Gisa Jähnichen Knihy

This volume consists of revised, extended and translated articles written by the author in the last ten years about music and dance cultures in Laos partly published and dispersed in academic literature. The main sources are mentioned at the beginning of each section. Since Laos is home to many cultures with a large range of individual varieties, the twelve articles cannot cover them in any aspect. They are only a beginning in exploring a remarkable amount of data collected in the last two decades all over the country and brought into a wider academic context of studies on mainland Southeast Asia. It is hoped that this volume encourages following researches to be conducted by a growing academic generation in Laos and other Asian countries.

The collection of articles written by the author in the past two decades shows a lot of issues, developments, and paradoxes that mount up to some real memories of virtual documents. Looking back, each of the articles was motivated by a conflict the author experienced. All articles were trying to answer questions. The succession from one perspective to another, from one community to another, also indicates that some problems were grown out by just ignoring them, directly solved by taking action, or by changing conditions through advanced technology. However, the most sensitive sections of these articles follow the gaze of an observer who is incurably interested in cultural and social aspects of the fact that the accumulation of knowledge through sound and audio-visual documents is crucial to the survival of human communities and their environment. This approach is itself brought up through the conflict between steadily progressing technologies and their application in still slowly learning societies. Gisa Jähnichen, ecomusicologist, currently working at Shanghai Conservatory of Music is an IASA ambassador engaged in audiovisual archiving around the globe, especially in Asia.

Double-reed instruments have been under-represented in ethnomusicology and related fields and deserve much more serious and sustained attention. To fill the void in current scholarship, the 25th Colloquium of the International Council for Traditional Music, Double Reeds along the Great Silk Road: The Interaction of Theory and Practice from Antiquity to Contemporary Performance, was held at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, China, in 2018. With a selection of papers from the colloquium, the present volume gathers and analyzes existing documents, whether written, historical or ethnographical, and provides information on previously neglected regions. With contributions by Sahereh Astaneh, Yves Defrance, Jürgen Elsner, Gisa Jähnichen, Rastko Jakovljevic, Chinthaka Prageeth Meddegoda, Uwe Umberto Paetzold, Raja Iskandar Bin Raja Halid, cSebnem Sen ccerman, Timkehet Teffera, Rewadee Ungpho, Anne van Oostrum, Esbjörn Wettermark, Liu Xiangkun, and Terada Yoshitaka.

Gisa Jähnichen durchstreift als leidenschaftliche Ethnomusikologin schon seit vielen Jahren die Welt nach Musik und Menschen, die mit ihr verbundenen sind und die unser aller kulturelles Wissen vertiefen können. Es ist mehr als spannend, was sie dabei herausfindet. Für sie gibt es offensichtlich keine uninteressante Musik. Um zu verstehen, warum Musik klingt, wie sie klingt, und warum wir sie so hören, wie wir sie hören, bedarf es viel mehr als nur wissenschaftlicher Bravheit. Ihrer Meinung nach muss man ganz unbedingt den Versuch unternehmen, zumindest eine vielheitliche, wenn nicht ganzheitliche Betrachtung der Musik als Tun und Sein auf möglichst unterhaltsame und gleichzeitig anspruchsvolle Weise seinen Mitmenschen nahezubringen, denn Musik ist abhängig davon, dass man sich ihrer denkend annimmt. Neben den amüsanten und Phantasie anregenden Erlebnissen, macht gerade die Idee, Musik als Teil des Gesamtkonzepts von menschlichem Leben zu begreifen und in diesem Sinne elementar darzustellen, das Buch auch für weniger Versierte in Sachen Musik lesenswert, da es doch tatsächlich wagt, althergebrachte Klischees und vorherrschende Ordnungsprinzipien anzugreifen. So wird von ihr eine viel breiter angelegte Sicht auf das Fremde in Schall und allem, was daraus werden kann, vorgeschlagen.