colloqium48 - Varun Rangaswamy[MA MaR]

In researching the Basel Mission Archive, I have been guided by Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation,” her methodology that attends to archival silences in order to imagine unarchivable moments in the archive of US slavery. My motivating question for the last year has been: can one critically fabulate musically?

Starting with examples from the Basel Mission's activities in South India, I will present the principles of an emerging methodology tentatively called "musical fabulation." Since Hartman's is a literary project focused on the material conditions of the Middle Passage, developing musical fabulation presents two challenges: (1) moving from words/literature to sound/music and (2) moving from a US–Africa historical context to a Europe–South Asia context. In this talk, I will discuss musical strategies for approaching both of these challenges, including the role of live and recorded voice in performance and the relationship between visual and aural attention to the archive. The former will touch on theorizations of “voice” in archival research while the latter will consider the possibilities of sonic engagement with the Basel Mission Archive despite the fact that it holds no audio records, only text and photographs. Finally, I will provide some original experimental examples of musical fabulation and anticipate future directions for this project.

Varun Rangaswamy is an improviser-composer and scholar. His self-reflexive albumREINHERITANCE has been praised for “creating a mesmerizing circular dialect” (I Care If You Listen). He has worked with such ensembles as International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and Mivos Quartet. Collaborators have included Aakash Mittal, Fay Victor, Rebekah Heller, Sara Schoenbeck, and Jasmine Wilson. He has degrees from UCSD and Eastman and is trained in Karnāṭak vocal music and contemporary bassoon performance. He is currently studying at the Hochschule für Musik Basel in Music and Research.