ABSTRACT
In 1935, the German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann founded an Oriental Music Archive in the newly established Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His activities included a series of 12 radio programs entitled “Oriental Music,” broadcast by the Palestine Broadcasting Service in its inaugural year (1936–1937). Urging his listeners to “leave all European prejudice aside,” Lachmann presented live performances of sacred and secular traditions of different ethno-religious communities of Palestine, simultaneously recorded onto metal disc. Eight decades later, the Palestinian artist Jumana Manna took Lachmann’s digitally restored recordings (from Davis 2013) to communities related to those Lachmann recorded, and documented their reactions. Her encounters form the substance of her film A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (2015). Commenting on her intentions, Manna describes Lachmann's project as “somewhat of a failure” and suggests that in her film “the present is giving advice to the past.” Drawing from the wider body of Lachmann's writings, I reappraise his project in light of his actual goals and the possibilities of his time. In so doing, I suggest, a more nuanced view of his position emerges—one more closely aligned with the position that Manna adopts in her film and in her commentaries on it.
