Musicology Lecture: Andrea Bohlman, UNC-Chapel Hill

"Pressing Pause At Lunch (ca. 1955): An Estranged Listening to Food and Tape"

A fisherman croons opera into a restaurant's mic in Marseilles, France; a Black domestic worker sings after serving lunch to white visitors at a summer estate in Virginia; in rural Poland a group of women is at work harvesting potatoes while a neighbor sings in the adjacent field. The scenes of music history (and music in history) I read closely here are not patently connected, except that each occurred in the mid-1950s, each links the practices of making/consuming food with musicking, and each was recorded on magnetic tape. I wonder what, bearing in mind our present moments' critical concern with global media's transnational corporate entanglements and extractive infrastructures, we might learn from sitting with and connecting these moments that, in my analysis, show the limits of (tape) recording.

In the 1950s, tape was imbued with the expectation of increasing access to music, knowledge, and citizenship, as it brought new material formations to sound's relationship to history. Magnetic recording, characterized by its vastly increased storage capacity and design for emplaced information gathering, was imagined as a powerful tool to collect and study human intimacies. Following Alejandro L. Madrid's suggestion, I seek out techniques to "estrange historical sound archives to more productively engage the information they store" (2025). Though the tape recordists who captured these scenes made elisions that kept the music, food, and sociality in archives, tape's materialities provide sonic clues to animate what Edward Said theorized as "sensuous particularity," a worldliness for these minor moments that connect ecosystems of food consumption and listening. As tape illuminates the constellations of relationships that brought food to the table, I mobilize a skepticism toward the media ideology of the early Cold War to think about the intersections of music, sustenance, and sustainability.

Speaker Bio:
An associate professor of music at the UNC-Chapel Hill, Andrea Bohlman studies the cultural mobilities of sound/music with a focus on histories of the everyday. Her current book, provisionally titled Rewind: Tape Recording, Sound Knowledge, and the Threads of History, 2020-1936, is in many senses a backwards history of tape recording, unspooling a constellation of sound archives to query histories of unstable listening.