but some of its techniques can be traced to the first millennium BCE and it gradually became central to several Indian religious traditions, including, by the second half of the second millennium CE, orthodox Hinduism. Hatha yoga is also the source of much of the modern yoga practised around the world today.
The history of hatha yoga is thus crucial for an understanding of both Indian religion and modern yoga, but is yet to be the object of serious study. As a result key questions about yoga — such as who were hatha yoga’s first practitioners and why did they practise it, and which modern yoga practices predate colonialism and which are innovations — are yet to be answered satisfactorily. The Hatha Yoga Project seeks to redress this by identifying the origins of both hatha and modern yoga. Its methodology will be predominantly philological and ethnographic, and it will draw on resources that are fast disappearing: crumbling manuscripts of Sanskrit texts on yoga and traditional Indian ascetic yogis whose practices are starting to change under the influence of modern globalised yoga.
The primary output of the project will be three monographs. The first will analyse hatha yoga and its practitioners in the period in which it was formalised, the 11th to 15th centuries CE. The second will document its subsequent proliferation and development, and identify what constituted yoga practice in India on the eve of colonialism. The third will focus on hatha yoga’s physical techniques in order to chart their history and identify continuities with and differences from the practices of modern globalised yoga. A secondary output will be critical editions and annotated translations of ten previously unpublished Sanskrit manuals of hatha yoga: the six earliest texts on the subject together with four later texts that were key to its subsequent development.
Summary
Hatha was the name given in medieval India to a method of yoga in which physical practices predominate. Its origins are unclear, but some of its techniques can be traced to the first millennium BCE and it gradually became central to several Indian religious traditions, including, by the second half of the second millennium CE, orthodox Hinduism. Hatha yoga is also the source of much of the modern yoga practised around the world today.
The history of hatha yoga is thus crucial for an understanding of both Indian religion and modern yoga, but is yet to be the object of serious study. As a result key questions about yoga — such as who were hatha yoga’s first practitioners and why did they practise it, and which modern yoga practices predate colonialism and which are innovations — are yet to be answered satisfactorily. The Hatha Yoga Project seeks to redress this by identifying the origins of both hatha and modern yoga. Its methodology will be predominantly philological and ethnographic, and it will draw on resources that are fast disappearing: crumbling manuscripts of Sanskrit texts on yoga and traditional Indian ascetic yogis whose practices are starting to change under the influence of modern globalised yoga.
The primary output of the project will be three monographs. The first will analyse hatha yoga and its practitioners in the period in which it was formalised, the 11th to 15th centuries CE. The second will document its subsequent proliferation and development, and identify what constituted yoga practice in India on the eve of colonialism. The third will focus on hatha yoga’s physical techniques in order to chart their history and identify continuities with and differences from the practices of modern globalised yoga. A secondary output will be critical editions and annotated translations of ten previously unpublished Sanskrit manuals of hatha yoga: the six earliest texts on the subject together with four later texts that were key to its subsequent development.
Max ERC Funding
1 846 122 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-10-01, End date: 2020-09-30
Project acronym Integrating Turkish
Project Beyond East and West: Developing and Documenting an Evolving Transcultural Musical Practice
Researcher (PI) Michael Paul Ellison
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2014-CoG
Summary For composers in Turkey today, the urge to integrate the beauties of Turkey’s rich musical heritage into contemporary concert music has become almost an imperative. But differences in tuning, texture, and between oral and notated orientations to performance have presented seemingly intractable obstacles. This project systematises practical processes essential for the creation of a new, East-West strand of contemporary music and opera. It initiates cutting-edge research workshops in Istanbul, Holland and the UK to: 1. Train top-level traditional instrumentalists and singers in Turkey effectively to perform a new repertoire; 2. Train top professional Western singers in non-Western techniques and nuances of vocal production; 3. Develop approaches for modelling such music's impacts on Turkish and Western musicians’ adaptive processes in rehearsal and performance, and diverse audiences’ perceptions of such music; 4. Create an ensemble interface (including newly designed instruments) to increase capacity for merging sounds beyond levels now achievable; 5. Produce groundbreaking studies on timbre to provide new insights into how sound is produced; 6. Establish a new template for mapping Eastern and Western tuning systems onto one another. This research, together with an orchestration manual for Turkish sounds will comprise the core of a published (CUP) team-authored e-book, Integrating Turkish Instruments and Voices into Contemporary Music (ITI), with included audio and visual examples linked as an online resource. Looking further, this project’s multi-modal, transdisciplinary approach also suggests a model for probing how the ‘free play’ of the imagination (Kant) possible within processes of art and its creation can provide metaphors towards understanding one of the most urgent and compelling issues of our time: how to transcend cultural barriers (real or imagined) that exist today.
Summary
For composers in Turkey today, the urge to integrate the beauties of Turkey’s rich musical heritage into contemporary concert music has become almost an imperative. But differences in tuning, texture, and between oral and notated orientations to performance have presented seemingly intractable obstacles. This project systematises practical processes essential for the creation of a new, East-West strand of contemporary music and opera. It initiates cutting-edge research workshops in Istanbul, Holland and the UK to: 1. Train top-level traditional instrumentalists and singers in Turkey effectively to perform a new repertoire; 2. Train top professional Western singers in non-Western techniques and nuances of vocal production; 3. Develop approaches for modelling such music's impacts on Turkish and Western musicians’ adaptive processes in rehearsal and performance, and diverse audiences’ perceptions of such music; 4. Create an ensemble interface (including newly designed instruments) to increase capacity for merging sounds beyond levels now achievable; 5. Produce groundbreaking studies on timbre to provide new insights into how sound is produced; 6. Establish a new template for mapping Eastern and Western tuning systems onto one another. This research, together with an orchestration manual for Turkish sounds will comprise the core of a published (CUP) team-authored e-book, Integrating Turkish Instruments and Voices into Contemporary Music (ITI), with included audio and visual examples linked as an online resource. Looking further, this project’s multi-modal, transdisciplinary approach also suggests a model for probing how the ‘free play’ of the imagination (Kant) possible within processes of art and its creation can provide metaphors towards understanding one of the most urgent and compelling issues of our time: how to transcend cultural barriers (real or imagined) that exist today.
Max ERC Funding
2 000 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31
Project acronym K4U
Project Knowledge For Use [K4U]: Making the Most of Social Science to Build Better Policies
Researcher (PI) Nancy Cartwright
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH5, ERC-2014-ADG
Summary ‘Research is an investment in our future’ says Horizon 2020. That’s only true if you know what to do with it. When it comes to social policy, we don’t really know how to put our research results to use. K4U aims to remedy this. K4U will construct a radically new picture of how to use social science to build better social policies. This picture will be founded on an ambitious philosophical study of the technology of social science including a thorough reconceptualisation of objectivity, deliberation and the role of values in the science/society interface. Current work, primarily by the evidence-based policy and practice movement, focusses on knowledge production: encouraging high quality studies and vetting them. Little attention goes to knowledge use: How is social science knowledge to be used in policy design and deliberation – how should it be used so that policy outcomes are more effective and more reliably predictable and competing values and points of view are respected in policy choice and implementation?
K4U will provide not just a theoretical but a practical understanding— for users: intelligible and practically helpful to those who need to estimate and balance the effectiveness, the evidence, the chances of success, the costs, the benefits, the winners and losers, and the social, moral, political and cultural acceptability of proposed policies.
The philosophical approach of K4U is broadly Popperian. It views ‘science and technology as a means of understanding social problems and responding to them’ and it emphasises the concrete and detailed, where the real content of general philosophical concepts and claims is embodied and interrogated. K4U is a showcase for the kind of philosophy that makes a difference to real life -- philosophy for practice. And it will launch an entire new field in philosophy: the philosophy of social technology.
Summary
‘Research is an investment in our future’ says Horizon 2020. That’s only true if you know what to do with it. When it comes to social policy, we don’t really know how to put our research results to use. K4U aims to remedy this. K4U will construct a radically new picture of how to use social science to build better social policies. This picture will be founded on an ambitious philosophical study of the technology of social science including a thorough reconceptualisation of objectivity, deliberation and the role of values in the science/society interface. Current work, primarily by the evidence-based policy and practice movement, focusses on knowledge production: encouraging high quality studies and vetting them. Little attention goes to knowledge use: How is social science knowledge to be used in policy design and deliberation – how should it be used so that policy outcomes are more effective and more reliably predictable and competing values and points of view are respected in policy choice and implementation?
K4U will provide not just a theoretical but a practical understanding— for users: intelligible and practically helpful to those who need to estimate and balance the effectiveness, the evidence, the chances of success, the costs, the benefits, the winners and losers, and the social, moral, political and cultural acceptability of proposed policies.
The philosophical approach of K4U is broadly Popperian. It views ‘science and technology as a means of understanding social problems and responding to them’ and it emphasises the concrete and detailed, where the real content of general philosophical concepts and claims is embodied and interrogated. K4U is a showcase for the kind of philosophy that makes a difference to real life -- philosophy for practice. And it will launch an entire new field in philosophy: the philosophy of social technology.
Max ERC Funding
2 092 125 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-11-01, End date: 2020-10-31
Project acronym MALMECC
Project Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures: Towards a Trans-Disciplinary and Post-National Cultural Poetics of the Performative Arts
Researcher (PI) Karl Kuegle
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH5, ERC-2014-ADG
Summary Late medieval European court cultures have traditionally been studied from a mono-disciplinary and national(ist) perspective. This focus has obscured much of the interplay of cultural performances that informed “courtly life”. Recent research has begun to reverse this, focusing on issues such as the tensions between orality, writing, and performance; the sociocultural dimensions of making and owning manuscripts (musical and otherwise); the interstices between musical, literary and visual texts and political, social and religious rituals; and the impact of gender, kinship, and social status on the genesis and transmission of culture and music. These “new medievalist” studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the cultural meanings of singing, listening, and sound in late medieval times.
Taking a decisive step further, MALMECC will, for the first time, systematically explore late medieval (c. 1280-1450) court cultures and their music synoptically across Europe. England, the Low Countries, Avignon, Bohemia, south-eastern Germany/Salzburg, Savoy, and Cyprus have been selected for study as each was a vibrant site of cultural production but has been relatively neglected due to prevailing discursive formations favouring “centres” like Paris and Florence. Linking these courts in a large-scale comparative study focused on the role of music in courtly life but embedded within a multidisciplinary framework encompassing all the arts as well as politics and religion will reveal the complex ecology of late medieval performances of noblesse in unheard-of depth while at the same time throwing the unique qualities of each court into distinct relief. The project will apply an innovative research paradigm that develops a trans-disciplinary and post-national(ist), “relational” approach to the study of music in late-medieval court cultures. In doing so it will integrate all late medieval arts and re-constitute the fullness of their potential meanings.
Summary
Late medieval European court cultures have traditionally been studied from a mono-disciplinary and national(ist) perspective. This focus has obscured much of the interplay of cultural performances that informed “courtly life”. Recent research has begun to reverse this, focusing on issues such as the tensions between orality, writing, and performance; the sociocultural dimensions of making and owning manuscripts (musical and otherwise); the interstices between musical, literary and visual texts and political, social and religious rituals; and the impact of gender, kinship, and social status on the genesis and transmission of culture and music. These “new medievalist” studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the cultural meanings of singing, listening, and sound in late medieval times.
Taking a decisive step further, MALMECC will, for the first time, systematically explore late medieval (c. 1280-1450) court cultures and their music synoptically across Europe. England, the Low Countries, Avignon, Bohemia, south-eastern Germany/Salzburg, Savoy, and Cyprus have been selected for study as each was a vibrant site of cultural production but has been relatively neglected due to prevailing discursive formations favouring “centres” like Paris and Florence. Linking these courts in a large-scale comparative study focused on the role of music in courtly life but embedded within a multidisciplinary framework encompassing all the arts as well as politics and religion will reveal the complex ecology of late medieval performances of noblesse in unheard-of depth while at the same time throwing the unique qualities of each court into distinct relief. The project will apply an innovative research paradigm that develops a trans-disciplinary and post-national(ist), “relational” approach to the study of music in late-medieval court cultures. In doing so it will integrate all late medieval arts and re-constitute the fullness of their potential meanings.
Max ERC Funding
2 186 400 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31
Project acronym Mulosige
Project Multilingual locals, significant geographies: a new approach to world literature
Researcher (PI) Francesca Orsini
Host Institution (HI) SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES ROYAL CHARTER
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH5, ERC-2014-ADG
Summary “World literature is literature that circulates globally. It is mostly in English. Its main genre is the novel.” These are caricatures of how World literature as a set of discourses is shaping the field of literary studies, but in fact Non-Western literatures are positioned with reference to a single global timeline and a single map, and translations supposedly ensure that worthy texts enter the global canon. What does not circulate globally is provincial, not good enough, not “world literature”.
This picture bears little resemblance to the multilingual world of literature, which consists not of a single map but of many “significant geographies” specific to language, group, and genre. By exploring the often fractured “multilingual locals” and “significant geographies” of literature in north India, Morocco, and Ethiopia—each with different experiences of literary multilingualism, colonial diglossia, and continuing oral traditions—we seek to establish a multilingual and located approach to world literature in place of meta-categories like “global” and “world”. Mindful of older histories and networks of literary multilingualism and critical of the monolingual straitjacket of modern literary histories that partition Anglophone and Francophone literature from Arabic, Amharic, and Hindi/Urdu, we focus on three periods: imperial consolidation, decolonization, and the current globalizing moment. We will study local transculturations, local debates on world literature, old and new forms of multilingualism, actors and technologies of print and orality, to highlight dynamics of appropriation rather than imitation, co-constitution rather than diffusion, and the multiplicity of choices and trajectories that together form local and transnational literary fields (“world literature”). The project will propose a theoretical approach, methods for multilingual training and research, and strategic dialogues with scholars and writers in Morocco, Ethiopia, India, UK and France.
Summary
“World literature is literature that circulates globally. It is mostly in English. Its main genre is the novel.” These are caricatures of how World literature as a set of discourses is shaping the field of literary studies, but in fact Non-Western literatures are positioned with reference to a single global timeline and a single map, and translations supposedly ensure that worthy texts enter the global canon. What does not circulate globally is provincial, not good enough, not “world literature”.
This picture bears little resemblance to the multilingual world of literature, which consists not of a single map but of many “significant geographies” specific to language, group, and genre. By exploring the often fractured “multilingual locals” and “significant geographies” of literature in north India, Morocco, and Ethiopia—each with different experiences of literary multilingualism, colonial diglossia, and continuing oral traditions—we seek to establish a multilingual and located approach to world literature in place of meta-categories like “global” and “world”. Mindful of older histories and networks of literary multilingualism and critical of the monolingual straitjacket of modern literary histories that partition Anglophone and Francophone literature from Arabic, Amharic, and Hindi/Urdu, we focus on three periods: imperial consolidation, decolonization, and the current globalizing moment. We will study local transculturations, local debates on world literature, old and new forms of multilingualism, actors and technologies of print and orality, to highlight dynamics of appropriation rather than imitation, co-constitution rather than diffusion, and the multiplicity of choices and trajectories that together form local and transnational literary fields (“world literature”). The project will propose a theoretical approach, methods for multilingual training and research, and strategic dialogues with scholars and writers in Morocco, Ethiopia, India, UK and France.
Max ERC Funding
2 482 416 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31
Project acronym TVOF
Project The values of French language and literature in the European Middle Ages
Researcher (PI) Simon Benjamin Gaunt
Host Institution (HI) KING'S COLLEGE LONDON
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH5, ERC-2014-ADG
Summary Two questions about linguistic identity lie at the heart of this project. What is the relation historically between language and
identity in Europe? How are cognate languages demarcated from each other? Normative models of national languages
helped shape Europe. Yet they did not become hegemonic until the 19th century. Indeed, they were imposed (not always
successfully) on a linguistic map of Europe more fluid and complex than most histories of national languages allow. In the
Middle Ages multilingualism was common, as was the use of non-local languages, notably Latin, but also French. This
project undertakes a revaluation of the nature and value of the use of French in Europe during a crucial period, 1100-1450,
less in terms of its cultural prestige (the traditional focus of scholarship) than of its role as a supralocal, transnational
language, particularly in Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The project fosters collaboration between, and
cuts across, different intellectual and national scholarly traditions, drawing on expertise in codicology, critical theory,
linguistics, literature, and philology; it involves scholars from a range of European countries and North America, entailing
empirical research around a complex and widely disseminated textual tradition vital to medieval understandings of
European history and identity, L’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. This case study will ground and stimulate broader
speculative reflection on the two core questions concerning linguistic identity. While the project builds on prior critiques of
the construction of, and investment in, national languages and literary traditions, it has a broad historical scope, and will
offer an innovative, genuinely international perspective, in terms of both its object of study and method. Indeed, its final aim,
through and beyond its consideration of French as a lingua franca, is to interrogate that language’s role in the emergence
of a European identity in the Middle Ages.
Summary
Two questions about linguistic identity lie at the heart of this project. What is the relation historically between language and
identity in Europe? How are cognate languages demarcated from each other? Normative models of national languages
helped shape Europe. Yet they did not become hegemonic until the 19th century. Indeed, they were imposed (not always
successfully) on a linguistic map of Europe more fluid and complex than most histories of national languages allow. In the
Middle Ages multilingualism was common, as was the use of non-local languages, notably Latin, but also French. This
project undertakes a revaluation of the nature and value of the use of French in Europe during a crucial period, 1100-1450,
less in terms of its cultural prestige (the traditional focus of scholarship) than of its role as a supralocal, transnational
language, particularly in Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The project fosters collaboration between, and
cuts across, different intellectual and national scholarly traditions, drawing on expertise in codicology, critical theory,
linguistics, literature, and philology; it involves scholars from a range of European countries and North America, entailing
empirical research around a complex and widely disseminated textual tradition vital to medieval understandings of
European history and identity, L’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. This case study will ground and stimulate broader
speculative reflection on the two core questions concerning linguistic identity. While the project builds on prior critiques of
the construction of, and investment in, national languages and literary traditions, it has a broad historical scope, and will
offer an innovative, genuinely international perspective, in terms of both its object of study and method. Indeed, its final aim,
through and beyond its consideration of French as a lingua franca, is to interrogate that language’s role in the emergence
of a European identity in the Middle Ages.
Max ERC Funding
2 274 225 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31
