Description
The Mediterranean not only challenges musicologists to explore innovative research trajectories that go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, it also inspires musicians to cross-cultural artistic collaboration. Adding aspects of performance and music business to a discussion of the Early Mediterranean as a musicological thought model, the focus of the paper is on the market segment of cross-cultural projects in Early Music and Historically Informed Performance Practice. I am investigating how such projects combine notions of “Early-ness” and “Mediterranean-ness”.
Taking two case studies from Puglia – “Oriamu pisulina”, a song in the grecanico minority language, and “Tu bella ca lu tieni lu pettu tunnu”, a sequence of stornelli – as a starting point, I set out to investigate how Mediterranean “folk” repertoire is co-opted into the sphere of Historically Informed Performance Practice, and to demonstrate how concepts of earliness (as temporal otherness) and “Mediterranean folk” (as spatial and/or cultural otherness) converge.
The circumstance that temporal, spatial, and cultural otherness in this context is usually perceived from the vantage point of a Western European "art-music" now necessitates reflection on the imbalance of historicities that comes into being if notated and dateable repertoires are combined with so-called “traditional” repertoires from supposedly ancient oral transmission. When used to evoke soundscapes of the past, “traditional” musics can end up deprived of their own historical locations. The Early Mediterranean as a thought model hence also invites discussions on how music history is documented, measured and explained differently in different cultures.
| IMPORTANT | YES, I confirm I have read it. |
|---|
