Dr. Martin Stokes | James W. Pruett Lecture, UNC MRF 24-25

Demographies of Babel: Musical Modernities between Istanbul and Cairo
Dr. Martin Stokes, Kings College London

It is plausibly claimed that Comparative Literature took distinct shape in Turkey in the 1930s, through the careers of Spitzer and Auerbach at Istanbul University. Can the same be said about Comparative Musicology and Cairo? The 1932 Cairo Congress for Arab Music was a unique gathering of musicologists, orientalists, pedagogues, administrators and performing musicians, at a moment of significant change in Egypt. It could be described as a failure in terms of its stated aims, But it profoundly shaped debates that spilled over into post-war ethnomusicology, and issues that haunt current rethinkings of, and efforts to decolonize, the field. These two postcolonial stories – of comparative literature and comparative musicology’s institutionalization – are familiar but rarely connected. What happens when we do?

Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at Kings College London. He has taught at the Queens University of Belfast, the University of Chicago, and Oxford University. He is the author of various books including The Republic of Love: Popular Music and Cultural Intimacy in Turkey (Chicago 2010), and, most recently, Music and Citizenship (Oxford 2023), which won the 2024 Bruno Nettl Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Currently he is PI of the ERC/UKRI project, ‘Beyond 1932: Musical Modernities in the Middle East and North Africa’ at Kings College London.

The UNC Music Research Forum hosts invited lectures by distinguished music scholars from around the world and informal research presentations by members of our department and colleagues across campus. It serves as an intellectual hub for the department and is open to all. The Forum is held on the final Friday of each month during the semester from 3:30-5:00 pm in Person Recital Hall.