Workshops

As part of the conference, we're offering five workshops for active participants of the conference and interested students. Active participants register at the email address eastwest2024 at web.de for one of the workshops. If you are a student and want to take part in the workshop please sends us a short bio and why you're interested in the respective workshop to the same email address.

July 4th, 2024

Workshop 1: Working with the Lautarchiv

Mentors: Sebastian Klotz, Christopher Li

Language: German and English

The workshop engages with historical objects and documents from the history of the Lautarchiv of the Humboldt University, located today at the Humboldt Forum. Using items such as reel to reel tapes, shellac discs, written archive materials (Personalbogen) and Doegen’s Organigramm, the participants are invited to analyze aspects of the sound archives in and before the time of the GDR.

Venue: Lautarchiv im Humboldt Forum

Meeting point: 9.00 am Portal 1 Humboldt Forum (vis à vis of Hanns Eisler Musikhochschule)

Workshop 2: Using the IITM’s Collections: The Cambodia Photo Collection as a Case Study

Mentors: Giovanni Giuriati, Albrecht Wiedmann

Language: English

This workshop will consider issues connected to a corpus of recordings and photographs taken by Alain Daniélou and Jacques Brunet in Cambodia during the 1960s and 1970s.

The high documentary value of these documents is due to the fact that they were taken right before Cambodia fell into the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) that forbid any kind of traditional culture and an ensuing civil war (1979-1993) that profoundly changed the status of traditional performing arts of the country, especially those of the Royal Palace. It is a significant case of a country that endured war and civil war caused by a clash between USA and USSR first, and then between USA and China later on, and therefore the task of Archives becomes important in preserving the memory of a culture that endured so many difficulties because of a global confrontation between East and West.

Until now, the photo collection could only be explored with the help of a systematic catalog, consisting of index cards in a highly elaborated sorting. This catalog is a typical representative of scientific cataloging of its time and, due to the progressive digitization of knowledge, is no longer in use today and therefore difficult to use.

The aim of the workshop is to familiarize students with this system and thus enable them to deal with such catalogs in the future. After all, there are still many old catalogs waiting to be used. 

Venue: Ethnologisches Museum

Meeting point: 9.00 am in front of Hauptwache in Dahlem. 

Ethnologisches Museum
Hauptwache
Fabeckstr. 20
14195 Berlin-Dahlem
++49 30 8301 207

Workshop 3: Making Musical Instruments in East and West: Olga Adelmann and Curt Jung with a resonating excursion to India 

Mentors: Lars-Christian Koch, Thomas MacMillan, Radhey Shyam Sharma, Olga Sutkowska, Rebecca Wolf, Barnes Ziegler 

Language: German/English

The workshop concentrates on two stringed instruments (viola d’amore and violin) made by Olga Adelmann and Curt Jung and includes letters that the two wrote to each other across the German border within Berlin. The correspondence between those two instrument makers offers a good starting point for discussing perspectives from East and West Germany with regard to ideals of sound and historical performance practice. The resonating strings at some instruments will be of special interest and build a bridge to theories of the phenomenon of resonance.  

With regard to the viola d’amore, the aspect of the sound ideal is also part of the East/West theme. The resonating/sympathetic strings play a sound-determining role in the construction of the viola d’amore, as they do in most North Indian stringed instruments. This central sound element in Indian music is hardly present in Western music, with a few exceptions only. An instrument maker from India – Radhey Shyam Sharma – will create a new level of discussion here. Together, we try to bring approaches from the fields of ethnomusicology – sound aesthetics and sound ideals - into the discussion.

The workshop also offers an opportunity for internal discussions with the instrument maker and the museum’s conservation scientist, Barnes Ziegler, on the subject of restoration and repair.

Venue: Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin: Museum of Musical Instruments (Kulturforum) 

Meeting Point: 9.00 am - entrance of Museum of Musical Instruments, Ben-Gurion-Straße 

https://www.simpk.de/museum/besuch/oeffnungszeiten-anfahrt.html 

Workshop 4

The workshop has  been cancelled due to scheduling conflicts.

Workshop 5: Socialist Social Dances (Dance Workshop)

Mentor: Sydney Hutchinson

Language: German/English

From the 1950s through the 1980s, many dozens of new social dances were created in East Germany in order to promote socialist internationalism, lure youth away from Western dances, and encourage cooperation between dancers and musicians, amateurs and professionals. Experiencing these dances can be a way of conducting embodied research in the past, finding out how culture circulated in the Second World, and investigating how that world built and perceived itself.

Venue: Klangwerkstatt im Humboldt Forum

Meeting point: 9.00 am - Schlüterhof im Humboldt Forum in front of the shop

https://www.humboldtforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/SHF_eb00110730_Lageplan-Humboldt-Forum.jpg