Description
In the early Nineties, the fields of musical anthropology and history of music converged for the first time around the Mediterranean. The renowned roundtable on 'Antropologia della musica e ricerca storica' saw this convergence. It was held at the Levi Foundation in Venice, during the founding meeting of the ICTM Study Group 'Anthropology of Music and Mediterranean Cultures'. Tullia Magrini chaired the meeting. The esteemed attendees included F. Alberto Gallo, Iain Fenlon, Roberto Leydi, Antonio Serravezza and François Lissarrague. The round table was a significant moment in time, from two perspectives: methodological and content-related. In his speech, Gallo concluded by calling for close collaboration between medieval music historiography and ethnomusicology on the one hand, and anthropological historical disciplines on the other. A couple of years later, in 1995, in the same place and context, we presented a joint research project on the systematic study of travel accounts as sources for the musical history of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This marked the start of a series of new studies that definitively expanded the spectrum of sources for the history of music. My short text is an homage to Alberto Gallo's pioneering role in this tradition of studies.
