Department of Music Lecture: Deborah Kapchan, Associate Professor of Performance Studies, New York University

“Aural Witness: Listening to the Pain and Praise of Others.”

How do we “witness” in the practice of listening? What testimony does such aural witness accomplish? And what does such listening perform in a world torn by sectarian violence and misunderstanding? Drawing on more than 20 years of research with Sunni Sufi Muslims in Morocco and France, I explore the practice of samaa – Sufi devotional listening and singing – asking what sacred modes of intentional listening accomplish and what they might offer to modes of ethnographic inquiry.