Lola San Martín Arbide
I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the École des Hautes Étudies en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Before moving to France, I was a Junior Research Fellow in Musicology at Wolfson College (University of Oxford), and a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). I have a background in Translation & Interpreting (BA specialising in English and French) and also studied musicology at the University of Salamanca (BA in Musicology, MA in Hispanic Music). In 2013, I obtained my doctoral degree from this university with a thesis exploring the connections between ambient music and visual arts in the 20th century, which paid special attention issues related to urban culture. I have published on a wide range of topics, including: Erik Satie’s Musique d’ameublement, Spanish sound maps and sound ecology, soundscapes in 1930s French literature, French opera, opera and feminism, Claude Debussy, and film music. I have carried out research stays at Sorbonne-Paris IV and at the Department of Musicology of UCLA.
At present I am writing a book entitled 'City of Sound, Village of Song: Listening to Paris in Literature, Film and Music, 1870-1939' (working title), which studies how singer/songwriters, composers, authors and filmmakers —such as Victor Fournel, Aristide Bruant, Jean Cocteau, Gustave Charpentier, René Clair and Pierre Mac Orlan— used the city and its sounds as creative force and political metaphor. This study of overlooked, or totally ignored, archival sources and cultural artefacts will enlighten our knowledge of how street culture and city life intersected with art during the Third Republic and will allow us to re-evaluate the politics of the city soundscape and its role in defining French identity.
I have taught lecture courses, seminars and tutorials in Spanish, French and English, on topics such as musical aesthetics; film music; music and mass media; ambient music; soundscapes of nostalgia; music and nationalism, and Parisian sound and street culture. In 2016, I co-founded the ‘Urban Rhythms’ Network (supported by The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities): (http://torch.ox.ac.uk/urban) and in 2019 co-organised the ‘Sound and Music in the Prism of Sound Studies’ conference (EHESS / Columbia University).
My research interests include: sound studies, music, sound and space, sound ecology, French music, French cultural studies, film music, sound in literature, avant-garde intermedia art, Situationism, walking, history of the senses, popular music, middlebrow culture.
At present I am writing a book entitled 'City of Sound, Village of Song: Listening to Paris in Literature, Film and Music, 1870-1939' (working title), which studies how singer/songwriters, composers, authors and filmmakers —such as Victor Fournel, Aristide Bruant, Jean Cocteau, Gustave Charpentier, René Clair and Pierre Mac Orlan— used the city and its sounds as creative force and political metaphor. This study of overlooked, or totally ignored, archival sources and cultural artefacts will enlighten our knowledge of how street culture and city life intersected with art during the Third Republic and will allow us to re-evaluate the politics of the city soundscape and its role in defining French identity.
I have taught lecture courses, seminars and tutorials in Spanish, French and English, on topics such as musical aesthetics; film music; music and mass media; ambient music; soundscapes of nostalgia; music and nationalism, and Parisian sound and street culture. In 2016, I co-founded the ‘Urban Rhythms’ Network (supported by The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities): (http://torch.ox.ac.uk/urban) and in 2019 co-organised the ‘Sound and Music in the Prism of Sound Studies’ conference (EHESS / Columbia University).
My research interests include: sound studies, music, sound and space, sound ecology, French music, French cultural studies, film music, sound in literature, avant-garde intermedia art, Situationism, walking, history of the senses, popular music, middlebrow culture.
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Articles / Book chapters by Lola San Martín Arbide
Après un brève tour d’horizons des caractérisations de Carmen, d’après Mérimée, Meilhac, Halévy et Bizet, ce chapitre examine surtout deux production récentes – celle de Leo Muscato et Cristiano Chiarot pour le Teatro del Maggio Musicale à Florence (2018) et celle de Barrie Kosky (Francfort, 2016 ; Londres, 2018) – sans négliger d’autres spectacles (de théâtre et de danse), où la vision du metteur en scène sur des questions de féminisme, de genre, et de masculinité toxique a suscité des débats sur la violence rituelle faite aux femmes, sur scène et dans nos sociétés modernes. En s’inspirant des textes devenus fondamentaux de la musicologie moderne et féministe de Susan McClary, ce chapitre découvre les défis de la mise en scène de Carmen au XXIème siècle.
The chapter offers a contextualization of the opera within the Spanish cultural politics of the period, which coincided with the blossoming of peripheral regionalisms. It charts the reception of the opera in these regions against the backdrop of the tensions between ideas of peripheral and centralist Spanishness, and nuances existing accounts of the opera’s reception in Spain. First it surveys the case of Andalusia, placing the arrival of the opera alongside the assimilation of its culture as the quintessential expression of the nation’s identity. Secondly, it shows Basque reactions to Carmen, which further exemplified the difficulty of consolidating the one-size-fits-all idea of Spanishness that the opera transmitted abroad. The chapter presents a cultural history of the reception of the opera together with a discussion of the cultural politics of the rich web of ethnic identities that constitute modern Spain.
This article explores the evolution of the concept of sound map, closely linked to that of soundscape. This genre is a middle ground between an active fight against sound pollution and the creation of artistic work from the field of sound ecology or ecomusicology. The alert listening implicit in soundmap making is in clear opposition to the use of ambient music. The first research teams created around this idea in Canada in the 1970s focused on the preservation of natural soundscapes, devoid of sounds created by mankind. Exploration of a place’s natural sounds would allow the comprehension of its sound identity. This interpretation path has opened new perspectives on sound tourism; soundmaps grant us knowledge of distant places through the immediacy of the Internet. Here lies one of the keys of the popularity of soundmaps, for they enable the creation of a horizontal network where everyone may collaborate on equal terms. A soundmap is also an identity statement, especially highlighted by maps created in Spain such as SoinuMapa, Escoitar or MapaSonoru. The Basque Country, Galicia and Asturias were among the first autonomous regions to develop their own map. Division of the sound field according to administrative borders was an idea absent from of the 1970s but has been powerfully embraced in Spain. Could we claim a link between soundmap making and regional demands?
Reviews by Lola San Martín Arbide
Doctoral Dissertation by Lola San Martín Arbide
Master's Thesis by Lola San Martín Arbide
Conferences. Congresos y jornadas by Lola San Martín Arbide
Call for papers – CFP by Lola San Martín Arbide
Après un brève tour d’horizons des caractérisations de Carmen, d’après Mérimée, Meilhac, Halévy et Bizet, ce chapitre examine surtout deux production récentes – celle de Leo Muscato et Cristiano Chiarot pour le Teatro del Maggio Musicale à Florence (2018) et celle de Barrie Kosky (Francfort, 2016 ; Londres, 2018) – sans négliger d’autres spectacles (de théâtre et de danse), où la vision du metteur en scène sur des questions de féminisme, de genre, et de masculinité toxique a suscité des débats sur la violence rituelle faite aux femmes, sur scène et dans nos sociétés modernes. En s’inspirant des textes devenus fondamentaux de la musicologie moderne et féministe de Susan McClary, ce chapitre découvre les défis de la mise en scène de Carmen au XXIème siècle.
The chapter offers a contextualization of the opera within the Spanish cultural politics of the period, which coincided with the blossoming of peripheral regionalisms. It charts the reception of the opera in these regions against the backdrop of the tensions between ideas of peripheral and centralist Spanishness, and nuances existing accounts of the opera’s reception in Spain. First it surveys the case of Andalusia, placing the arrival of the opera alongside the assimilation of its culture as the quintessential expression of the nation’s identity. Secondly, it shows Basque reactions to Carmen, which further exemplified the difficulty of consolidating the one-size-fits-all idea of Spanishness that the opera transmitted abroad. The chapter presents a cultural history of the reception of the opera together with a discussion of the cultural politics of the rich web of ethnic identities that constitute modern Spain.
This article explores the evolution of the concept of sound map, closely linked to that of soundscape. This genre is a middle ground between an active fight against sound pollution and the creation of artistic work from the field of sound ecology or ecomusicology. The alert listening implicit in soundmap making is in clear opposition to the use of ambient music. The first research teams created around this idea in Canada in the 1970s focused on the preservation of natural soundscapes, devoid of sounds created by mankind. Exploration of a place’s natural sounds would allow the comprehension of its sound identity. This interpretation path has opened new perspectives on sound tourism; soundmaps grant us knowledge of distant places through the immediacy of the Internet. Here lies one of the keys of the popularity of soundmaps, for they enable the creation of a horizontal network where everyone may collaborate on equal terms. A soundmap is also an identity statement, especially highlighted by maps created in Spain such as SoinuMapa, Escoitar or MapaSonoru. The Basque Country, Galicia and Asturias were among the first autonomous regions to develop their own map. Division of the sound field according to administrative borders was an idea absent from of the 1970s but has been powerfully embraced in Spain. Could we claim a link between soundmap making and regional demands?
This conference seeks to interrogate how to insert this topographical repertoire withina sonic and musical history of the quarter of Montmartre and, beyond that, in the cultural history of Paris. Going further than song as a musical composition it addresses the relationship between song-writing and other crafts that enrich the artistic qualities of song: it is not only composers and song-writers who are at the core of the history of the Montmartre song, but also illustrators, music critics, publishers, impresarios, etc. Performers, sometimes also authors of the texts that they sang, of the music of a song or of both, are at the centre of the world of the Montmartre song. We interrogate whether or not it is adequate to understand their songs as a faithful narrative of their lives. The conference also seeks proposals dealing with score editions, including the different formats and its illustrations as they bear witness to the importance of the author(s), as well as to the celebrity status of the painters that were commissioned to design their covers, such as Steinlen, Ibels, Toulouse-Lautrec and Guillaume, among others.
With these issues in mind, we invite proposals covering (but not limited to) the following themes:
-Montmartre song and identity politics
-Performers: gender, sexuality and life-writing
-Illustrated scores and iconography
-Topography of song and its venues
-Authenticity and cosmopolitanism
-Kitsch allure and tourism
-Song and music recording; song in the cinema
-Funding, production and dissemination of song
-National and international dimensions of the Montmartre song
Keynote speaker: Prof. Derek B. Scott (University of Leeds), ‘The New Cabaret Songs of Montmartre, 1880–1900’.
Scientific committee
Laurent Bihl (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne)
Phillip Dennis Cate (Professeur émérite, Université d’État du New Jersey)
Étienne Jardin (Palazzetto Bru Zane)
Anne Monjaret (EHESS-CNRS, IIAC LAHIC)
Michela Niccolai (LaM, ULB ; IHRIM, Lyon 2)
Cécile Prévost-Thomas (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, CERLIS)
Lola San Martín Arbide (CRAL / EHESS)
Organising committee
Étienne Jardin
Michela Niccolai
Lola San Martín Arbide
Date: 15 June 2020
Venue: EHESS, Salle 13, 105 boulevard Raspail, 75006 PARIS
Abstracts for 20-minute papers in English or French of no more than 250 words should be sent to chansonmontmartre@gmail.com by 10 February 2020, and applicants will be informed whether they have been successful
by 10 March 2020.
The Musical City in the 19th and 20th Centuries
EHESS, Paris
105 boulevard Raspail, Salle 13
July 3, 2020
Call for papers – deadline: 6 April 2020
https://www.ehess.fr/en/node/16865
The aim of this workshop is to explore space through music, approaching the history of the city via the notion of nostalgia. Often described as a form of homesickness, nostalgia is, by definition, the feeling that makes us wish to repossess or reoccupy a space. Such spaces appear to us as both near and distant, tangible and remote, and it seems that attempts at reclaiming them are frequently musical in nature. We know, for instance, that particular compositions have played important roles in helping people to navigate or mitigate a sense of displacement. In these circumstances, affective experiences may be bound up with trauma or joy, as is the case of song during wartime or musical imaginaries among migrants. Under other conditions, we might identify a ‘second-hand nostalgia’ in the guise of a musically-inflected tourism that seeks to reactivate (for pleasure and/or profit) the historical aura of an urban site. What are we to make of the abundance of personal, inter-personal, and propositional episodes that posit music as some kind of a bridge to the urban past?
One option is to turn to digital humanities and to recent trends in mapping the musical layers and pathways of city life. Yet, how well do such methods account for the emotional force of nostalgia and for the flickering between presence and absence that seems to characterise the musical grasp of the past? It is notoriously difficult to geo-locate affect and it is for this reason that we are looking to the kinds of mapping that music enables without the use of digital tools. How might we revisit compositions, correspondence, film music, opera, music criticism, etc. as techniques of urban nostalgia? Of course, these questions are not entirely new. But even as the so-called ‘urban musicology’ offers alternatives to traditional narratives of musical history, replacing big names with city streets, it sometimes remains unclear what the deeper relationships between musical practice and urban experience may be. We seek to address this lacuna by asking:
1) how composers, interpreters and other cultural actors have codified the city in musical terms;
2) how particular cities have afforded particular kinds of listening for particular groups at articular times; and
3) how music has contributed to the repertoire of clichés about urban identity, whether understood from ‘within’ or from the ‘outside.’
Another context for this conference is the growth of sound studies, which has made the notion of a ‘soundscape’ an unavoidable point of reference when describing links between music and urban atmospheres. In light of such work we aim to consider what the idea of a musical landscape or musicscape might offer to historically-sensitive and site-specific scholarship.
We welcome papers with a broad disciplinary grounding, including (but by no means limited to) musicology, history, cultural and sound studies, cultural geography, art history, and literature. We are also looking to include research – and researchers – that expand the geographical frame beyond Europe and Northern America, the areas favoured thus far by sound studies and technology and media studies.
We seek proposals that respond, but are not limited to the following themes:
-Music, memory, and nostalgia
-Music and mapping
-Recorded music and the city
-Musical clichés of space
-Music, space and emotions
-Music travel, and tourism
-Urban music and local vs. national identity
-Divisions of /bridges within the urban space through music
-Intermedia exchanges in the representation of the city: visual arts, literature, and film
-Site-specific musical works
-Music architecture, and urbanism
-Music and escapism: imaginary landscapes
-Mobile listening
-Music and noise pollution
Keynote lecture by Richard Elliott (Newcastle University), title tbc
Please note the quick turnaround for this call: abstracts of no more than 250 words are to be sent to musical.cities.2020@gmail.com no later than 6 April 2020. Accepted proposals will be announced on 17 April 2020. Please, include a short biography of no more than 100 words and your institutional affiliation. Proposals in both English and French will be accepted.
Scientific committee: Esteban Buch (CRAL / EHESS, Paris); Jonathan Hicks (University of Aberdeen); Gascia Ouzounian (University of Oxford); Lola San Martín Arbide (CRAL / EHESS, Paris); Christabel Sterling (University of Westminster); Justinien Tribillon (Theatrum Mundi).
Funded by the ‘Aural Paris’ project (Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 750086); organised by Lola San Martín Arbide (CRAL / EHESS, Paris).
Originally written for the CarmenAbroad website: https://carmenabroad.org/essays/feminist-endings-challenges-of-operatic-staging-in-the-twenty-first-century