Symposium 2014

Singing Storytellers: The Lives, Music and Verbal Artistry of Bards in our World

An International Interdisciplinary Symposium hosted by Cape Breton University, in partnership with Celtic Colours International Festival and CBC Cape Breton

October 9th – 12th, 2014

Singing storytellers – griots, kobzars, troubadours, ashiks, gusle players, sean-nós and seann-nòs singers, bards and epic singers, performance poets, men and women from countless narrative traditions around the world – have played a variety of complex roles in their communities and cultures. The long-time focus of study for ethnomusicologists and other scholars of culture, history and memory, they are multifaceted social agents – genealogists, historians, spokespersons and activists, diplomats, musicians, praise singers, healers, and advisors. Wordsmiths and performers, their verbal and musical art have been the subject of studies across disciplines – religious studies, history, music, folklore, anthropology, gender studies, linguistics and literature, to name a few. But recent studies of these bards and their practices in our contemporary world are relatively few.

The study of today’s singing storytellers resonates with theoretical interest in ethnomusicology, humanities and social sciences. It offers opportunities to consider the importance of the individual in society, as well as the politics of representation. Whereas ethnomusicology has, more conventionally, invoked music as a symbol of national pride, cultural and national unity, or presented musical phenomena as typical products of a larger social organicism, this symposium also looks to the ways in which music is historically constructed, socially maintained, individually created and experienced. We will look to examples through which numerous interlocutors, processes, practices, statements and performances continually operate and fluidly reshape one another. We will consider the ways in which cultural performance and production are contingent on intersecting and mutually affecting aspects of experience entwined with identities. Contributing to a burgeoning literature on musicians’ life stories, this topic brings to light the ways in which individuals function within cultural webs along the many avenues they travel — revealing shared practices and ideologies within specific locations and beyond. Aspects of identity and experience are shaped in the context of wider, changing historical, social and cultural pressures – which many singing storytellers deftly negotiate. Singing storytellers provide an opportunity for scholarly investigation that profoundly makes evident the complexity with which experiences and identities are created and performed through the lives, music and verbal artistry of individuals.

Call for Participation