Performing transnationality – Dr Saeid Kordmafi presents at Cardiff University
Dr Saeid Kordmafi, a Lecturer in Musicology of the Middle East in the Music Department at SOAS delivered a keynote speech at 2024 BFE/RMA Research Students’ Conference in Cardiff.
Dr Kordmafi's speech, titled "Performing Transnationality: Thresholds of Artistic Research in 21st-Century Music Studies", aimed to show how apparently opposing strands and methods in the field of music studies may interact and enrich each other within the methodologically flexible framework of artistic research, demonstrating the potential of combining empirical/analytical and embodied/ethnographic modes of understanding music.
The talk also explored how the multi-methodology and multi-epistemology in question culminate in transnational and cross-cultural music-making and music studies, where the research questions and processes at times relate to potentially contested subjects such as music revival, activism, and national and ethnic identities. With special focus on a revival movement in Iran, the lecture exemplified ways in which understanding one’s own music from a historically informed perspective may pave the way for crossing cultural boundaries which are the constructs of nationalist ideologies emerging in the 19th and 20th centuries in the Islamic world.
The BFE/RMA conference was organised by and held at School of Music, Cardiff University from 10–12 January 2024. The conference theme was ‘Identities’, inspired by Wales’s strong sense of place and national identity. However, the theme also encompassed identities in its broadest form, spanning the personal and local to wider geographical and cultural contexts.
