Miracles in Sound: Sonic Efficacy after The Qur’ān: Lunch-time Talk with Bradford Garvey

Scholarly discussions on “Islam” and “music”–ethnomusicological and otherwise–have largely focused on differences of the medium of sound production, that is, on the expressive differences between music, whether sung or played, voiced or unvoiced, and the recitation of the Qur’ān. In this short exploration, I suggest that, in order to understand some Muslims’ criticism of music, medium may be less important than other capacities inherent in different practices of sound production. The history and contemporary distribution of these semiotic and interpretive capacities is a complex and reflexive historical process that is nevertheless often lexicalized and debated in terms of “genre”: whether something is or is not music, or poetry, or recitation. I suggest that this contributes to music studies’ perduring confusions about the status of music in Islam. I explore this through three smaller arguments: first, I note that we could more adequately parse features of sound media within broader ideologies of communication. Secondly, we could better historicize features of contemporary Islamic practice to avoid ethnographic tautology arising from orthopraxy. Thirdly, we could interrogate too credulous and often tendentious appraisal of Muslims’ own discussions of the status of the Qur’ān, especially in relation to poetry, music, and other “sonically efficacious” practices. I present these suggestions in the spirit of positive critique and in an attempt to document the rich and complex ecology of sonic ideologies–each with equally complex histories of contention–in a world shaped by the Qur’ān as object and practice.

This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided. This guest talk by Bradford Garvey is a part of the ISM's Fellows Lunch series.

Open to Yale Community only.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Speaker bio:

Bradford Garvey is an Assistant Professor of Music at Brandeis University. In 2020-2021, he was a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow through the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and is currently turning his dissertation into an ethnographic monograph entitled Praise to Open Palms: A Moral Economy of Praise in the Sultanate of Oman. He studies the role of publicly performed sung praise in producing and shaping cross-class relationships that are simultaneously communicative, social, normative, and economic. My work on Iraqi Maqām and Omani Arab performance has been published in Asian Music, The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, HAU, Ethnomusicology, and the Yale Journal of Music & Religion. From 2019-2020 he was the Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Visiting Assistant Professor in Music at Amherst College. He received his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from The Graduate Center, CUNY, advised by Jane Sugarman and funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research from 2015-2017