A central challenge in ethnomusicology today is how to connect an older (though progressive) commitment to the critique of 'modernities' with the current energies surrounding the 'environmental humanities'. One involves a commitment to the local and the strategic, to the project of 'provincializing' (we might say, following, Dipesh Chakrabarty). The other involves thinking across huge temporalities, geographies and spaces, to understand the relationship of culture to 'deep time' (we might say, following Richard Irvine). One a centering, the other a decentering in the environment, of 'the human being'. But the tension may be more apparent than real - or, at least, turn out to be productive to explore. This lecture will consider lines of thought connecting 'modernities' with 'deep time' in a region, the 'Middle East' (long a contested colonial category), that provides significant inroads into this question with regard to music.
Martin Stokes is a British ethnomusicologist and King Edward Professor of Music at the King's College London. He has special research interests in ethnomusicology and anthropology, as well as Middle Eastern popular music.