Guest Lecture Series - James Davies

Event time: 
Friday, February 23, 2018 - 1:30pm
Location: 
Stoeckel Hall See map
469 College Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

James Davies (University of California, Berkeley)
Stoeckel Hall 106
1:30 pm
 

Albert Schweitzer’s Tropical Pedal Piano

This paper presents initial thoughts on the “pedal with piano attachment” presented to the greatest humanitarian of them all: Bach scholar, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, theologian, and jungle doctor Albert Schweitzer. The instrument was gifted to Schweitzer by the Paris Bach Society in 1913. He received the gift, in order that he could continue musical studies, on the eve of his departure for the Paris Missionary Society’s mission at Lambarené on the Ogooué river, in French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon). This Gaveau piano, built to resist the equatorial rainforest, is now housed at the Musée Albert-Schweitzer in Gunsbach, Alsace.

The site of Schweitzer’s posting had a reputation as the most “inhuman” environment known to enlightenment man. It was an historic “slave reservoir,” and long a principle resource for the extraction of circum-Atlantic wealth, including ivory, ebony, padouk, and other musical woods. This is to say that the idea of the “uninhabitable” tropical forest as “uncivilizable” prospered at the very same time they provided the raw materials for the production of “civilization.” This “white man’s grave,” indeed the Gulf of Guinea tout court, had long been the site where the question of what it means to be human had been most fraught.

I am interested in questions of humanitarianism, and anthropopoesis – that is, the mission to “make human” by overcoming climate. What I think we’re dealing with, with the export of the “insulation technologies” of German Art Music to the Gabonese tropics, is certain imperial navigation of “the human.” By anthropopoesis, I mean “an art of the human,” or a “progressivist” humanitarian project to “make human.” This “making human” involved music-making and Bach, of course. But it also involved the cultivation of conditions for a more “equitable” and “temperate” (indeed “equal-tempered”) world, one delivered from the purportedly “dehumanizing” effects of “torrid zones.” This paper sketches the lineaments of that humanitarian project – at once biomedical, raciological, religious, and musical – to free humanity from its enslavement to climate.

Calendar Type: 
Guest Lecture Series