"Listening through the Noise of the Colonial Archive: Things, Sound Objects, Legacy, and the Konrad T. Preuss Collection at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv"

Archives and the information they contain are designed, structured, and organized according to narratives that shape the type of knowledge that their users are expected to obtain from them. Thus, the objects and documents in an archive usually tell and re-tell stories that performatively reproduce the larger ideological frameworks informing the dynamics between objects, documents, representation, and users. The central concern in this lecture is whether it is possible (and how) for archives to tell stories different to the ones they are designed to tell us. In order to find an answer, I study the collections of Naayeri and Wixárika chants recorded for the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin by Theodor Konrad Preuss (1869-1938) between 1905 and 1907 and housed by the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, and propose that the way the sound objects in those collections were created responds more to Preuss’ expectations regarding these indigenous communities than to how these communities conceptualize their music and ritual practices. As such, the archive tells us the story Preuss wanted to tell us and nothing more. I close the presentation with an exploration of how Mexican anthropologist Margarita Valdovinos has engaged this archive since the 2000s, and propose that her interrogation of its constituent materials, with the end of repatriating its recordings to Náayeri and Wixárika communities in Mexico, is a model of how to ask questions from archives to force them to tell us stories different from those embedded in their design, structure, and materiality.

Alejandro L. Madrid is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is a cultural theorist of sound and music working in Latin American and Latinx studies. He is a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award, presented by Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in recognition of lifelong accomplishments in research and teaching; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Dent Medal, awarded by the International Musicological Society and the UK’s Royal Musical Association for “outstanding contributions to musicology”; Cuba’s Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas; as well as top awards from the American Musicological Society, the Latin American Studies Association, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the ASCAP Foundation, and the Society for Ethnomusicology.