Professor Jill Rogers has been awarded an IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Production Grant to support her book project, Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars (forthcoming, OUP), and the book’s companion website, Sonic Constellations: Circulations of Music, Sound, and Emotion in Interwar France. In her book Dr. Rogers demonstrates that coping with trauma was a central concern for French musicians active between the First and Second World Wars.
Situated at the intersections of musicology, history, sound and performance studies, and psychology and trauma studies, Resonant Recoveries argues that modernists’ compositions and musical activities were sonorous locations for managing and performing trauma. Through analysis of archival materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and the music produced between the wars, this book illuminates how music emerged during World War I as a technology enabling consolation through soothing sonic vibrations, rhythmic bodily movement, embodied musical memory, humor, and friendship. By revealing the importance music-making held for French musicians, this book refigures French modernist music as a therapeutic medium for creators, performers, and audiences.
As a complement to Resonant Recoveries, the digital humanities project Sonic Constellations will provide access to recordings and scores of musical pieces discussed in the book, as well as to artworks, musical pieces, poetry, and literature of the period that further contextualize the stories told in Resonant Recoveries. In addition, Sonic Constellations will feature bibliographies, discographies, and archival holdings useful to other researchers of French interwar artistic cultures; social networking maps that will visualize relationships between historical actors in interwar France; and historical sonic maps designed to illustrate where musical performances took place, and how music and sound travelled through geographical space in France between the wars.
Dr. Rogers has also been awarded an IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Program Campus Conference Hosting Grant. “Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” currently slated to take place February 12-14, 2021, will be the first interdisciplinary conference to bring together internationally renowned scholars from disciplines in and beyond the arts and humanities, including music scholarship, sound studies, history, psychology, and medical humanities. This conference will not only address the myriad ways that music and sound have historically and contemporaneously helped people process trauma, but also explore how music and sound have been implicated in violent experiences that might result in trauma.
The conference will feature invited talks, roundtable conversations, lecture recitals, paper presentations, workshops, seminars, and concerts designed to engender conversations amongst researchers, students, and members of the community that examine how attending to trauma as a physiological, psychological, and social phenomenon might produce individual, interpersonal, and social healing.
The keynote presentation will feature leading music and trauma scholar Maria Cizmic (University of South Florida). Cizmic is the author of Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press) and teaches courses on film music, trauma studies, and disability studies.