Co-Sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies (CGES), and the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia (CREECA).
This event is part of the CREECA lecture series, which is held on Thursdays at 4:00 pm. Coffee, tea, and cookies served starting at 3:45.
In this lecture, Karnes will talk about Maija Tabaka, who was the first Soviet citizen to be awarded the DAAD fellowship. She unwittingly opened doors to over a decade of artistic exchanges between Riga and West Berlin. She also provided an enduring model for arranging such collaborations, with offices of the Latvian KGB partnering with Latvian emigres to broker relationships, awards, and creative possibilities. Mining archives in Berlin and Riga, this talk traces the origins of such exchanges in the 1970s, their evolution in the time of perestroika, and their end in an ill-fated endeavor to support the dream of the Latvian musician Hardijs Lediņš to record with Laurie Anderson in a newly reunited Berlin.
Kevin C. Karnes is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Music and Divisional Dean of Arts at Emory University and Visiting Professor of Musicology at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music. His most recent book is Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground (2021). His latest research considers techno music and club culture as both product and reflection of transnational exchange across reimagined European borders at the turn of the 1990s.
