Join this virtual lecture with Dr. Julia Byl, Associate Professor in ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta.
Via Zoom! Link to be sent via email.
About the lecture:
Located on a global trade route, the island of Sumatra has long participated in Indian Ocean cultural flows. This has not always been recognized in interior North Sumatra—Christian missionaries and Indonesian narratives alike have characterized the Batak regions as ahistorical and devoid of the hallmarks of esteemed Southeast Asian civilizations. This lecture complicates both assumptions, using musical examples from a few different genres of Batak music. In it, I try to balance an understanding of Sumatran music that looks out to Indian Ocean history, with a recognition of rich indigenous musical practices that can only be understood in conversation with its native ecology.
About the speaker:
Julia Byl is Associate Professor in ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta. As part of her work on North Sumatran musical cultures, she has listened to four-part harmony in palm liquor stands, and examined manuscripts on Shaivite cosmology and Sufi metaphysics. She has been involved in the European Research Council projects, “Musical Transitions to Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean,” P.I. Katherine Butler Schofield, and “Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in South Asia,” P.I. Carola Lorea. Her monograph, Antiphonal Histories: Resonant Pasts in the Toba Batak Musical Present was published in 2014 (Wesleyan University Press), and Fall 2023 saw the publication of Sounding the Indian Ocean, co-edited with Jim Sykes (University of California Press). She is the director and editor of Canadian Mehfil, a documentary film on South Asian music and poetry in Edmonton, incorporating audio-visual footage filmed in the 1960s. Julia’s newest project, “Civic Modulations,” explores public music, the individual, and the transnational institution in East Timor, and involves archival and ethnographic research in Dili, Portugal, Jakarta and The Hague.