The popular instrument known as organillo in the Spanish music street has been tightly linked with the imaginary of the “old Madrid” music by the end of the 19th century. The same repertoire performed in theatres and balls was played afterwards on squares and streets of the capital using these gadgets. Particularly noteworthy was its relation with a specific type of theatre, a kind of short plays called género chico, whose attachment is stronger due to the intrinsic properties of the music, plots and the popularization of this busking practice, all this despite the fact that organillos existed previously and were linked in the first moments with Italian busking musicians. Even though it is common to think about organ grinders such a specific type of street music players, fully attached to the aesthetic of Madrilenian popular sonic identity, it was another cultural fashion imported from Europe that proves again the connection with other capitals.
While scholarly attention to organillos and busking music has primarily focused on other European and American cities, a reevaluation of Late 19th century press and theatrical productions reveals the organillo’s prominence in Madrid’s cultural landscape. The instrument featured prominently in local playwrights’ works, showcasing a repertoire centered on traditional urban dances, opera arias, and zarzuela romanzas that captivated audiences with huge success. Likewise, organ grinders have served a crucial democratizing role too, by disseminating widely recognized melodies, prevalent in esteemed theatres, onto the streets. However, its omnipresence was not without controversy, as its incessant presence often perturbed residents, prompting regulatory measures from authorities aimed at curtailing its performances.
This study aims to show the relevance of the organillo in the open-air scenarios outside the theatres, paying attention to the correlation between both, in terms to check the popularity of the music repertoire. Moreover, it underscores the pivotal role played by organ grinders in disseminating internationally acclaimed musical themes to pedestrians and neighbors, subsequently influencing the creation of new theatrical one-act popular works written by local authors. Ultimately, this work aims to shed light on the multifaceted factors contributing to the organillo's elevation as a prominent musical symbol of Late 19th century Madrid, transcending its negative associations to underscore its integral role in the city's cultural tapestry.
A significant number of Catalan manuscript songbooks from the Eighteenth century have been preserved, testifying to a vibrant popular singing tradition that is still little known. These songbooks contain only the lyrics of the songs, but not their music, which has led to their marginalisation in musicological studies.
Fortunately, some of the melodies to which these songs were performed are known, as they are indicated with the expression "to the tune of." This paper examines songs with the designation "to the tune of Folías de España" found in Catalan literary manuscript songbooks from the 18th century.
Richard Hudson distinguishes between the early folia and the later folia. The former, mentioned by Salinas in 1577, would be of Portuguese origin but would become popular in Spain and reach Italy around 1600. The later emerged at the French court and spread throughout much of the European continent, including Spain. As demonstrated in the works of Ramón Pelinski, Pepe Rey, and Giuseppe Fiorentino, Renaissance and Baroque folías manifested in various forms within vocal performance. The Catalan vocal folías found are more modern and possess distinct characteristics that warrant thorough analysis.
The first objective of this paper is to determine what these Catalan songbooks are referring to when they mention the 'folías de España'. Secondly, a musical reconstruction of these songs is proposed. Finally, the transformation and polysemy of this term has influenced the Catalan imaginary associated with the concept of 'folia', so it seems appropriate to examine the intertextual processes - both literary and musical - in these songs, which will contribute to a deeper understanding of the creation, dissemination and cultural significance of popular songs in the Eighteenth century.
The subscription concert held in domestic settings has recently emerged in scholarly research as a key component of elite leisure in late eighteenth-century Spain. In response to the scarcity of public concerts and the institutional control of theatres, domestic concerts appear to have constituted a primary site for musical and cultural negotiation—albeit one that remains relatively understudied. Drawing on the exceptional richness of certain local sources, this study explores domestic concerts in Barcelona between 1760 and 1808. A defining feature of these gatherings was their diversity—of repertoires, participants, and attitudes. As a site of contact among representatives of opposing—and even incompatible—spheres, including singers from opera companies, ecclesiastical musicians, amateur performers, itinerant virtuosi, and both local and foreign audiences, the domestic concert gave rise to numerous conflicts. Examining these conflicts offers insight into the challenges of articulating musical culture in a Mediterranean city at the end of the Ancien Régime. These events involved the negotiation of competing concert formats—public versus private—; the legitimacy of emerging repertoires, often tested in domestic settings before reaching churches or theatres; the evolving roles of women, situated between social ritual and the emergence of celebrity; and, after 1789, the very viability of a shared cultural framework within elite leisure practices amidst growing ideological tensions. Though concealed behind the solid walls of urban palaces, the domestic concert can hardly be seen as a private phenomenon in the modern sense; rather, it served as the very site where the orientation of urban—and even regional—musical culture was actively negotiated.
Like much of the Mediterranean, Dalmatia has become a globally sought-after tourist destination over the past century. Along with its sun, sea, wine, and olives, it offers the distinctive sound of Dalmatian klapa – a traditional vocal ensemble deeply rooted in the region. The klapa repertoire reflects a range of influences, e.g. Italian canzone, church music, the brass band tradition, non-tempered musical expressions of the Dinaric Highlands, and traditional urban canons from former Yugoslav republics. This stylistic diversity highlights an extensive network of trade, migration, and cultural exchange typical of regions bridging the mainland and the “wide world”.
Using klapa – Dalmatia’s representative musical expression – as lens for understanding, I aim to offer a broader perspective on how music evolves in region with pronounced regional identity, rich cultural exchange network, and strategic political position. Drawing from my dissertation that combines economic and historical (ethno)musicology, this paper focuses on the repertoire of Yugoslav 78 RPM gramophone records (1926–1960) that spread with the rise of radio as the primary medium for disseminating the sound of the “new” Dalmatia present today. The transition from “old” to “new” Dalmatian sound involves changes in choice of musical instruments, vocal arrangements, and musical genres. I place these changes within the socio-political context of the turbulent 20th century, considering the commercial success of Yugoslav record labels and the state’s role in shaping Dalmatian music as part of political and tourism strategies.
Yugoslav efforts to create a “new” Dalmatian sound through records, radio and festivals also served to construct a regional identity tied to the Mediterranean “Southern myth” emphasizing themes of romance, passion, and musical superiority. Once identified, I challenge the prevailing stereotypes by contrasting them with the harsh realities of life on Dalmatia’s rocky landscape, marked by war, political conflict, disease, and mass migrations across the Atlantic.
Throughout the 20th century, phonographic industries unprecedentedly intensified the circulation of music between countries and territories with Lusophone heritage. Local music genres such as samba and maxixe in Brazil, and fado in Portugal, were promoted through musical industry to the symbolic status of national music, becoming part of a vast and complex system of transoceanic circulation. This presentation will address two musicians who played a key role in building sonic bridges between Brazil and Portugal during the early phase of phonography, whose trajectories are largely forgotten due to technological obsolescence. These are artists whose productions actively contributed to the construction of shared sonic imaginaries and who moved between Portuguese and Brazilian artistic contexts in the early decades of the 20th century, participating in the emerging entertainment industry. The presentation is part of the project "Liber Sound: Recorded Music, Transcontinental Experiences, Connected Communities," which proposes the liberation of musical heritage stored in obsolete sound carriers with the aim of providing memory reactivation through innovative archiving processes. The project was developed at INET-md of the University of Aveiro (Portugal).
Recording studio is the rite to passage in popular music production from its inception. Be it for voice dubbing, live instruments recording or mixing and mastering ‘recording studio’ is incessantly ‘in between’ after a composition is made and its release as a popular song to the listeners. Situating ‘recording studio’ as the hardware infrastructure of making of popular music, paper will take an ethnographic journey into popular music production scene of Assam. Paper emphasizes primarily how recording studio is assemblage of musicians, audio engineers and technologies which proliferates popular music scene. That echoes what Brian Larkin in Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria refers “Infrastructure to the totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” (Larkin 2008,6). But paper along with it, from the vantage point of making music which always has been profoundly and primitively collective, further follows Tim Ingold’s thesis of “making is a correspondence between maker and material in case of art” (Ingold, 2013, xi) in Making Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture inversely argues it is the collectiveness of musicians that enduing recording studios (read infrastructure here) and recording studios as audio infrustructure rendering Assamese popular music making. What musicians engage with contemporary audio technologies in recording studios which I call hardware infrastructure and the technology which formulate sound i.e. timbre of Assamese popular music which I call software infrastructure i.e. Virtual Studio Technology (VST) is an audio plug-in software interface. Finally, paper will argue translocality and its discontents, describing VST plugins made from abundance of resources in technological center in Global North like Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH, a Hamburg, Germany based musical software and hardware company is creating songs of scarcity in periphery of Global South like Guwahati, Assam, India.
Clara Haskil was one of the most important pianists of the 20th century and the first prominent Romanian pianist. Growing up in a politically and ideologically fragmented Europe permeated by nationalist ideologies that promoted eugenics and marginalized Jewish communities, Haskil's identity as a Sephardic Jewish musician placed her at the intersection of many cultural and social challenges that dramatically shaped her journey. Forced to leave Romania, she studied in Vienna and Paris, took refuge in Marseille, and finally settled in Switzerland, where she was supported by her patron and manager, Michel Rossier, and became part of Charles Chaplin's social circle.
In a context of migration and exile, Haskil reconfigured her artistic identity beyond national schemas to embody an inter-national, even supranational identity. It is this artistic identity that I will analyze, drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of "performative identity”. Butler defines a musician's identity as a fluid construct that is negotiated over time through repertoire choices, interpretative style, audience interactions, and so on. Haskil's commitment to the classical repertoire (Mozart, Beethoven) reflects a particular artistic sensibility and an intimate, introspective approach to performance. Known for her reserved and introspective demeanor, Haskil conveyed a profound sensitivity and intimacy in her interpretations. She didn't just interpret music; she projected an image of herself through gestures, stage presence, and performance style that contributed to the construction of her artistic identity.
I will argue that Haskil's identity was an ongoing negotiation of what Homi Bhabha has called "cultural hybridity”. By mapping her trajectory as a resistance to prejudices, nationalist ideologies, and gender stereotypes, it will be possible to shed light on how music served as a transcultural space in which her identity as a performer was constantly redefined within the framework of migration, exile, and refuge.
The prolonged exile in Rome of the Chilean new song group Inti-illimani (1967-), slowly but intensely linked the band with the Italian Mediterranean culture, with which Chileans had had little direct contact. After feeding their curiosity with these new sonorities, instruments and genres, the band's director, Horacio Salinas, began to compose Mediterranean-inspired instrumental music to incorporate into Inti-illimani's concerts and discography. He and the group did so by combining their Latin American instrumental and sung repertoire, strongly influenced by Andean music, with the new Mediterranean repertoire, using the first and/or last track of three of their albums to place it. Thus, they seemed to leave their native music framed by the sounds of exile. This happens in the albums Palimsesto (1981), Imaginación (1984), and Andadas (1993). With this last one they entered the category of World Music on Billboard. In Europe, Inti-illimani had emphasized the composition of instrumental music to overcome language barriers. Pointing out that they were making “folklore from an imaginary country” the group used their own Andean instruments to perform and record their new Mediterranean repertoire, with the guitar as a common element. They did not seek mixtures, but rather displacements, as Violeta Parra did in the mid 1960’s. In this paper, I focus on the following three problems: the processes of adaptation of Mediterranean music to the Andean ensemble proposed by Inti-illimani; the discourses that legitimize their procedures of elaboration of folklore; and the reception and destiny in Italy and Chile of this new Mediterranean-Andean repertoire.
This paper concerns the histories of mobility and movement in the Mediterranean through music. It aims to address musical exchanges between Italians and Tunisians that followed French occupation (1881) and between Italians and Egyptians developed during Italian migrations (1920s). Firstly, through several fieldworks in Tunis (2015-2017) and Marseille (2023), and archival research, focusing on the Italian family of musical instruments seller - the Scotto (1927-1960s) – and its interaction with Tunisian instrument makers such as the Bellasfar family (1930- now), I will show how Italians contributed significantly to an exchange of knowledge, skills and craftsmanship during the protectorate era. Secondly, I will focus on Teresa De Rogatis (1893-1979), Neapolitan composer and musician who lived in Egypt for more than forty years (1921-1963) and explore how Italian music became a principal component of élite entertainment in Cairo. What can we learn by re-examining Italy’s early twentieth century music history, as an example of Europe articulated in an Arab-Ottoman/British imperial context? By exploring the phenomenon of collective memory as it is revealed through musical activities, this paper investigates new complex networks of inter-cultural and intra-cultural exchanges in the Mediterranean that are not defined by postcolonial/global boundaries.
The idea of exploring the “Circulation of Opera and Operatic Companies around the Mediterranean Theaters” was born during the meeting of our IMS Study Group at the Med-Ren conference in Lisbon 2021, where the participants approved the proposal to organize a panel on this topic at the 21st IMS Quinquennial Congress in Athens 2022. Two years later the same group had a second meeting in Valletta, Malta, discussing the same topic as a sequel to Athens. The great interest aroused by these two meetings, where for the first time this topic was explored collaboratively by scholars from so many Mediterranean countries, convinced us to propose a third meeting for IMS Valencia 2025 in which the same group of scholars (with a few variations from the previous two, but with the entry of younger scholars) will be able to present the results of the work carried out over the last three years, which will lead to the publication of a collective book in preparation. The invited scholars are specialists in the history of opera houses in their respective countries (Italy, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia). It will thus be possible to draw a first reliable diachronic map of the circulation of theatre troupes in the Mediterranean.
Presentation of Projects
Next meetings and general discussion
in association with Barry Ife (Guildhall School, London) Jasper van der Klies (Guildhall School, London) and Marco Moiraghi (Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi, Torino)
with M.R. De Luca (Università di Catania), A. Bonsante and D. Fabris (Università della Basilicata)
The idea of exploring the “Circulation of Opera and Operatic Companies around the Mediterranean Theaters” was born during the meeting of our IMS Study Group at the Med-Ren conference in Lisbon 2021, where the participants approved the proposal to organize a panel on this topic at the 21st IMS Quinquennial Congress in Athens 2022. Two years later the same group had a second meeting in Valletta, Malta, discussing the same topic as a sequel to Athens. The great interest aroused by these two meetings, where for the first time this topic was explored collaboratively by scholars from so many Mediterranean countries, convinced us to propose a third meeting for IMS Valencia 2025 in which the same group of scholars (with a few variations from the previous two, but with the entry of younger scholars) will be able to present the results of the work carried out over the last three years, which will lead to the publication of a collective book in preparation. The invited scholars are specialists in the history of opera houses in their respective countries (Italy, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia). It will thus be possible to draw a first reliable diachronic map of the circulation of theatre troupes in the Mediterranean.
Located in the Southeast of Spain, the Mar Menor is the biggest coastal saltwater lagoon of Europe. Since at least 2015, due to a mix of various anthropogenic causes, it has faced a big ecological crisis, with two mass deaths of fauna in 2019 and 2021 due to the eutrophication of its waters. This intervention analyzes the musical responses to the Mar Menor ecological crisis. Focusing on different collective actions, such as the song “Sol y sal” or the background music of different awareness campaigns, it will be analyzed how music is instrumentalized in the struggle for the hegemony of the climate imaginaries defined by Levy and Spicer. Specifically, it will highlight how the techno-market and sustainable lifestyles imaginaries display contrasting musical strategies in order to win the public opinion. Despite the mainstream support of the later, it is undoubtable that it deploys a difficult and contradictory balance between a focus on the impact of agricultural nitrate discharges (the main cause of the crisis) and a call for action rooted on the evocation of an emotional attachment to the lagoon created by uncontrolled and unsustainable tourism. This is paralleled in the way that much of the music under study presents, following Timothy Morton, a sentimental approach complicit with the consumerist appropriation of nature under capitalism, that contradicts the aims for solutions that question the Anthropocene, such as granting the lagoon the status of “legal person”. Implicit to this research it is a wider discussion about the relationship established by music and environmental protest in Spain, with changing ecological-generic alliances that talk about the way in which both fields transformed over time.
While in countries such as Switzerland and France tourism had already been consolidated in the 19th century as an economic and cultural vector, at the beginning of the 20th century in Spain tourism was still an incipient, marginal activity lacking public regulation or organised national promotion. However, it was beginning to attract the attention of both political agents and businessmen at a municipal or regional level, since it promised a double benefit: economic and reputational. It was hoped to simultaneously attract foreign currency and demonstrate to visitors - representing the world - that Spain was not the defeated, backward and inquisitorial country that the black legend and romantic novels propagated, an image that the catastrophic end of the colonial adventure had finished off. While it would take until the end of the 1940s for politics to establish operational management and regulation instruments at national level, the private initiative of cities that already had a certain tourist influx such as San Sebastian, Malaga and Barcelona, as well as those such as Madrid or Zaragoza that wanted to attract foreign tourists, encouraged the creation of a network of entrepreneurial associations that were agile, sharing an innovative business vision, with an eye on the international market. This network expanded steadily from the 1910s onwards until it achieved national coverage.
Initially, they chose different names – “Society for Attracting Foreigners”, “Promotion of Tourism”, “Syndicate of Initiative and Tourism” etc. – but the objective was common: to create a lobby to defend their interests in the face of political regulators, to share knowledge about the industry, to learn about and implement modern tourist products and services, as well as to create links beyond provincial and national borders. Some of them, such as the “Sociedad de Atracción de Forasteros de Barcelona” or the “Sindicato de Iniciativo y Propaganda de Aragón” published periodical journals to publicise the beauties and curiosities of their respective cities and regions. Likewise, international agencies such as Thomas Cook published tourist magazines for the Spanish-speaking market. This communication aims to take the musical pulse of pioneering magazines for promoting tourism such as Gran Vida (1903-1936?), Barcelona Atracción (1911-1954), La Revista de Viajes (1924-1936), Aragón (1925-1968), or Páginas de Turismo Nacional (1945-1946). The first began its journey as an organ of the Sociedad Hípica Española but gradually broadened its horizons to include tourism and the arts, the second was born as a magazine for tourists and the last already shows an institutional character. What kind of music is mentioned in them, how is music advertised and used as a tourist attraction? What was the origin and course of the aesthetic-musical premises we found? These and other questions will guide the presentation.
The islands of Ibiza and Formentera, especially after the Civil War, underwent a series of social, political and economic changes that influenced the panorama of traditional music, leading to the almost total disappearance of the practice and performance of much of its repertoire, which subsequently forced them to initiate a process of recovery and safeguarding of this.
This recovery and promotion of the repertoire was especially driven by the need to reinforce Ibizan and Formentera identities in the face of a globalized world and mass tourism. This process provoked changes in the repertoire that came to modify its nature and the way of expressing musical culture, and gave rise to the revival movement, as well as an alteration in the collective imaginary of Ibiza and Formentera.
On this basis, the proposal is to analyze the evolution of the construction of identity linked to the repertoire of traditional music from the early twentieth century to the present, from the identity linked to a social and economic class, to become a tool against a massive influx of people and what that entails, and how this evolution has affected the musical genre.
In addition, projects created to ensure the sustainability of the traditional music genre will be exhibited, such as the new digital archive, Cançoner de les Pitiüses, promoted by the Institut d'Estudis Eivissencs, and other projects linked to it. These projects seek to promote music through dissemination, education and research.
This presentation outlines the initial developments of In-Music: Interactive Tools for the Study and the Enhancement of Music Iconography, a project supported by a 2024 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Post-Doctoral Fellowship and hosted by the DIDPATRI research group at the University of Barcelona.
Bridging historical musicology, music iconology, and digital humanities, In-Music aims to provide scholars and cultural institutions with interactive resources for studying and engaging with music-iconographical heritage. At its core is the development of a semantic database designed to facilitate interdisciplinary research and support the creation of digital tools that enhance accessibility in educational and museal contexts.
Focusing on Early Modern Spanish musical imagery, In-Music places particular emphasis on the former territories of the Crown of Aragon. By mapping and structuring visual sources from this historically interconnected region, the project not only sheds light on Iberian musical culture but also encourages comparative, transregional, and diachronic analysis for broader exploration of music-iconographical themes across the Mediterranean.
Eight months into the project, this paper will present an overview of the sources compiled and the initial structure of the database, reflecting on methodological challenges and preliminary insights that have emerged from the research.
This presentation explores my book’s content, research process, and the historical significance of two Qājār-era paintings depicting musicians.
The book ʿAmalajāt-i Ṭarab-i Ḵāṣa (Exclusive Royal Musicians) examines two paintings related to music from the Qājār period (1794–1925), during the reign of Nāser-al-Din Šāh (r. 1848–1896). The first painting, ʿAlī-Akbar Farāhānī va Šāgerdānaš (ʿAlī-Akbar Farāhānī and His Apprentices) by Abu’l-Ḥasan Ḡaffārī, also known as Ṣaniʿ-al-Molk (c. 1813–1866), is currently located at an unknown site. The second painting, ʿAmala-i Ṭarab (Royal Musicians), by Moḥammad Ḡaffāri, also known as Kamāl-al-Molk (c. 1848–1941), is housed in the Golestān Palace in Tehrān.
Ṣaniʿ-al-Molk’s painting portrays the court musician ʿAlī-Akbar Farāhānī with his renowned tār, named Qalandar, surrounded by seven of his apprentices. Due to the absence of the original painting, the analysis relies on photographs taken by Bahman Boustān, images available in various historical sources, and a postcard. In the image, some apprentices are identified through historical sources, while others remain anonymous.
Kamāl-al-Molk’s painting depicts fifteen individuals, five of them are playing musical instruments (santur, kamānča, tār, tombak, daf). A dancer lying on the ground holds a pair of small cymbals, which are barely discernible. The painting also features three young male dancers. The names of three musicians are mentioned in historical records, but the names of the tombak and daf players are not specified.
The book analyzes the context and dating of the paintings, the depicted musical instruments, the identification of the musicians, and the sociocultural factors significant to music-making during the Qājār period, as well as the implicit meanings of the paintings. Given its multidisciplinary approach, this book will interest both scholars of Qājār music and art historians specializing in painting and photography.
This paper presents a survey of images (lithographs) related to music that were published in the issues of the Brazilian illustrated periodical Revista Illustrada. Based in Rio de Janeiro, this periodical had a notable activity, existing for over two decades and having a record breaking circulation in Latin America. Its first phase ranges from its founding in 1874 by the Italian-Brazilian Ângelo Agostini (Vercelli, 8/4/1843 - Rio de Janeiro, 28/4/1910), who was also its main illustrator during this period, until 1889. Ângelo Agostini became famous as a graphic artist during the Second Reign of the Empire of Brazil, and his production at the head of Revista Illustrada, encompassing a point of maturity of his style, mainly in the genres of cartoons and portraits. The outcomes presented here are the result of a detailed survey that aimed to identify all occurrences of images related to the theme of music, facing the challenges of systematizing data related to a set that is surprising in quantitative terms and expands, on the one hand, the approach to the relationship between music and periodicals, focusing specifically on iconographic elements, and, on the other, the approach to musical iconography itself, prioritizing a portion that lacks studies in the area. The Volpe methodology, applied in the systematization of data, has demonstrated its efficiency in previous works, dedicated to this and other textual typologies of musical journalism, and allows us to advance in the tabulation of results by analytical categories, in order to direct the following stages, which encourage interdisciplinary efforts to approach interpretative questions in this relevant iconographic-musical production. This work is part of a larger project that aims to cover the second stage of the same periodical, as well as extend its action to other similar periodicals.
In the early modern age, urban phonospheres of the Catholic western Mediterranean were defined within the ceremonial framework of civil religion. Hence the homogeneity of the rituals in which they were generated and of the institutions that produced them. The hegemony, or direct rule, of the Spanish monarchy contributes to the composition of a uniform image. Does this necessarily imply the predictability or equality of the phonospheres in the different cities?
This study session proposes to approach the topic by comparing four cities - Barcelona, Naples, Palermo and Valencia - that are being studied by the participants of the project "Sounding Cities. Mediterranean Urban Phonospheres (1500-1900)". The session will explore these cities through two journeys that symbolize Hispanic monarchical power: the material journey of Francisco Benavides, Count of Santisteban (1640-1716), and the symbolic journey of the devotion to the Immaculate Conception.
After being viceroy of Sardinia, Sicily and Naples, Santisteban returned to Madrid in 1696, with short stops in Rome, Venice, Milan, Turin, Genoa, Marseilles and Barcelona. The study of the ceremonies that greeted him in each city allows a comparative reconstruction of the respective phonospheres. Earlier, in Palermo, Santisteban transformed the city's seafront to create a specific theatrical space for the performance of serenades. We will examine how these nocturnal celebrations were integrated with new theatrical spectacles (opera) and traditional practices (processions and luminarias). These data will be contrasted with the nocturnal entertainments typical of the civic ceremonies celebrated in Barcelona. In particular, the luminarias were usually accompanied by the music of different instrumental groups that played from the top of towers and high parts of buildings.
The kings Philip III (†1621) and Philip IV (†1655) strongly supported the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Between 1618 and 1619 this cult was imposed in Naples with ceremonies that shook the city, in particular the landing of the Virgin and her procession from the port to the centre: a founding event that consolidated this devotion as part of Neapolitan history to the present day. The same monarchical commitment had very different results in Valencia. The devotion to the Immaculate was traditionally very popular, and its proclamation became a means of expressing dissent in public ceremonies: at various times in the 17th century, in the Valencian phonosphere, the sonorous image of conflict replaced that of festive concord.
These case studies provide the methodological foundation for future systematic work. On the one hand, we aim to investigate the effective equality of sound production and the relevance of differences in the four cities surveyed and beyond. On the other hand, the communicative processes of which they are part will be examined in order to understand the purposes for which these resources are manipulated, and the reception and decoding of the messages: thus going beyond a strictly factual reconstruction and delving into symbolic construction. On this basis, comparative objects not considered here can be integrated into the research, with a primary interest in the urban phonospheres of the southern and eastern Mediterranean.
In her Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro, Cristina Magaldi describes Italian opera as an “enduring force in European colonialism.” During the nineteenth century, European companies populated opera theaters in Latin America, bringing with them the belief that opera had the power of elevating or modernizing its audiences–a particularly important feature to local elites trying to escape racialization and otherization by external powers.
The aim of this work is to examine how the transnational traveling opera circuit operated in the post-colonial nations of Latin America during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the triangle Rio de Janeiro-Buenos Aires-Montevideo. While these companies impacted the identitarian formation of South American nations by promoting the diffusion of European musical and ideological ideals, they also had to make a multitude of adjustments in their business model to make it thrive in the region–like using derivative arrangements for voice and piano, or the performance of opera in events that mixed the genre with dance musics, some of them with African influences. Particularly in Brazil, Italian opera was also implicated with remnants of colonialism, sometimes exploiting the labor of enslaved Black musicians and choir singers in their regional productions. In this sense, Italian opera presence in the region may have been much more diverse, multi racial, and transcultural than the categorization as a “force in European colonialism” may reveal. Migration and the growth of Italian communities, as well as racial theories that perceived European presence in the region as a way of improving population profile by whitewashing also explain the preference for a music genre that represented European whiteness. Drawing from a decolonial framework (with particular emphasis on works by Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, but also with contributions from feminist decolonial scholars like Maria Lugones), this paper intends to examine how colonialism, racial theories, migration and diaspora modified the business of traveling opera in South America, while highlighting the participation of a racialized workforce that has been overlooked and marginalized in Latin American musicology.
Material expressions of power function as fundamental instruments of empire, creating controlled environments that encompass both colonizers and colonized. It is therefore unsurprising that the French administration in Indochina, between the 19th and 20th centuries, undertook expensive construction projects to solidify their authority over Southeast Asia, including the establishment of theaters in Hanoi, Haiphong, and Saigon, designed for the performance of opera and operetta [Kleinen, 2014]. These performance venues served multiple purposes. Their architecture symbolized France’s technological superiority, while the productions exalted French culture. Together, opera and the opera house embodied both the illustrious past of the metropole and the triumphant future of its empire. The case of Hanoi is particularly revealing. Although opera activities began in the late 19th century, it was only in the early decades of the 20th century that the city established a regular opera season. By recreating a semblance of French cultural life in this distant corner of Southeast Asia, colonial officials sought to strengthen ties with Europe and affirm their civilizing mission [McClellan, 2003]. However, transportation difficulties—both internal, via river routes, and external, as touring companies endured long and exhausting journeys from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Tonkin—along with exorbitant costs and the indifference of the local Vietnamese population, underscored Hanoi’s isolation. Many years later, following a prolonged period of war and political upheaval, that cultural divide has narrowed. Today, the vitality with which Vietnamese institutions and musicians perform and hybridize the Western classical repertoire reflects a dynamic engagement with this once-imposed tradition.
When studying basso continuo practices as historical musicologists or theorists, we usually examine treatises and compare them with the music of ‘great’ composers in order to formulate analysis, reflect on creative processes, or to draw insights for performance practice. However, our knowledge of these practices remains tied to specific exemplary cases, with the risk of ‘incomplete’ reconstructions (Christensen, 2023), especially if we ask a few hero-musicians to narrate the story of entire socio-cultural context.
David R. M. Irving has recently pointed out the importance of exchange and circulation processes (‘Musical Transactions’) of practices and knowledge for a better understanding of eighteenth-century music (Irving, 2024). Yet transactions of accompaniment practices did not only take place between people operating in geographically distant cities (such as a cembalist working in Kiel and one in Badajoz), but also among musicians active in the same cultural environment but having different roles and social statuses within it. In Venice, for instance, basso continuo was used not only in what we now call ‘art music’, but also in many ‘popular’ musical events. The same phenomenon happened in other European countries in the Mediterranean area, such as Spain or France.
I will first consider the treatise L'Armonico pratico by Francesco Gasparini (Venice, 1708) alongside a series of short anonymous manuscripts teaching the basics of basso continuo practice. Secondly, I will compare compositions by Albinoni, Lotti, Vivaldi, the so-called ‘great masters’ with a collection of ‘popular’ canzonette ‘da battello’ (boat songs). In so doing I will demonstrate the widespread diffusion of certain harmonic models and their use at different levels of complexity, depending on the destinations of the music and the performative goals.
From this analysis, it will be evident that in Ancient Regime Venetian society these stylistic patterns represented a potential instrument of social aggregation: they were actually not only ‘transcultural models’ (La Via 2014), but even possibly ‘trans-social’ tools, i.e. capable of bringing together people belonging to a similar cultural milieu but to different social classes.
From the early sixteenth century, lutenists, guitarists, and keyboard players understood chords and how to use them. These instrumentalists understood what we now call functional harmony and used it in practice long before it was codified by theorists. In the same way that the unwritten practices of singer-songwriters throughout the sixteenth century have have not been accommodated into the historiography of renaissance music, the practices of musicians who thought in chords have not been assimilated alongside those whose understanding of the inner workings of music was based on counterpoint. Composers of polyphony appear to have period remained largely impervious to the notion of aggregated harmonic structures, sometimes trying to explain more complex vertical relationships using the language of counterpoint. It was as if two musical worlds existed alongside one another, independently.
Amid the musical innovations of the early seventeenth century, previously undefined notions of chords and harmony began to solidify. The triad was defined by German theologian and music theorist Johannes Lippius in his Synopsis musicae novae (1612) just after Italian guitarist Girolamo Montesardo established the guitar’s alfabeto chord system in his Nuova inventione d'intavolatura (1606). Instead of looking forward, the purpose of this paper is to initiate new discussion of what came before, using the broader methodological trends of contemporary musicology. This study commences from a sociological base that explores institutions, musical employment, education and other areas that can help us understand more about the ways in which two largely discrete musical cultures coexisted during the sixteenth century. It moves from the sociological to the musical, attempting to make sense of a dual system of music theory that is neither documented in writings from the period nor acknowledged in contemporary studies but that is abundantly evident in the musical legacy of the period.
Nunneries participated in cultural and liturgical exchanges involving music at national and international levels, particularly through the existing networks of their religious orders, which connected Hispanic cities to other European centres and also to the New World. This paper addresses processes of musical-cultural exchange in convent spaces, arguing that nunneries were an important focus of dissemination of music and musical discourse crossing geographical boundaries. It appears that these networks not only served to disseminate musical artefacts and musical discourse, but also for the transmission of oral repertoires. The Carmelite Order offers a prime example, in this case stemming from Teresa of Avila’s tradition of composing poems to be sung at daily recreational gatherings, as this practice was transferred to Carmelite convents founded in France and the Low Countries in the seventeenth century.
This roundtable addresses the IMS conference’s general theme on Global Mediterranean and Postcolonial Music Histories by re-assessing the role of Italian Fascist radio broadcasting against a global backdrop. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds—including ethnography, history, musicology, migration studies, and media studies—this session will discuss and problematize how Italian Fascism leveraged music and radio broadcasting to shape and disseminate propaganda across Mediterranean and global routes during the interwar period.
Between the 1920s and the 1940s, Italy witnessed the rise to power of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, the expansion of its colonial domains in North and East Africa and the concurrent centralization and institutionalization of emerging cultural and technological forms such as radio broadcasting. As radio became a mass medium and public institution, infrastructural investments in long-distance transmissions (particularly in short-wave broadcasting), alongside the imperialistic drive and the drastic change in international diplomacy brought about by the Fascism regime, cooperated in establishing new world-wide channels for circulation and dissemination of national music, and cultural and sonic propaganda.
This roundtable examines how these changes re-shaped the soundscape along various axes within and from the Mediterranean, and how these soundscapes contributed to political and cultural projects of territorial expansion while simultaneously fostering assimilationist narratives abroad. By addressing these questions, the roundtable participants will also reflect on the value of an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the intersections of mediated sound, politics, and mobility.
In their joint intervention titled “Mediterranean Radioscapes: Locating Italy’s Radio Programming in its Imperialist and Global Fascist Context (1930-1939),” two of the participants will focus primarily on the role played by Fascist radio broadcasting in connecting ties with allies and with the newly conquered territories. They will first address how Italian state broadcaster EIAR established new infrastructural facilities to support shortwave transmissions directed toward Eastern and Northern Africa populations. Secondly, they will deal with music-focused programming pursued in Italy’s programme exchanges and joint broadcasts with Germany and Japan, with an attention to the musical repertoire used to perform Italy’s newly proclaimed ‘Roman Empire. The next contribution, “From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic: Fascist Propaganda and American Assimilation in the IBC Radioscape (1930-1941)” will illustrate how Italian Fascist ideology and propaganda intruded and influenced political imaginaries and listening practices among the Italian listeners of the International Broadcasting Corp network in 1930s and the 1940a United States.
Finally, the paper titled “The Call of the Motherland: Fascist Radio Propaganda for Italians in the United States,” will explore how Italian-language radio programs, broadcast both from Italy and U.S. commercial stations, sought to align Italian Americans with Mussolini’s foreign policy. These radio programs fostered a connection to the ancestral homeland, but they ultimately failed to weaken Italian Americans’ loyalty to the United States.
The question of Spain by European musical Romanticism has to be posed in ontic (ontology: the essence) and epistemic (epistemology: the ways of understanding it) terms. On the one hand, the question of Spain's being, of what it was in itself, is conditioned by the way it was seen by the European powers in the natural course of colonialism since the 19th century. On the other hand, Spain's image of itself oscillated between coinciding with the vision of these powers or claiming its own style. These epistemic ways of knowing and accepting both the ontology of others and one's own are intertwined and occur simultaneously in a sea of connections such as the Mediterranean.
In music, the orientalist current refers to works composed from the West that seek to evoke aspects of the East. Spain was typified as a gateway to the properly Oriental by European music and, in many cases, accepted the meanings without fear of resembling its near Other: the Islamic world. Thus, the Alhambrist style was very common in Spanish compositions of the time. However, the unbearable similarity of the Islamic Other also occurred, translating into nationalist musical currents that claimed a style of their own, alien to the Arab, or into a warlike musical Africanism that broke the dialogue between East and West.
Llorenç Barber’s involvement in the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt during the late 1960s and 1970s stands as a critical moment in his development as a composer and a figure in the Spanish avant-garde. In this paper, I explore Barber’s experience at Darmstadt, both as an observer and participant in a musical world that contrasted sharply with the political climate of Franco’s Spain. Having attended the courses in 1969, 1970, 1972, and 1976, Barber witnessed the experimental music scene, forging connections with key figures such as Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti, and George Crumb, as well as contemporaries from Spain like Eduardo Polonio, Paco Otero, and Ángel Oliver.
The paper delves into Barber’s personal account of the transformative impact of Darmstadt on his musical journey. He highlights key moments, such as the European premieres of Terry Riley’s In C and Helmut Lachenmann’s Air-Musik for large orchestra and percussion, and the premiere of Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen. These encounters deeply influenced Barber’s creative trajectory, including his engagement with new trends such as neotonality, minimalism, and mysticism, which were emerging as alternatives to European post-serialism. Notably, his involvement in the 1976 Kranichsteiner Musikpreis-winning composition Quatre Caps reflects his commitment to exploring new forms of collective music-making.
However, Barber’s experiences at Darmstadt were set against the backdrop of political upheaval in Spain, marked by the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and the violence that accompanied its end. His account juxtaposes the revolutionary spirit he encountered in Darmstadt with the constraints and tensions he faced back in Spain, where musicians struggled to confront their dictatorial past. In this context, Barber's founding of Grup Actum in Valencia and his broader engagement with the international avant-garde reflect his response to the political and musical challenges of the era. This paper seeks to illuminate Barber’s unique perspective on Darmstadt and its significance for composers in Spain during a time of profound political and cultural transformation.
This paper explores two modalities of aesthetic reception of Hispanism, as a Mediterranean cultural current arrived and renewed since the Spanish conquest, in two musical fields in the region of Cuyo (Argentinian central-western) in the first half of the 20th century. Differences can be observed in the appropriation of poetry, the Castilian language and the European musical heritage, which arrived from the peninsula, in the academic and popular spheres.
To demonstrate this, we turn to the poetic-musical production of two musicians whose repertoires circulated in different social areas. On the one hand, the folk songbook of oral tradition in the voice of the poet and musician Eusebio Dojorti [nicknamed Buenaventura Luna]. Born in the rural hinterland of the region, he was the ‘gaucho decidor’ of popular customs, myths and experiences. On the other hand, the choral, orchestral and solo compositions created by the composer, pianist and choir conductor Inocencio Aguado Aguirre, a Spanish immigrant who settled in Cuyo in 1912.
From the perspective of Postcolonial Studies —which maintains the theoretical conceptions of the subaltern subject and the idea of Europe as a ‘silent’ referent of any historical construction (Chacrabarty, 1999)— the duality and ambiguities that lead to the clarification of the historical subjects that appear in this local history of music are raised. Ambivalent subjects, for the popular oral culture and for the enlightened academic culture of the region, who question and discuss politically the totalising representativeness of Argentine cultural nationalism from a situated and anti-elitist perspective; but, on the other hand, they assimilate casteism as an integral element of their ideological autonomy in the case of Inocencio Aguado and of their Cuyo identity in the case of Buenaventura Luna.
Annette et Lubin (1762), an opéra-comique adapted by Justine Favart from Jean-François Marmontel’s moral tale, examines the interplay between religious and secular authority through marriage law and social ethics. At its core is the conflict arising from the protagonists’ consanguineous relationship, challenging moral norms and legal frameworks. The work highlights systemic inconsistencies in Ancien Régime law, such as flawed dispensations and secular power abuses, revealing contradictions and inequities. Compared to Marmontel’s tale, Favart’s libretto omits sensitive elements, particularly regarding ecclesiastical institutions and morally contentious actions. Yet, the opera retains its focus on tensions between natural law, religious prescriptions, and emerging secular legislation, reflecting Enlightenment legal thought.
The principal reason for these omissions, in my view, lies in the need to accommodate audience sensibilities and elicit their sympathy more effectively. Annette et Lubin cultivates a form of “worldly-sensuous sympathy,” heightening the emotional weight of the protagonists’ ethical dilemma. This effect is further reinforced by its musical components, which include vaudeville melodies, original ariettes, and songs drawn from various composers. Despite their diverse origins, these musical elements collectively serve to engage spectators in reflecting on the legal and moral issues embedded in the work.
By scrutinizing marriage law’s dynamics, Annette et Lubin critiques 18th-century legal and social structures while advancing Enlightenment ideals. It underscores the waning influence of religious authority in favor of secular governance and raises enduring questions about law, morality, and justice. This study contextualizes the work as both a cultural and legal mirror while incorporating its literary source (Marmontel’s tale) and another derivative work (La Borde’s pastoral), offering insights into its role in institutional transformations in 18th-century France.
In 1956, the play Orfeu da Conceição, by poet and composer Vinícius de Moraes, premiered in Rio de Janeiro, featuring music by Tom Jobim and modernist sets by Oscar Niemeyer, performed by the Teatro Experimental do Negro company. The text, transposed the mythical episode of Orpheus and Eurydice to the Rio carnival and was later adapted into film Black Orpheus (1959), directed by Marcel Camus. The soundtrack, composed by Tom Jobim, Luís Bonfá, Vinícius de Moraes and Antônio Maria, contains elements of the emerging Bossa Nova, and achieved wide transoceanic circulation. The frenetic percussive rhythm stands out in the score, supporting the visual and choreographic frenzy that aesthetically marks the production. Often criticized, and rightly so, as a stereotyped and unrealistic representation of life in Rio, it nevertheless seems consistent with the attempt to relate the ritual dimension of the Orpheus myth (it is worth noting that Marcel Camus had been initiated into Orphic rituals) to Brazilian carnival, interpreted by Camus as a collective trance, spiritually founded on Afro-Brazilian religions.
The Orpheus/carnival connection and the criticism this production enlicited echo another connection that marked musical experimentalism centuries erlier: that between Orpheus and opera. As the tutelary deity of music and poetry, Orpheus lent his persona to decisive experiments in the genesis of the operatic genre, such as Jacopo Peri's tragedia per musica Euridice (1600), Giulio Caccini's tragedy in stile rappresentativo Euridice (1602) and Monteverdi's favola in musica Orfeo (1607), which similarly faced critiques regarding verisimilitude. In our presentation, we will reflect on the aesthetic-musical experimentations to which the myth of Orpheus has lent symbolic force since the onset of Modernity. A figure who traverses the relms of the living and the dead, Orpheus also represented, in his journey between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, as we can see, the transit between the world of speech and the world of song, and between the erudite and the popular.
The exchange of correspondence between the Mallorcan folklorist Antonio Noguera (1858–1904) and the Valencian Eduardo López-Chavarri Marco (1871–1970) provides a valuable source of information regarding the study of musical nationalism in Spain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A comprehensive analysis of their correspondence, with a focus on the collection and adaptation of traditional music, illuminates how both authors delved into the potential of formulating a repertoire firmly embedded in local customs while unveiling novel avenues for expression and interpretation—always under the mentorship of Felipe Pedrell.
This collection of letters, one of the most comprehensive in the López-Chavarri archive, is analyzed as part of the MUSred project. The project, titled "Música, redes y nacionalismo: análisis de la conciencia restauradora a través de la correspondencia de Eduardo López-Chavarri Marco (1871–1970)," is funded by the Generalitat Valenciana and led by the MUSurba research group, "València. Territori sonor. Musicologia i cultura urbana," at the Universidad Internacional de Valencia. The project's comprehensive database, encompassing over seven hundred contacts, reveals an extensive network of composers, musicologists, folklorists, performers, painters, and writers from diverse backgrounds.
This paper will present the identified network of contacts and analyze how these connections facilitated the dissemination and consolidation of traditional repertoires across various cultural domains. In the course of this analysis, the role of intellectual networks in shaping identity discourses will be examined, offering insights into the processes of cultural construction in turn-of-the-century Spain. Preliminary findings from the correspondence between Noguera and López-Chavarri will be used to shed light on the practices that contributed to the formation of nationalist discourses in music and culture.
Project Overview:
The Zajal Digital Chronicles project seeks to establish an interactive digital archive dedicated to preserving and transmitting Lebanese Zajal—an oral poetic tradition deeply rooted in Lebanon’s cultural heritage. By integrating modern digital technologies and a participatory approach, this initiative ensures the longevity and accessibility of this art form in an evolving digital landscape.
Drawing inspiration from The Atlas Group by Walid Raad, the project employs a hybrid approach, blending authentic archives with enriched digital narratives to captivate audiences and adapt Zajal to contemporary media dynamics. It leverages advanced tools such as augmented reality (AR), content management systems (CMS), and social media platforms to document, archive, and disseminate Zajal performances, fostering an interactive and immersive experience.
Key Objectives:
• Preservation and Transmission: Digitizing Zajal performances while maintaining their oral and performative essence.
• Interactivity and Participation: Enabling users to explore, engage with, and contribute their own narratives, strengthening collective memory.
• Accessibility and Dissemination: Expanding Zajal’s reach to younger generations, the Lebanese diaspora, and global audiences through innovative digital formats.
• Cultural Impact Analysis: Evaluating the influence of digital technologies on the transmission of oral heritage and measuring audience engagement.
Expected Outcomes:
The project aims to produce an enriched, interactive digital archive, fostering stronger community engagement and facilitating intergenerational and intercultural transmission. Additionally, it provides a framework for analyzing the impact of digital methodologies on intangible cultural heritage preservation.
By exploring the intersections of technology, collective memory, and oral tradition, Zajal Digital Chronicles presents a pioneering model for documenting and revitalizing oral traditions in the digital age.
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We will probably never know how the earliest Christian chants were related to Jewish chants, due to the lack of ancient sources. Nevertheless, some later notations of Gregorian and synagogue chants suggest a relationship. This paper discusses one such case: the melodies of the Jewish hymn Aleinu (“We Must Praise”) and a nearly identical Sanctus. Aleinu, like the more famous Kol nidrei, belongs to a small group of chants that are revered as if they were part of the Sinaitic revelation. Although no “melodies from Sinai” are notated before 1740, they are commonly considered medieval. Among these melodies, Aleinu stands out for two reasons: it closely resembles a fourteenth-century Sanctus, and a twelfth-century Hebrew chronicle claims that thirty Jewish martyrs sang Aleinu while being burned at the stake in 1171. Two questions arise: did the martyrs sing the traditional chant, and was the Sanctus derived from it?
Abraham Idelsohn mentioned the “conspicuous similarity” of Aleinu and Sanctus without discussing the details (1926). Eric Werner implied, but did not show, a relationship (1959). Hanoch Avenary sought to establish musical parameters for the “melodies from Sinai” as a genre (1972). Geoffrey Goldberg summarized, but didn’t investigate, the relevant historical issues (2019). Jonathan Friedmann discussed the history of the term “melodies from Sinai” without evaluating the music (2019).
Despite the centrality of Aleinu and Sanctus in their respective traditions, nobody has yet compared them systematically. This paper fills the gap, showing that a close reading of the chronicle casts doubt on the historicity of the martyrs’ singing of Aleinu, while a musical analysis reveals that the chants are not so closely related as had been thought. Offering a new appraisal of an old interreligious puzzle, this comparative study enhances our understanding of the history of both Jewish and Gregorian chant.
This doctoral dissertation approaches the origins and development of the first saxophone ensembles in Brazil and demonstrates that this process took place through the symbiotic relationship between opera and band repertoires between 1888 and 1938, and served as the mainspring of Brazilian chamber music for this newly invented instrument. The interaction between concert and popular genres in operatic performances and the band environment led composers to explore new timbres, driving the creation of a specific repertoire for saxophone ensembles. The initial repertoire produced in Brazil had a hybrid character, with sonorities and particularities linked to the development of Brazilian music in the first half of the 20th century, as a result of a transculturation process that took place in philharmonic and military bands. This phenomenon can be observed in the diversity of influences, ranging from Italian opera to Brazilian tango, as well as sacred music and stylized Afro-Brazilian dances. The circulation of national and international genres in the repertoire of these instrumental ensembles occurred through the mediation between orchestral, operatic, and band music, via the practices of transcription, adaptation, and arrangement, which resulted in the production of works specifically written for saxophone chamber ensembles. This process is part of a broader context in which music is seen as the result of social constructions, influenced by historical, political, and cultural events. The diverse approach, involving the cross-referencing of hemerographic sources, musical manuscripts and editions, concert programs, iconographic materials, phonograms, and others, allowed for the identification of traces and events, whose analysis pointed to a symbiotic process that began half a century after the invention of the saxophone. This dissertation reaffirms the commitment to preserving Brazil’s musical heritage, enabling its broad access, dissemination, and a new understanding of the histories of the saxophone in Brazil.
Raymond Guiot and Angelo Persichilli are remembered as significant flautists and teachers of the twentieth century in Italy. Research on flute pedagogy during this period has been dominated by a particular focus on France and the Paris Conservatoire, and there is a void of doctoral research on flute pedagogy in Italy during this time. One existing study on Raymond Guiot has a focus on his years teaching in Paris, and there is no known research study on Angelo Persichilli. My doctoral thesis aims to correct this imbalance by providing an examination of the contribution of both flautists, particularly during the period in which they delivered three-year examined courses at the Accademia italiana del flauto (AIF) in Rome. My thesis examines forgotten Italian flautists who have unfortunately been overshadowed by research on other contemporary flautists of their time. Due to the lacuna of research on flute pedagogy in Italy, my thesis offers an opportunity to learn more about master flautists in Italy of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It is the first known doctoral thesis with a focus on the AIF in Rome, reforms to musical Higher Education Institutions in Italy, and several Italian composers are re-discovered. Furthermore, there is little published work on Guiot’s teaching methods and no known research on his flute teaching in Italy during the twentieth century. Throughout my presentation, I will highlight how my doctoral thesis will be a reference for future research, and I will unpack the conceptual framework that underpins my research. I will underline the strong intercultural, interlingual, and intersemiotic elements to my thesis, with primary source materials in Italian and French examined throughout: including pre-existing audio and written musical data; new and original interviews with key participants; articles from the flute magazines Syrinx and Traversières; published books, and other material.
The research analyzes the discourse constructed around the aesthetic trends of the repertoire performed by the Philharmonic and Symphonic Orchestras of Havana during the 1920s, under the direction of Pedro Sanjuán (San Sebastián, 1886–Washington, 1976) and Gonzalo Roig (Havana, July 20, 1890–June 13, 1970), respectively. These orchestras, which were in competition during their early years, reflect how various constructions and representations of national identity in music were shaped by the meanings discursively constructed around their concerts and repertoire. The study explores how these disputes over meaning manifested in the intellectual and cultural spheres, within a context where avant-garde movements and conservative sectors defended opposing perspectives on national musical expression. Within this framework, the analysis also examines the transatlantic exchanges between Spain and Cuba, focusing on how the repertoire performed by these orchestras was influenced by European musical traditions and practices, and the implications of these foreign influences in the debates that were generated. To this end, concert programs, newspaper clippings, and press articles, collected in albums from both personal and institutional archives of the National Museum of Music of Havana, Cuba, are considered as texts that, due to their communicative nature, both influence and are influenced by the processes of meaning construction surrounding the concerts and orchestras.
My dissertation results from a larger four-year collaborative project conducted at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb, Croatia, and funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. The project focused on the first three domestic record companies. The term “domestic” implies the historical context in which Zagreb – the companies’ headquarters – was nested within larger political entities: two Yugoslavia and the Independent State of Croatia. These political contexts influenced the record production to include music from various ethnic groups existing across the states mentioned above, which today comprise Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. The research covers a three-decade period between 1926 and 1959, during which observed companies – Edison Bell Penkala, Elektroton, and Jugoton – produced so-called shellac or 78 RPM records. Specifically, the thesis examines both the domestic and international markets in which these companies operated, aiming to determine their position relative to foreign labels and their impact on consumers, society (including diasporic communities), and everyday musical life, including detecting their contemporary echoes. It also explores the companies’ business strategies, illustrating that these were shaped not only by economic but also by broader political, social, and cultural factors that shape the market per anthropological definitions. With its reverse chronological and cyclic concept, the study takes a non-linear approach, so rather than emphasizing chronological developments, it focuses on various market aspects, such as operations in monopolistic and oligopolistic markets, production, advertising, expansion, and key collaborations, among which the most significant turned out to be radio, consequently analyzed in detail. With its specific research focus (market in the past), methodology (predominantly archive work), and interdisciplinary theoretical framework, the dissertation contributes to the fields of economic and historical ethnomusicology.
From the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the next one, theatre was a mass phenomenon, becoming a social shaping tool for many Enlightenment philosophers. This conception led to a series of ethical and aesthetic controversies on the stage and its music through Hispanic and Portuguese territories. They took place in different spheres: political, religious, administrative and properly theatrical. Parallel to the above, identity symbols of what some people called “nations” were established in Iberian societies. This Ph.D. thesis focuses on the interrelation of scenic and identity events, paying special attention to the ambivalent role that Galician migrants played. To achieve this, genres such as the Spanish “tonadilla” or the Portuguese “entremez” are analyzed from an interdisciplinary and ethnosymbolistic perspective, in addition to the trips across the sea that Italian opera companies made until they reached the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. For this purpose, primary sources were consulted in more than 35 archives and libraries located in cities such as Madrid, Lisbon, Coimbra, Porto, Santiago de Compostela or A Coruña, among others. Based on the research carried out, it is concluded that musical theatre not only reflected various collective identities, but also influenced their formation.
El libro de madrigales Armonía Espiritual (Madrid, 1624) del violón de la corte española Stefano Limido (?-1647) contiene once obras en castellano basadas en poemas de temática religiosa de algunos de los escritores más representativos del Siglo de Oro. Tras haber profundizado y analizado el
volumen y explorado su contexto histórico, devocional y musical, se puede afirmar que existe en él una confluencia de características excepcionales, -comparándolo con los repertorios publicados en España
durante ese periodo-, que coexisten con otros rasgos más habituales en la música espiritual de la época.Este trabajo parte de un estudio exhaustivo del impreso a nivel material, formal y de contenido, así como de su contextualización dentro del proceso de confesionalización en el que
estaba inmersa la España de la época. Para entender dicho contexto, la investigación se acerca a los conceptos y dogmas eclesiásticos que fueron impulsados por el Concilio y aquellas instituciones y manifestaciones devocionales que los proyectaron, así como a las herramientas que fueron esenciales en su difusión, como los sermones de los predicadores, los libros de meditaciones, los tratados de oratoria religiosa o la poesía espiritual de la época.
Tras profundizar en los madrigales de Limido a través del contenido de los textos, así como en los principales rasgos de su lenguaje compositivo, -tradicional y en ciertos aspectos extemporáneo-, se establece su conexión con los mecanismos de confesionalización mencionados y con la retórica clásica, no sólo a través de determinados recursos de la oratoria eclesiástica reflejados en la música, sino también mediante la estructura en seis partes de los sermones de los predicadores, presente en los madrigales del compositor italiano. En definitiva, Armonía espiritual reúne algunos rasgos habituales a repertorios de la época pero también posee características excepcionales,
fundamentalmente en su clara relación con los postulados tridentinos y sus mecanismos de difusión, que, en conjunto, lo convierten en un libro inusitado.
Palabras clave: madrigal espiritual, devocional, sermón, predicación, libros de meditación
ABSTRACT
The book of madrigals Armonía espiritual (Madrid, 1624) by the Spanish court violinist Stefano Limido (?-1647) contains eleven works based on poems in Spanish with religious themes by some of the most representative writers of the Golden Age. After having delved into and analyzed the
volume and having explored its historical, artistic, devotional and musical context, it can be stated that there exists in it a confluence of exceptional characteristics, -comparing it with the repertoires published
during that period-, which coexist with other more common features in the spiritual music of this epoch.
This work is based on an exhaustive study of the printed matter at a material, formal and content level, as well as its contextualization within the process of confessionalization in which Spain at the time was immersed. To understand this context, the research approaches the ecclesiastical concepts and dogmas that were promoted by the Council and those institutions and devotional manifestations that projected them, as well as the tools that were essential in their dissemination, such as the sermons of the preachers, books of meditations, treatises on religious oratory or the spiritual poetry of the time. After delving into Limido's madrigals through the content of the texts, as well as the main features of its compositional language -traditional and in certain aspects extemporaneous-, its connection is established with the aforementioned mechanisms of confessionalization and with classical rhetoric, not only through certain resources of ecclesiastical oratory reflected in music, but also through the six-part structure of the preachers' sermons, present in the madrigals of the Italian composer. In short, Armonía espiritual brings together some common features of repertoires of the
time but also has exceptional characteristics, fundamentally in its clear relationship with the Tridentine postulates and its dissemination mechanisms, which, together, make it an unusual book.
Keywords: spiritual Madrigal, devotional, sermon, preaching, meditation books
The gaps in musical witnesses, produced during the process of tradition or along the paths of dissemination, represent as many open wounds and often compromise the transmission of repertoires in space and time. Sometimes, however, this loss is not irreparable but transforms into a stimulus to analyse the compositions that have reached us incomplete with more attention and seek strategies to make them performable again.
Among the repertoires most affected by this issue is the polyphonic music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often published in separate parts and reaching us incomplete due to the dispersion of one or more part-books.
Because of such gaps, thousands of incomplete compositions, originally no less significant than those which are still complete, have fallen into oblivion: they are neither studied nor transcribed, as if they had never existed. Even complete compositions within incomplete collections are often overlooked by scholars and performers, distorting modern understandings of the music of the past.
The poster illustrates the results of the Mus.I.Care project, created to address this topic and investigate the incomplete polyphonic collections of sacred and secular music printed in Italy (1580-1640). The project aims to:
- census incomplete musical sources;
- quantify the proportion of incomplete collections in relation to complete ones;
- analyse the extent and nature of missing parts;
- identify later editions that could help restore the musical text of incomplete first editions;
- detect the presence of complete compositions preserved within incomplete collections;
- identify and promote incomplete compositions of historical or musical interest through music editions, reconstruction of missing parts and performance.
By uncovering and reassessing these overlooked compositions, Mus.I.Care seeks to restore their rightful place in musical history, ensuring a more complete and accurate understanding of our musical past.
This project examines contemporary audiovisual languages, focusing on compositional processes that integrate timbral, melodic, and rhythmic elements from the Mediterranean basin with orchestral and electronic music. The analysis spans from 1984, the release year of Dune, to 2024, marked by Hans Zimmer’s score for Dune: Part Two, a model for blending ancient Mediterranean music, orchestral traditions, and electronic soundscapes.
The first goal is to analyze selected film scores from the past forty years to catalog Mediterranean instruments used. The second is to explore how electronic music interacts with orchestral writing and Mediterranean sonorities, particularly Arabic and Greek, creating unprecedented dramaturgical power. The third goal involves developing Dioniso 2.0, a musical library allowing composers to merge visual media with electronically manipulated ancient music, highlighting a method that reconnects humanity with its primordial essence amidst societal fragmentation and recombination.
Dioniso 2.0 will serve as a catalog of sound samples, offering authentic scales and tunings, while showcasing the potential of electronic manipulation techniques. These approaches provide Western composers access to the vast, untapped reservoir of Mediterranean sonorities, encouraging innovation through recombination.
Ultimately, the project identifies a thread linking futuristic, distorted visions of human society with soundtracks that restore a fundamental connection to the origins of humanity. By recovering and reinventing ancient Mediterranean sounds, these compositions offer a pathway to re-establish a germinal link between the past and the present, highlighting the enduring relevance of this cultural heritage in contemporary audiovisual expression.
Considered the most innovative composer of the first half of the 20th century in Cuba and a pioneer of the Latin American music of his time (White, 2003), Alejandro García Caturla (1906-1940) represents a leading figure of the so-called Afro-Cuban art music. The iconoclastic language of his work positions his work within a framework of staunch modernism and experimentation, in line with the modernist ideo-aesthetic premises wielded by the progressive intelligentsia (“Grupo Minorista”) of republican (post-colonial) Havana in the 1920s. After sailing the Atlantic-Mediterranean waters twice (1928 and 1929), Paris, epicenter of the artistic movement that highlighted “black” and “primitivist” art (Moore, 1997), opens to the incipient Cuban composer the longed-for doors of its avant-garde circuits, with the premieres at the Salle Gaveau of his Dos poemas afrocubanos, with text by Carpentier, and Bembé, as well as the publication of several of his works by Editions Maurice Senart. Unlike the “colonialist” appropriation of African art by the Parisian artistic and intellectual orbits, which emerged in its most commercial and popular version in the city's nightlife circuits, the Afro-Cubanism of the young Garcia Caturla - “force of nature” according to his fleeting mentor, Boulanger (Henriquez and Gonzalez, 1986)- hails for an art where the black cultural universe stands as an irrecusable expression of the Caribbean, the American and the universal. His epistemic disobedience to the then core of European modernity, as well as to the episteme of the Europeanizing Havana elites, raises a question of substantial interest for this communication: Is the Afro-Cubanist music of García Caturla, a young white man of suigeneris academic training, a rupturist proposal of “de-Westernization” (Mignolo, 2015) and “Afrotopia” (Sarr, 2016) that evidences the fertilization of new aesthetic, sonorous and identity paradigms in 20th century art music?
The epic poem Erotokritos, composed by Vitsentzos Kornaros in 17th-century Crete, is a key work of Cretan literature. With its 10,012 rhyming fifteen-syllable verses in the local dialect, it tells the story of the love between Erotokritos and Aretousa, exploring themes of honour, friendship, and perseverance. While originally a literary piece, the poem gained renewed life in the 20th century through Nikos Xylouris, a central figure in the Cretan folk music revival. His renditions, starting in the late 1970s, reinterpreted the poem, blending traditional Cretan sounds with modern influences, and making it a symbol of Cretan identity.
This study examines Erotokritos’ journey from its Venetian roots to its 20th-century revival. In addition to Xylouris’s recordings, field recordings from Crete and Corfu, where the poem spread and took on local melodic variations, will be analyzed. These interpretations reflect the adaptability of this musical heritage across regional contexts.
Drawing on my works on Cretan music (2017, 2025) and Alexandros M. Hatzikiriakos’s 2021 study A maniera greca, which explores the hybridization of Venetian and Cretan musical cultures during Venetian rule, this paper situates Erotokritos within a broader discourse. It connects with Kate van Orden’s Seachanges (2022) on musical revivals, demonstrating how they reactivate historical connections. Contributions from Dawe (2007), Hagleitner (2017), and Hnaraki (2007, 2009, 2011, 2013) provide a critical framework for understanding performance in Mediterranean island societies, while Kallimopoulou (2009) explores music, meaning, and identity in contemporary Greece.
Central to this analysis is the theme of cultural exchange across the Mediterranean, from Venice to Crete, across the Ionian Islands, where the song of Erotokritos transcends time and place, embodying the sea’s role in the exchange of artistic and cultural traditions.
Can music transcend its initial performance, gaining heightened significance within diasporic contexts? How does the reception of a musical event reshape its meaning, spurring the production of new material artifacts that mediate cultural identity and intercultural negotiation? I explore these questions through the re-emergence of a flute score from Ararat, an Armenian avant-garde performance staged by painter Herman Vahramian and composer Ludwig Bazil at the Church of San Maurizio in Milan in 1977.
The intermedial project Ararat featured a musical program that included string quartets, vocal arias, and an a-cappella composition. However, the event additionally featured an introductory flute solo that, unlike the other scores, was notably absent from the performance catalogue. Despite this omission, the flute piece received high praise from Milanese critics, who described its sound as possessing a “primordial” quality. Nine months later, I/COM—a Milanese Armenian publishing house founded by Vahramian and Bazil—issued the score. The accompanying critical notes emphasized the flute solo’s “primordial” character, echoing and expanding upon the media’s reception while subtly revisiting themes from the Ararat project.
Focusing on the cross-cultural implications of the resurfacing performance within a post-traumatic framework, specifically the Armenian diaspora in Milan, my paper examines the deferred action of the Ararat music. I argue that the belated emergence of the flute solo in print vividly illustrates the entanglement of music and ethnicity within the evolving interplay of the Armenian diasporic community and the broader urban cultural environment in which it has settled.
This paper follows the journey of an Italian harpsichord, purchased by renowned New York architect Stanford White during his 1895 European tour, to explore changing attitudes towards early musical instruments in the United States at the turn of the century. After its travels across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, the instrument, known as the “Colonna harpsichord,” probably once owned by the aristocratic Colonna family of Rome and currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, arrived in the United States at a crucial juncture in the history of US American collecting practices. Based on new archival evidence – including White’s private correspondence with dealers, appraisers, piano makers and artists in his circles, as well as records of Italian art export licenses – this paper explores the harpsichord’s journey from a showroom in Venice to White’s Music room in New York, revealing the agents, the negotiations, legal implications and the architect’s initial intentions, which ultimately failed, to restore the instrument to its playing conditions. The story takes an unexpected turn in 1906, when White was killed by his lover’s husband in what became known as the murder of the century. As the story unfolds, the arrival of the harpsichord in New York’s high society circles opens a new window on a number of narratives, including tensions around this failed attempt to bring back the forgotten voice of this mysterious relic of a musical past, the accumulation and aesthetic consumption of foreign goods as markers of elite tastes, and attitudes on collecting of European luxury antiques and art to construct a class identity for the new U.S. American industrial “aristocracy.”
Since 1990 the interaction of contemporary compositional strategies with traditional practices and tonal systems of non-Western music has been increasing in the European new music scene. The question how music material from a different musical culture can be integrated into new music and how this process can be analyzed is the core of many discussions in the last three decades in field of musicology and music analysis. This paper presents the categories of intercultural reception, specifically focused on the use (integration) of selected Arab traditional musical practices into music of 20th and 21st century. In general, the reception of Arab music and its Music Theory in the context of new music has rarely been researched, although it represents an important segment of the global art new music scene. The compositional (intercultural) reception will be demonstrated using analysis of selected compositions written by Swiss composer Klaus Huber, German-Palestinian composer Samir Odeh Tamimi and Egyptian-Austrian composer Amr Okba. As a result of my research and analysis, I will present three categories of mentioned reception which I called: 1) musical difference; 2) aesthetical presentation; 3) Decontextualization. Apart from the analysis, the reception also charts the relationships between different aspects of Arab and Western music since the 1990 and the associated differentiations, connections, and confrontations between these two musical cultures. In addition, the social, spiritual, and political aspects behind the compositional concepts will be also illuminated.
Greece, placed in the center of the Mediterranean basin, has always been a crossroads of goods, ideas and people. During the 19th century, the Greek Revolution inspired artists, poets and musicians who stood beside the Greek people and created masterpieces. Alongside, the Ionian Islands, being under Venetian - instead of Ottoman - rule for many centuries, were the part of Greece closer to Western culture and commerce. Musical migration of Greek and Italian musicians was a natural phenomenon, and research has revealed numerous significant personalities.
Riccardo Bonicioli (Zara 1853-Como 1933), born in Zadar (Dalmatia) - a territory that changed multiple occupiers – had Italian roots from his mother. Although little is known today for his life and work, documents indicate that he was a very active conductor and composer of his era. Traces of his activity are discovered from Greece, Odessa and Italy as far as Argentina. Many documents prove his musical career in Greece for a long period during the 19th century. Due to the fact that he mingled with so many different cultures and histories, and also at a time when nations required their entity, he composed musical works inspired by Greek, Italian and Argentinian history (Marco Botzari, In morte di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Juan de Garay).
This paper aims to compose a brief picture of Bonicioli’s route and work. Light is shed on a document kept in the Department of Manuscripts and Facsimiles of the National Library of Greece; this document gives clues for the music of his opera Marco Botzari (as the score is ignored). Markos Botsaris, the emblematic figure of the Greek Revolution, inspired many 19th century composers. Furthermore, Bonicioli’s musical compositions dedicated to Garibaldi and Botsaris are also considered in parallel.
Rosa Balistreri, a symbol of Sicilian popular music, played a central role in the rediscovery of oral tradition during the Italian folk revival in the 1960s (Tomatis 2016). Her journey unfolds within a context of socio-economic transformations and migrations that influenced the redefinition of Mediterranean musical identity (Nitti 1900). Like Amália Rodrigues for Portuguese fado, Balistreri reinterpreted popular repertoire, transforming it into a means of political and social expression (Van Orden 2023).
Born in Licata in 1927, Balistreri personally experienced female marginalization and poverty, experiences that deeply shaped her singing. Her raw timbre breathed new life into traditional Sicilian songs, turning them into tools of social protest (Piedalue and Rishi 2017). Songs like A pinnula, whose central theme is the contraceptive pill, anticipate feminist issues, positioning Balistreri in contrast to the patriarchal society of her time.
Her collaboration with I Dischi del Sole and Fonit Cetra facilitated the spread of folk repertoire through new channels, also sparking a process of transformation that raises questions about authenticity and the dynamics of cultural hybridization (Carpitella 1958). Comparing her work to that of Amália Rodrigues reveals a shared process of rewriting collective memory, where female agency is manifested through singing as a tool for cultural and social change (Bhabha 1994; Albrecht 2020).
How does their musical legacy continue to influence contemporary practices? Can the folk revival be reconsidered in light of postcolonial theories on memory and cultural identity?
The analysis of these questions offers valuable insights for a debate among ethnomusicologists and musicologists, exploring the interactions between tradition and modernity in the Mediterranean.
Fado, a Portuguese urban folk genre, is often perceived as the Canção de Portugal [the song of Portugal], a symbol of Portuguese identity, the ‘alma’ [soul] of Portugal. However, given its prominence during the Salazar Dictatorship (1933-1974), one does not immediately associate fado with protest music - ‘explicit’ or ‘covert’. There is a lack of research on the subversive use of fado, perhaps due to the prominence of canção de protesto as the obvious musical channel for political protest. Even less studied is the role of Amália Rodrigues, who became the face of fado during the dictatorship and is largely responsible for solidifying fado as a pillar of Portuguese culture and identity. Throughout her career, Amália’s public image adapted to serve social and cultural demands, and as such, she shifted from her position as the ‘Rainha’ [queen] of fado, the face of fado internationally, to the ‘menina do Salazar’ [Salazar’s girl] or ‘Princesa da PIDE’ [the Princess of PIDE – the secret police operating under the dictatorship].Following her centenary in 2020, new evidence has arisen that rebuts the notion of Amália being an advocate of the regime, and instead demonstrates that her political standing was ambiguous and often aligned with the political resistance movements. The central question of this study is not to clarify Amália’s political leanings – her own claim that she was ‘apolitical’ resonates with the uncertainty of charting a career within a dictatorship
while, driven by an acute ‘social conscience’ and innate generosity, providing assistance to oppositionists. The main goal of this work is to discern how this newly revealed subversive facet of Amália is reflected in her musical output, ranging from repertoire to the choice of collaborators and poems, as well as in terms of the development of Amália’s expressive and interpretative range. Given this, I examine ‘Libertação’ as the main case study, supplemented by ‘Abandono’, ‘As Águias’, and ‘Estranha Forma de Vida’ to support this understudied line of en
Augusta Candiani and Marietta Baderna emerged as pivotal figures within the Brazilian artistic landscape of the mid-19th century, marking a significant milestone in the cultural history of the period while also exposing the steep price women paid for defying societal expectations of their time. Engaged in 1844 and 1846, respectively, to join the Italian operatic company performing at the Imperial Theatre of São Pedro de Alcântara in Rio de Janeiro, both artists immigrated from Italy in pursuit of new professional opportunities in the tropics amidst the political upheaval of Italian revolutions. Candiani, a soprano from Milan, and Baderna, a ballerina from Parma and former prima ballerina of La Scala, faced not only the challenges of Rio’s theatrical milieu—such as the devastation caused by yellow fever and precarious working conditions—but also the systemic constraints imposed on women striving for public prominence. Despite these adversities, both artists transcended rigid norms by incorporating elements of Brazilian culture into their performances: Candiani captivated audiences with her performances of modinhas during opera intermissions, while Baderna integrated movements inspired by Afro-Brazilian dances into her choreography, challenging the artistic conventions of the time. In their later years, they devoted themselves to teaching their respective arts, yet their legacies remained largely unrecognized by contemporary society. Candiani faded into historical obscurity, and Baderna’s name entered Brazilian vernacular with a pejorative connotation that distorts her artistic contributions. This paper seeks to reassess and illuminate the cultural and artistic impact of Augusta Candiani and Marietta Baderna in 19th-century Brazil, emphasizing how their work extended beyond the stage to confront societal prejudices. It highlights their struggle to claim significant spaces within a context of cultural transformation and underscores their roles as exemplars of female resistance and resilience in an era of profound social and artistic change.
Used from the era of the crusades till the first half of the 19th century, Sabir was a common language of the Mediterranean countries: a mix of French, Genoese, Venetian, Sicilian, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic. Also known as Le Petit Moresque, it has been registered in a dictionary in 1830 and it has survived only in musical compositions called Moresche and Villanelle, till the last century. This lost language seems to be somehow linked to the Moresca dances that were very popular in the European courts of the renaissance, that were also reproduced in theatre plays.
Analyzing some examples of Sabir in literary works by Molière and Carlo Goldoni, I will propose some reflections on the existence of a Mediterranean archipelagic culture, on its role and representations in the arts as well as in other spheres of everyday life. I will also describe the role of Moresca as instrument of the propaganda against the Islamic religion both in Europe and in the overseas territories of the European colonies, reaching the Americas, Africa, India, Philippines and Sri Lanka.
Between 1537 and 1570, at least 75 different editions (not counting reprints) of Canzoni villanesche alla napolitana were printed, and the phenomenon, formally speaking, continued copiously until beyond the early 1600s, to enumerate, according to our RIM-Novissimo Vogel database-repertoire a total of 180 books. It may seem paradoxical that about 80 % of this rich repertory was printed in Venice rather than Naples. The reasons for this happening are related not only to the great publishing vitality of the Venetians in the 16th century and beyond but also to other reasons that we have investigated through the study of the texts used and set to music by musicians around the figure and school of Adrian Willaert and especially Baldassare Donato.
Among the many subjects of this repertoire, a singular theme peeps out in an apparently rarefied way among these canzonettas and insofar as it has been little investigated, it has been focused by us with a targeted research on the approximately 54000 complete poetic texts (i.e. set to music) reproduced in RIM bringing to light 27 occurrences, i.e., song songs integrally dedicated to this theme.
Similar texts such as those intoned by Willaert , very unedifying, always insulting and full of contumely and revulsion towards old women, would even be unworthy of dissemination as would that of Giovan Tomaso Di Maio who begins Tutte le vecchie son maleciose in his Primo libro di villanesche. The theme of the old hag, envious and dirty (the forerunner of the modern witch) was thus quite common, heartfelt and all but stigmatized in the Madrigal era. The musical channel is thus a sure medium for both performance and representational dissemination of the figure of the Witch.
A chronological inventory and a more systematic investigation of this theme, also read from a musical perspective, might illuminate some aspects of one of the saddest anti-feminist phenomena in the history of Western culture
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Abstract
This paper examines a corpus of compositions classified as “cultured tangos” [tangos cultos] (Buch 2012), produced between 1890 and 2002 by composers educated in the tradition of Western Art Music and native from cities near the Mediterranean Sea: Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909 from Camprodón, Girona, Spain), Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924 from Lucca, Italy), Darius Milhaud (1892-1974 from Marseille, France), and Salvador Ranieri (1930-2012 from Arena, Calabria, Italy). Through the analysis of musical notations, sound and audiovisual recordings, this study aims to identify stylistic-compositional techniques and intertextualities between this “popular” musical genre of Rioplatense origin (Novatti 2018 [1980]; Link & Wendland 2024) and Central European “Art Music” genres (suites, ballets, and piano pieces). Specifically, it seeks to explore receptions of Rioplatense tango’s “compositional styles” (Kohan 2010), “technical foundations” (Peralta 2012), and “essential elements for arranging” (Gallo 2018). This research seeks to expand the concept of “cultured tango” by proposing an internal classification and a historical reinterpretation that considers alternative perspectives on the influences, mediations, and cultural mobilities between different musical traditions shaped by diverse processes of globalization (Strohm 2018; Sperber 2023; Heile 2024) during the Age of Total War (c.1914-1945/50) and the Age of Interconnection (c.1945-2001). Ultimately, questions regarding cultural uses of tango will be addressed, such as how and why it was referenced in Western Art Music.
Keywords
Tango, Mediterranean, Western Art Music, Popular Music, Musical Analysis
Bibliography
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SPERBER, Jonathan. 2023. The Age of Interconnection: A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. London & New York: Oxford University Press.
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As pogroms intensified in Central Asia (1890 ff.) and revolutionary fervor gripped Russia (1905), Armenians faced new waves of displacement, leading many to resettle in Western Europe. Paris soon emerged as a vibrant hub for an ever-growing Armenian diaspora, where writers and musicians, liberated from the constraints of empire, debated the terms of Armenian national identity. During this period, defining Armenian identity became increasingly urgent, as evidenced by the diverse ways exiled Armenian composers and ethnomusicologists evoked the concept of “home” through their musical and ethnographic works. From the 1890s to the 1910s, Armenian musicians in Paris and Armenia grappled with questions of authenticity. These debates juxtaposed Western European musical influences with Near Eastern approaches, with each side claiming cultural ties to the divided homeland. Exploring this critical tension, I analyze how Armenian folk and art music was represented in the Parisian press, including publications such as Le Figaro and the Société Internationale de Musique supplement. At the heart of these discussions was Komitas Vartabed (1869–1935), whose ethnographic fieldwork deeply influenced his compositions and writings, which helped define narratives of Armenian musical authenticity. Alongside Komitas, other lesser-known Armenian musicians educated in Paris contributed their findings to the city’s musical press, further complicating these discussions. Examining sources that have largely been excluded from Armenian Studies, this presentation shows differing versions of Armenia as represented in harmonized folksong volumes and journal articles by both Armenian and French musicologists from the fin-de-siècle. Ultimately, these musical and ethnographic sources display ambivalent and dialectical qualities that reflected fluctuations in Armenian social and cultural history during that time. I argue that these publications embody ambiguity, a significant feature of Armenian musical identity, and a crucial tension of Armenian cultural politics that defined much of the post-Genocide (1915) 20th century.
The city of Morelia, Mexico, founded in the 16th century in the midst of the struggle between the Spanish and indigenous peoples, resulted in a city with a hybrid identity and an intricate cultural mosaic (Canclini, 2012). At the same time, colonial violence brought with it a Western musical culture that became deeply rooted in the city. As a result of this history, Morelia has many institutions of recognized musical importance. This heritage has been recognized in the declarations granted by UNESCO 1) as Cultural Heritage of Humanity (1991) and 2) as part of the Network of Creative Cities (2017) - cities in which art is a fundamental factor of development (Zherdev, 2014).
Since 1966, the year of the first edition of the Alfonso Vega Núñez International Organ Festival, the local tradition has been festivalized (Bennet et al., 2014), proliferating in events of this nature. Music festivals are a laboratory that allows us to delve into a complex network of facets: repertoires, discourses, performers, circulation (Marín, 2007), transfers, etc., are just a few examples of the richness of the field grouped under the umbrella of festival studies (Getz, 2010).
The aim of this communication is to analyze the first 25 years (1966-1988) of the Alfonso Vega Núñez International Organ Festival, and to observe its role as a port of arrival and departure for musicians and repertoires from all over the world, placing Morelia in a global network of sacred music. Using the metaphor of the Mediterranean as a sea where cultures meet, the processes of international circulation in Morelia are highlighted, with emphasis on works and performers, captured in newspaper and magazine sources and programs that paint a network of musicians with emphasis on America. The conclusions are discussed from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 2015).
In scholarship on El Sistema (Baker 2014; Verhagen, Panigada, and Morales 2016) and El Sistema-inspired programs (Bull 2016, Baker 2022), little attention has been paid to the opinions of the young participants in the programs. Yet children and teenagers have ideas about the musical repertoire assigned, which in many cases contrast with the music they listen to in domestic and non-program-related social environments. This paper examines the voices of participants in the SOMOS Música program, an alternative, government-funded music education initiative in Santa Fe (Argentina), designed to promote social change and democratize music education in marginalized communities. In Santa Fe (pop. 400,000), which exhibits geographically embedded social inequalities, SOMOS operates orchestras in low-income neighborhoods. SOMOS prioritizes the “Orchestra-School” method, emphasizing not just ensemble performance but also social skills such as discipline and teamwork. This paper is an autoethnographic narrative and analysis of my experiences working in SOMOS from 2019 to 2024. Informed by document analysis, as well as theories of coloniality (Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Quijano 2007), cultural diversity and hybridization (Bhabha 1988), my paper critically examines the program’s official repertoire, comparing this with young participants’ own preferences and choices. I conclude that SOMOS’s foundational structure fosters cultural tensions by reinforcing colonial hierarchies. In consistently positioning Western European music as “superior” to that preferred by the children and teenage participants, SOMOS ignores their complex musical identities, shaped by their engagement with popular and “folk” music alongside western classical music.
The story of music and musicians at the Benedictine Abbey of New Norcia in Western Australia is unique. Located 132km north of Perth, the Abbey was founded in 1847 by Spanish Benedictines who meticulously documented their encounters with indigenous Australians. The Abbey archives house an extraordinarily rich series of documents in Spanish and English, many of which reveal the importance of music and musicians in the Abbey’s encounters with both Aboriginal and Anglo-Irish Australians.
Among the missionaries who arrived in Fremantle in 1853 after a sea voyage of some 113 days, was a young monk from Cuatretonda (Valencia). As an accomplished organist, Odo Oltra (1826-1898) dedicated himself to the musical instruction of indigenous boys. These young singers performed by themselves and in combination with the monks. They sang Masses and many other compositions for up to four voices. The young choristers —as their own sons and grandsons would do some seventy or eighty years later— learned everything by heart. Brother Oltra’s next task was to teach his young aboriginal charges to play Western musical instruments and to read music notation. These efforts led first to a string orchestra of some 20 players, and then to a brass band of 25 players. Archival documents held at the monastery attest to daily performances of three ensembles made up almost entirely of Aboriginal players: a choir, a string orchestra and a brass band. These ensembles were playing regularly at least up until Oltra’s death in 1898.
In the absence of a common language or culture, music became one of the chief means of mutual engagement between the Spanish Benedictines and the Aboriginal population. Indeed, this common interest in music is one of the most consistently fascinating aspects of the mission’s history. The paper is richly illustrated with archival photographs and sound recordings.
The integration of China’s oceanic routes into global music history pedagogy offers a compelling framework to illuminate transregional cultural exchanges and their musical legacies. This paper investigates the Maritime Silk Road’s role in fostering dynamic interactions between China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and beyond, highlighting how these connections enriched global musical traditions. China’s maritime networks served as conduits for the dissemination of instruments, scales, and genres that shaped musical landscapes across continents. For example, Nanyin—a traditional musical form from Quanzhou—illuminates how port cities acted as hubs of cultural synthesis. Nanyin’s preservation and transmission through Chinese diasporic communities demonstrate the enduring influence of maritime trade on musical heritage. Furthermore, the exchange of metallophone instruments, pentatonic scales, and rhythmic patterns between China and Southeast Asia underscores the transregional nature of these interactions.
This pedagogical framework emphasizes how oceanic routes can serve as lenses to analyze the global flow of musical ideas, transcending conventional geographic boundaries. Incorporating archaeological discoveries, ethnographic studies, and historical artifacts into music curricula can enrich students’ understanding of cultural hybridity and connectivity. Additionally, the paper argues for integrating Southeast Asian perspectives into the narrative, highlighting mutual influences rather than one-directional diffusion.
By situating China’s maritime history within a global music context, this approach not only broadens the scope of music history pedagogy but also fosters a more nuanced appreciation of cultural diversity and interconnectedness. The proposed framework aims to inspire educators to reimagine music history as a shared global narrative shaped by dynamic exchanges across oceanic routes.
What impulses do works of contemporary music provide for a current historiography of today’s plural societies? This question will be examined on the basis of Mediterranean Voices by Neue Vocalsolisten (Stuttgart 2014) and its relations to the historiography of the Mediterranean, for which the interplay between plurality and unity is central.
The ‘video-concert architecture about twelve identities in the Mediterranean’ consists of works by contemporary composers with connections to different Mediterranean countries, each of which was travelled to with a singer in advance. The resulting compositions address history by drawing on ancient mythologies, religious origins, personal memories, migration stories or political events. Although very different, they intersect through quotations of classic European repertoire, through the intertwining of different languages or through emotional-physical sound effects in dream-like or traumatic contexts. Furthermore, the geography of the Mediterranean region is an important theme, which is expressed through aerial sounds and reverberant caves. Taken together, the individual pieces charge landscapes, communities, individuals and experiences with multiple historical perspectives against the background of which migration biographies or diaspora experiences stand out as the driving force behind plural historical-theoretical concepts.
In the lecture, the overarching connections mentioned above will be read on the basis of David Abufiala's, Jacques Rancière's and Leyla Dakhli's critique of Braudel's Mediterranean study. They not only emphasize the particular proximity and distance of the different Mediterranean societies and thus the processes of exchange, but also reflect on the many European projections with which the Mediterranean region is imbued. Rancière, finally, sees Braudel's approach of geographisation as a poetics that integrates unheard voices into historical narratives. In relation to this, Mediterranean Voices positions itself as a hybrid on the edge between inside and outside perspectives, resulting in new crossovers of central parameters of Mediterranean history and thus also increasing the inner plurality of historiography.
Music is an essential part of European cultural and economic objectives. While this might seem to provide an opportunity for musicology, both music and the science that best represents it remain underrepresented in policy and scientific infrastructures. Part of the problem is the nature of musical artefacts themselves. Unlike tangible heritage fields such as archaeology and visual arts, musical heritage spans both tangible and intangible elements—scores, instruments, oral traditions, data, (recorded) sound—that can be utilized for both research and commercial purposes. The diverging viewpoints on music as an industry and music as a domain of research have resulted in the limited integration within European heritage and digital infrastructures of both music and musicology.
In order to chart new and sustainable paths for the field, EarlyMuse has been launched as the first Cooperation in European Science and Technology (COST) Action devoted to historical musicology (https://earlymuse.eu). A principal aim of EarlyMuse’s four-year programme (2024-2026) is to define new paths for musicological research in Europe in the domains of education, publications, sources, performances, and policies. Nearly 300 researchers from 40 countries across Europe and beyond are sharing data, analyses, and ambitions to provide inspiration for shifting the scientific and cultural policies of the European Union and its partners. By analysing the institutional challenges and opportunities our field faces, we are identifying new ways in which the discipline can position itself to meet the demands of the future.
In this presentation, we will illuminate the organisation of our Action and the results of our work so far. Our intention is to demonstrate that, despite the challenges of integrating musical heritage and data into European infrastructures, there are unprecedented opportunities for musicology—but we must be ready to seize them.
In his 1938 book "Die Improvisation in der Musik," the Hungarian scholar and music educator Ernst Ferand (1887–1972) presents nothing less than an alternate history of European music. Through groundbreaking readings of primary and secondary sources, Ferand reconstructs a forgotten network of improvised practices that were central to the early development of European music (from plainchant, to Medieval organum and discant, to Renaissance counterpoint and instrumental dances). Further, Ferand shows that even after the advent of notation, written and improvisational practices coexisted for centuries, their creative friction generating new forms and genres. More radically, by engaging with the field then known as “comparative musicology” (what we would now call ethnomusicology), Ferand identifies numerous transcultural parallels between improvisational practices. In particular, he suggests that improvisational evidence supports the controversial “Oriental hypothesis” that the music of the Medieval and Renaissance periods was profoundly influenced by Europe’s neighbors to the east. For Ferand, improvisation is not the domain of non-Western “others,” but rather a universal human activity whose relative independence from notation makes in an ideal medium of intercultural musical exchange. Finally, Ferand argues that the eventual decline of improvisation in European music isolated this tradition not only from the influence of other cultures, but also from the generative springs of musical praxis itself. Accordingly, his history of improvisation is also intended as an intervention in the field of music education, in which he argues for a return to improvisation-informed pedagogy as a way of revitalizing musical life and reconnecting theory and practice. In this talk, I will present some of the major themes of Ferand’s book, outline its intellectual and historical contexts, and discuss some of the challenges and questions I have encountered in the course of translating this important work of scholarship.
This study examines Wilhelm Tell's function as a musical symbol during the transformative period of 1750-1798 in the Swiss Confederation. Drawing upon Braudel's conceptualization of the Mediterranean as "a sea ringed round by mountains," I investigate how Tell's musical representations negotiated complex political and cultural identities within Switzerland as a critical Alpine-Mediterranean borderland. The research traces how musical narratives about Tell circulated transnationally, mediating between revolutionary French influences, Italian traditions, and Germanic cultural expressions. Following the French occupation and establishment of the Helvetic Republic in 1798, Tell's musical embodiments reflected heightened political tensions and competing national narratives. Through analysis of key works, particularly Grétry's 1791 opera "Guillaume Tell," I demonstrate how Tell functioned simultaneously as French revolutionary music and Swiss patriotic symbol. Methodologically, this research emphasizes mobility over fixed national categories, examining archival materials from Swiss and French collections to trace Tell's sonic journey across political boundaries. My analysis of political songs and ritual music reveals how distinctively Alpine musical gestures encoded Tell's narrative while adapting Mediterranean republican ideals. This research contributes to our understanding of late 18th-century transnational musical networks, illuminating how the Alpine-Mediterranean nexus functioned as a dynamic space of cultural exchange during this pivotal historical moment.
During the 1820s and 1830s it would have been difficult to find a more ideal setting in which to restage Gioachino Rossini’s philhellenic opera Le Siège de Corinthe (1826) than the Nobile Teatro di San Giacomo di Corfù. The Greek Revolution was underway on the mainland, and the small Mediterranean island of Corfù was under British rule following an intense seventeen-year period (1797-1814) of the French, Russian, Ottoman, and British Empires jockeying for imperial control of it. The local theater managers had a fondness for Rossini’s opera. Therefore their 1818 contract stipulated that two of the six operas performed there, L’italiana in Algeri and Il turco in Italia as it turned out (Kardamis, 2014), had to be by Rossini. An Italian translation of Le Siège survives in Corfù, and yet it was the original Italian version entitled Maometto II—less explicitly philhellenic than Le Siège—that was performed at the theater in 1833 (Romanou, 2010).
This paper centers the San Giacomo theater to reconsider the role of Rossini’s orientalist operas in the Mediterranean. Given the lack of explicitly philhellenic opera in the theater’s repertoire during the first part of the nineteenth century, the importance placed on L’italiana in Algeri and Il turco in Italia in the 1818 contract (as well as the choice of Maometto II over Le Siège) calls into question the ideological uses of Rossini’s opera in Corfù. Drawing on recent work on both Ionian transnational patriotism (Zanou, 2019) and Rossini’s touristic gaze (Armstrong, 2023), I recontextualize the theater’s surviving Rossini libretti alongside foreign tourism in the island to suggest that in this particular institutional, geographical, and sociopolitical environment, Rossini’s operas spoke to a conflicted Mediterranean identity at once included and excluded from the rest of Western Europe.
The aim of my paper is to contribute to the musicological debate surrounding the Mediterranean by focusing on the role of Algeria in the creation of Gioachino Rossini’s opera “L’italiana in Algeri” (1813). Specifically, I would like to draw the attention of the musicological community to the results of recent research that could lead us to reconsider existing theories regarding two aspects of “L’italiana in Algeri”. The first aspect concerns the truthfulness of the opera’s plot: it is believed today that the character of Isabella was inspired by Antonietta Frapolli, a woman who, according to some early-20th-century sources, was kidnapped by Algerian corsairs at the beginning of the 19th century. Nevertheless, archival research reveals a lack of evidence to support this claim, challenging its validity. The second aspect involves the possible political content of Rossini’s opera: although recent historiographical trends tend to sever any connection between early-19th-century opera and the Italian Risorgimento, an analysis of the librettist of “L’italiana in Algeri”, Angelo Anelli, as well as some archival findings, demonstrates his evident political engagement. This makes the hypothesis that Rossini’s opera contains a political message entirely plausible. The study of these two aspects of “L’italiana in Algeri” allows us to reconsider the role of Algeria and, more broadly, the southern Mediterranean coast in the opera’s creation. While this geographical area may not have been essential as the backdrop for a news item that inspired the plot, it was likely significant as a space distant enough from Italy to portray the Italian political situation in a safer manner, sending patriotic messages to the opera’s audience.
This panel addresses the International Musicological Society’s conference theme, Global Mediterranean: Postcolonial Music Histories (16th–20th Centuries), by proposing an expanded view of the Mediterranean as an “image-language” that transcends geographical borders and resonates in multiple contexts, including Abya Yala (Latin America). Engaging with the idea of a “resounding Mediterranean” as a locus of cultural multiplicity, we examine how postcolonial theoretical frameworks from a Latin American vantage point inspire a rethinking of global music histories. Our approach foregrounds the Mediterranean as a pluriversal microcosm marked by flows of exchange, colonial impositions, and enduring hierarchies that shape how music is created, circulated, and perceived. In dialogue with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Walter Mignolo, Gloria Anzaldúa, Silvia Cusicanqui, and Ailton Krenak, we propose a decolonial musicology that recognizes ancestral knowledge, communal cosmovisions, and subaltern experiences. This perspective not only contests eurocentric narratives but also illuminates marginalized musical practices. By adopting transcontinental and translocal lenses, we acknowledge interwoven paths between Iberian (and broader European) influences, African diasporic heritage, and Indigenous knowledges in shaping Latin American musical identities. In doing so, we align with the conference’s emphasis on expanding the Mediterranean’s cultural and historical scope across oceans and continents, reevaluating how colonial connections and power structures impacted—and continue to influence—music-making and historiography. This panel brings together four contributions exemplifying these concerns. The first one explores Regional Labels and Postcolonial Discourses around Tango (1980s–2020s), revealing how “Rioplatense,” “South American,” and “Latin American” tangos were employed to address economic and nationalist crises while reinforcing or contesting hegemonic discourses. The secondengages with questions raised by Postcolonial Studies, reflecting on the definition of subaltern subjects who serve as protagonists in local and translocal histories of music in the southern regions of Latin America. Considering the diversity of manifest identities and those overlooked by dominant historiography, it becomes essential to reevaluate these subjects' relationships and degrees of dependence or autonomy concerning the persistence of hierarchies and values rooted in Eurocentrism. The next one Fabio Matias investigates the colonial simulacrum around Afro-Brazilian religiosity in Canto de Xangô, from the iconic album Os Afro-Sambas (1966). Drawing on Afro-referenced approaches to musical signification, he shows how power imbalances, racialized violence, and identity distortions obscure Xangô’s ancestral legacy. This perspective uncovers marginalized narratives in Brazilian popular music and underscores the need to confront residual colonial structures in contemporary music-making. The final contribution focuses on Decolonial Epistemologies and Musical Translocalities: Transformations in Contemporary Musicology, highlighting how postcolonial/decolonial approaches reshape the discipline by destabilizing Eurocentric canons, critiquing power in musical circulation, and embracing translocal epistemologies. Together, these presentations explore how musical histories, practices, and epistemologies intersect with the “extended” Mediterranean and postcolonial realities in Abya Yala. By addressing ancestry, diasporic mobility, and cultural resistance, the panel demonstrates how decentering the eurocentric gaze creates new spaces for interstitial and subaltern voices in music scholarship. We propose an insurgent framework for global musicology—one that confronts colonial legacies while envisioning more inclusive, just, and plural musical futures.
Round Table
Dinko Fabris chair
Ramzi Aburedwan (funder of Al Kamandjati, Ramallah)
Felicity Rose Laurence (University of Newcastle)
other
Italian opera quickly became integrated into the theatrical landscape of 18th-century Madrid, influencing local genres such as zarzuela and Spanish opera. These genres readily absorbed the musical conventions of dramma per musica and opera buffa. However, their hybrid nature either disrupted the rigid structure of Spanish theatre or led to only sporadic performances.
Fortunately, other theatrical genres were far more prevalent on the Madrid stage and also incorporated conventions from Italian opera. One such genre was the comedia, the most frequently performed theatrical form in 18th-century Madrid. As a declamatory theatre with a continuous yet flexible musical presence, the comedia featured a dynamic dramaturgy that allowed for the integration of various musical pieces. Throughout the century, Spanish and Italian composers wrote music for these plays, often including arias, recitatives, and cavatinas. Moreover, pieces in Italian were frequently incorporated, sometimes taken directly from popular operas of the time. This makes the comedia a valuable genre for studying the reception of these operas in Madrid.
In this paper, we examine comedia and its music, with a particular focus on its relationship with Italian opera in the 18th century. We will analyze the conventions it borrowed and blended from Italian opera and present the Italian pieces incorporated into comedias, some of which were composed by prominent figures of the time, such as Baldassare Galuppi, Carlo Ignazio Monza, and Giuseppe Sarti.
Pluriculturalism of Dalmatia, the coastal area of the Adriatic Sea, was a result of numerous rulers who brought their cultures, customs and music. In the early modern times, Dalmatia was under Venetian, Austrian, French, and again Austrian rule, while the sovereign Repubblica di Ragusa (The Republic of Ragusa, 1358–1808) was a tributary state of the Kingdom of Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and the French Empire and the Kingdom of Italy. Dalmatia became entirely a part of Croatia, that is, of Yugoslavia in 1947.
Dalmatia demonstrates a special model of nationalism, wherein the linguistic, cultural, and ideological policies embody multiplied self-identification. The microregion belonged to the Italian cultural sphere, even during the Austrian rule. Italian was the main language and the means of communication between the different communities of the area; the Slavic community also expressed their national ideas in this language at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
In this paper I am going to present Dalmatian pluriculturalism through the musical and theatre life, especially in Zara (Zadar), the language policy, and the transformations of the “first” (pre)national opera Ljubav i zloba (Love and malice, 1846) in accordance to Pan-Slavism, Mediterraneanism, and Orientalism.
During the Spanish Restoration, a stable political climate and favorable social and cultural conditions facilitated the rise of children's opera and lyric theater companies, composed of young performers specializing in musical and theatrical genres such as zarzuela, operetta, and other productions specifically adapted to youthful voices. Notable Spanish directors of these companies included Bosch, who led his company on successful tours through France and Italy, as well as the entrepreneur Jiménez, known for producing and premiering a diverse repertoire in both Spain and the Americas. Similarly, Lambertini gained recognition for staging operettas with young performers, organizing tours across various provinces, and collaborating with local groups.
The phenomenon also included American-based companies that toured Spain, further enriching this transatlantic cultural exchange, with El Pinar Children's Company from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, representing a significant case study. These companies showcased their talent in a wide range of venues, from private residences to prestigious theaters such as the Teatro de la Zarzuela and the Teatro Español, presenting adapted repertoires and original productions that captivated diverse audiences.
This research investigates the internal structure, repertoire choices, and educational practices implemented by these companies, highlighting how this phenomenon transcended geographical and cultural boundaries. Likewise, it examines the ethical and social implications of children's participation in extensive tours, along with the legal and custodial challenges they faced during that period.
A methodology combining critical analysis of contemporary newspaper chronicles, theater programs, specialized repertoires, and archival documentation allows for a detailed reconstruction of these companies' trajectories and an evaluation of their reception in different cultural contexts.
The results highlight the significance of these companies in the professionalization of young artists and the enrichment of the lyric-dramatic tradition, whose legacy contributed to the consolidation of a transatlantic cultural bridge.
The economic and cultural progress of the Spanish Basque Country in the early 20th Century fostered a flourishing of all sorts of philarmonic activities. Notably, initiatives related to the so-called ‘Basque renaissance’ and its ensuing musical Nationalism (such as the compilation of folk songbooks or the development of vernacular operas) are well-documented, as well as other efforts to promote academic music.
However, one overlooked aspect is the proliferation of high society amateur performances for philantropic purposes, particularly in the cities of San Sebastian and Bilbao during the 1920s. In that elitist scene, two significant influences stand out: the early impact of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and the incipient airs of American jazz; sometimes blended with more folkloric or tradional elements. This paper will analyse the practices, contexts and repertoires of several of these events, highlighting their national and transnational connections. Thus, the conspicuous modernity and cosmopolitanism of this artistic melting pot offers a fresh image of the cultural reality of the Basque Country in the midst of the ‘Jazz Age’, far beyond traditional folkloric stereotypes. Moreover, it challenges us to reconsider the importance of transnational cultural dynamics during the Interwar period in such a peripheral region.
Nationalist thought has constituted a principal axis of musicology in Latin America since its inception, and thus has exerted a considerable influence on the respective musical histories that were created during the initial decades of the twentieth century. It would be reasonable to posit that Cuba has not been immune to this phenomenon, particularly in the wake of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The interweaving of nationalist and Americanist ideologies with an ideological and political stance marked by the different stages of struggle against colonial (Spain) and neocolonial (United States) powers is evident. From this perspective, the impact and significance of Alejo Carpentier's narrative in the Latin American context during the 20th century is indisputable. Similarly, he played a pivotal role in the formation and legitimization of a musical nationalist discourse in 19th-century Cuba. Considering the most recent contributions to the fields of history, literature, and musicology, it can be stated that there are a multitude of factors that challenge the veracity of Carpentier's thesis. The principal aim of this paper is to deconstruct the discourse on the canon of musical nationalism in colonial Cuba, with a particular focus on the nationalist/Americanist ideological agenda espoused by Carpentier in La música en Cuba (1946). In addition, it is proposed that the term "criollo" or "criollista" be considered as a potential operative term for the study of musical activity related to certain relational and membership circuits located in nineteenth-century Cuba. To achieve this, it has been necessary to understand and explain the object of study from several different perspectives. These include pragmatics (Escandell, 1993), the discursive context (Calsamiglia and Tusón, 2001) and the performance complex proposed by Alejandro Madrid (2012). These approaches have been essential for the post-national study of musical nationalism.
One of the most understudied yet potentially fruitful areas of research along the East-West axis connecting the Mediterranean and the Americas is the presence and use of plainchant in the newly conquered lands of sixteenth-century Nueva España. While many musical sources and collections remain unexamined, an increasing number of libraries are digitising plainchant manuscripts and prints, thereby making them accessible to scholars worldwide.
This paper examines a small corpus of fifteen manuscripts, containing both polyphony and plainchant, copied between 1582 and 1635 and now preserved in the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. Previous studies by Robert Stevenson, Paul Borg, Robert Snow, and Victor Anand Coelho have primarily focused on the polyphony in these sources, attributed to Franco-Flemish and Spanish composers such as Isaac, Mouton, Morales, and Guerrero. Even though half of these manuscripts contain plainchant—some exclusively so—scholarship to date has merely acknowledged its presence without undertaking an in-depth investigation.
A closer study of the plainchant in these Guatemalan manuscripts not only provides essential context for the liturgical polyphony but also sheds light on the provenance of the liturgical repertory transferred from the Old World to the New. Furthermore, it offers unique insights into the methods employed by Spanish missionaries in their efforts to evangelise indigenous populations. Following the military conquest of the region by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524, the introduction of plainchant emerged as one of their principal tools in the conquest of indigenous minds.
Music-theoretical works have long not been a specific subject of research in Croatia. As Stanislav Tuksar (2008) once concluded: «the proportions and then-contemporary needs for such music titles, both for education and for all other purposes, still remain a closed book for today’s researchers.» As we will see, this is certainly due to cataloguing issues, but also to historical separations of people and territories. Francesco Antonio Calegari OFMConv (Venice, 1656–1742) is, therefore, the actual author of three sacred works first composed for Padua in 1718 (I-Pca) and later copied for St. Domnius (HR-Sk). Calegari was maestro di cappella at St. Antonio in Padua, before changing back to St. Maria de’ Frari in Venice (1727–1742). The re-attribution of these works could make it necessary to revise previous conclusions, especially concerning repertory building and further relationships of the Split Cathedral in earlier centuries (Tuksar 2000–2014, RISM catalogue). Carlo Antonio Nagli OFMConv (Rimini, c.1680 – Venice, 1756) served as maestro and organist at St. Domnius in the early eighteenth century. After studies on his sacred works (Tuksar 2004, Stipčević 2013), I will propose a first reading of his «Principij Primi» (Split 1742, I-Vc) that has ties both to Calegari’s peculiar teaching of harmony and to local customs in Coastal Croatia. Shortly after, Nagli succeeded Calegari at Frari (1743–1756). A thorough analysis of the Martini correspondence (I-Bc) sheds new light on this issue, and especially on the criteria for hiring a maestro on both sides of the Adriatic Sea under Venetian domination: Was it more about the Franciscan order, personal relationships or even ethnicity? Such questions go even beyond the matter of decentering music history. A «common history» is, indeed, not only a task for historians, but it remains also important for the European integration and long-term pacification of these territories.
Saint Benedict the Moor (1526-1589), a prominent figure in the devotional panorama of the early modern period, represents a bridge between the religious traditions of the Mediterranean and Afro-American spirituality. Born in San Fratello (Messina) to a family of African slaves, he became the object of a special cult that rapidly spread between Sicily and Spain, thanks to the efforts of the Franciscan friars, before reaching Afro-descendant communities in Latin America. As evidence of the extraordinary impact of his devotion at the local level, in 1652, Benedict was named co-patron of Palermo by the city's Senate, paralleling the growing devotional interest in Saint Rosalia. This ‘religious success’ can be understood in light of the increasing presence of black slave communities, who often organized themselves into confraternities. The phenomenon of black confraternities grew significantly between the 16th and 17th centuries, promoting devotional events that also included music. These celebrations had their own characteristics in terms of sound, with chants and processions that often exalted saints who were perceived as closer and more accessible to the lower social classes. At the same time, in the New World, the devotion to Saint Benedict the Moor took deep root among enslaved converts, who adopted him as their intercessor and protector, reshaping his figure through ritual expressions enriched by musical elements and dances of African origin. Considering the convergence of different cultural influences, this paper aims to offer a broad reflection on the relationship between music and the cult of the ‘Santo Moro’, exploring the role of black communities within the framework of early modern Mediterranean sanctity and their dialogue with the New World.
Between 1946 and 1956, with most theatres in ruins after the war, approximately twenty opera-films, which proved to be box-office hits, were produced in Italy. Directed by Clemente Fracassi and presenting an abridged version of Verdi’s work, Aida (1953) was the first Italian opera-film in Technicolor, achieving successful distribution across Europe and the United States. Aida’s character was embodied by the still-unknown Sophia Loren, who lip-synched Renata Tebaldi’s voice – an established practice in opera-films that extended to the other roles.
Building on the studies by Bernard Kuhn (2009) and Marcia Citron (2015), this paper investigates Fracassi’s Aida against the backdrop of post-World-War-II Italy and the contemporary film industry. Firstly, I explore the creative strategies aimed at neutralizing conventions characteristic of opera that, tacitly accepted by operagoers, were deemed incompatible with the cinematic medium. I then address the recourse to theatrical makeup for Sophia Loren and Afro Poli (who interpreted Amonasro, lip-synching Gino Bechi’s voice) to portray Ethiopian ethnicity. This choice, a legacy of operatic staging, clashes with the film’s intent to adapt Verdi’s opera to cinema. Finally, I examine the interpolated scene depicting the Egyptian attack on the Ethiopians and the employment of the so-called ‘Roman salute’ in light of Italy’s ongoing reckoning with its totalitarian past and, in particular, with its colonialist campaign in East Africa. Rooted in Jacques-Louis David’s Le Serment des Horaces (1784) and codified as a marker of antiquity in early-twentieth-century Italian and Hollywood kolossals, the ‘Roman salute’ acquired a distinct political significance during and after the totalitarian regimes that appropriated it, shifting from a tool of propaganda to one of potential critique. Drawing a parallel with Mervyn LeRoy’s film Quo vadis (1951), I argue that Fracassi’s Aida can be interpreted as an intentionally ambiguous ideological product, offering hooks for a reading that subtly condemns Fascism.
In 1941, only eight months into the war, Italy was clearly becoming Germany’s lackey. In response, as historian Benjamin Martin (2016) highlights, Fascism sought to assert Italian cultural superiority over its militarily mightier ally. Benito Mussolini pursued this goal by ordering an ambitious propaganda campaign for the 40th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi’s death, occurring that same year. A centerpiece of this effort was the Ministry of Culture’s release of the first-ever edition of Verdi’s Rigoletto’s draft. Designed as a strong and cultivated statement of Italian greatness in music, it was addressed to an “institutional” audience of fascist elites, musicians, and critics.
While scholars have treated this edition primarily as a vessel for Verdi’s text, focusing on its invaluable and otherwise then-inaccessible content, they have overlooked its paratextual, material, and medial features. Understanding these aspects is essential for grasping the edition’s role in advancing the fascist cultural agenda of 1941.
In my paper, I contextualize this edition within the 1941 Verdi celebrations and analyze it through methodologies derived from literary studies (Peter Stallybrass, Dennis Duncan, Adam Smyth, among others). I argue that this edition transcends being merely a “neutral” container of music. On the contrary, it is a complex medium that not only houses Verdi’s text but also actively shapes its reception and meaning. Through an examination of its textual, visual, paratextual, and material dimensions, I reveal how these components cooperate to (re)construct Verdi as the quintessential “Italian musical genius”, elevating him above the iconic “German musical geniuses”, Beethoven and Wagner. In conclusion, I ponder the broader implications of this interpretation, considering how the material characteristics of an edition serve as a tool for crafting powerful, often unwritten narratives about music and its composers.
Istituto Luce's documentaries and newsreels played a pivotal role in the colonial propaganda of Fascist Italy during the 1930s. The films of the Luce's Photographic Department for East Africa, which was established in Asmara at the onset of the Ethiopian War, exemplify colonialist tendencies that would subsequently become the stylistic hallmark of Italian cinematic productions for decades. The footage, captured by notable photographers such as Mario Craveri, Corrado D'Errico, and Giorgio Ferroni, is distinguished by a voyeuristic narrative that aligns with the prevailing European perception of African inhabitants since the late 19th century: a depiction of the colonized populations as subhuman beings, situated at the intersection of bestiality and eroticism.
This representation is accompanied by a series of stereotypical auditory elements that are typically associated with the African setting. Indeed, depictions of the populations of the Horn of Africa, including the African military corps under Italian command, invariably feature ambient music that uses well-known exotic clichés, such as high-pitched woodwinds, folkloric percussion, and the "Phrygian" scale. The origins of these auditory elements, in the context of Italian settings, can be traced back to a select number of pieces from photoplay music collections of the "silent" era, such as Carisiana (Carisch), Biblioteca Cinema (Ricordi), Commento Films (Florentia), and others.
For the purposes of this paper, I will argue that the Luce documentaries and newsreels, with their repertoire of auditory topoi associated with the African scenario and disseminated in a variety of receptive contexts, had a decisive impact on the way Italian society of the time perceived and represented African populations. Luce's films functioned as a "fabric of commonplaces," understood in the sociological sense of taken-for-granted collective knowledge, of untheorized assumptions that do not fall within the direct sphere of the subject's experience but with which he or she comes into contact through the media.
Scholars and musicians alike have grappled with the conceptual nature of music copyright law since its idealistic, utilitarian inception. However, due to the nature of copyright law, many musical traditions are left out of the discussion since there are specific requirements in the process of copyrighting, because of the necessities that the work must be in a fixed, tangible medium and have a definite author, or authors, in order to obtain legal protections of ownership. So, how do oral traditions and orality as a whole fit into the larger discussion of intellectual property in music and how does one parse out ownership of such? This paper serves to answer some of those questions and provides some of the arguments for either side of copyrighting oral traditions in hopes of an egalitarian distributionism to appropriately compensate communities of origin for their work—which has proven to be financially lucrative in terms of music consumption. While discussing some basic understandings of music copyright law and correcting false (and common) assertions, I also examine how these policies can shape our understanding of oral traditions with a methodology in both legal research and common pool resource management. When understanding oral traditions as a sort of “musical commons,”Eleanor Olstrom’s work in Governing the Commons can be invoked in understanding how resource management is closely related to managing the oral traditions of the affected communities. Several case studies are discussed in detail within this methodology, including: Charles Seeger and Alan Lomax’s collections of orally transferred music and Duke Ellington’s oral history within the Yale University Archive.
The professional activity related to the performance of early music combines artistic and creative work with the study and dissemination of musical heritage, framed within a cultural consumption model led by the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). This sector possesses a unique identity and dynamics that often conflict with traditional models of cultural creation and consumption. This research examines how professional practices and challenges reflect the sector's degree of consolidation and integration within the structure of CCIs in Europe.
Adopting an ethnographic and cultural management approach, this paper investigates how identifying the community's needs, viewpoints and behaviors can uncover strategic opportunities to potentially optimize management and promote professional sustainability. This approach engages with musical heritage and its dissemination based on the labor and social realities of cultural workers. In doing so, it fosters a dialogue between historical musicology and society, treating early music as a fluid concept constantly redefined by academic, artistic, and market-driven forces. The research further explores interconnections between community dynamics, the qualities of cultural products, career management, policy frameworks, music education, market criteria, artistic direction, communication strategies, and sustainability efforts.
This article presents preliminary findings from a doctoral research project, which are grounded in a bibliographic review and the analysis of nearly a hundred testimonies and perceptions documented in professional reports and academic works. Currently, the Portuguese early music sector is being studied to design and implement an adaptable analytical model aimed at developing cultural management strategies tailored to specific contexts. This study addresses a gap identified in ethnomusicology and cultural management concerning the role of early music professionals in cultural revitalization, as well as the lack of a gender perspective in these areas.
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.
The Introit holds a prominent place in the liturgy of the Mass, as it is the introductory chant and establishes from the beginning the context of the feast. It is well known that the Hieronymite order granted special importance to plainchant, as evidenced by its regulation in various liturgical and musical sources, both printed and manuscript, as well as in documents regulating its practice (constitutions, ordinaries, and ceremonials).
Alongside this omnipresence of plainchant, in Hieronymite liturgy other musical practices can be found in which plainchant serves as a foundation. It was emphasized that, when singing in multiple voices, “other voices should be added over the plainchant, so that all may sing” [...] “but in such a way that the integrity of the plainchant remains unaltered.” This use of plainchant in polyphony—understood in its broadest sense—was highly valued in certain religious centers, as evidenced by the musical practices of two of the most important Hieronymite monasteries of the period. On one hand, the Monastery of El Escorial, where, alongside this practice, other well-known polyphonic techniques based on plainchant were developed. On the other hand, the Monastery of Guadalupe, which preserves the codex E-GU 1, containing a rare and complete repertoire of polyphonic introits for the most important festivities of the year, composed in the 17th century. These introits are analogous to repertoires found in other manuscript or printed sources of the time, such as the Liber Introitus by Miguel de Fonseca (1540-1544), preserved in the Arquivo Distrital de Braga (P-BRad 967), or the collection Contrapunctus seu musica figurata, published in Lyon in 1528: in these sources, polyphony is developed over plainchant, which is presented in its entirety with equal note values. Codex E-GU 1 must have been of great importance to the Monastery of Guadalupe and its liturgical and musical practice, as most of its repertoire resulted from a special commission to some of the most prominent cathedral chapel masters of the time.
As several scholars have pointed out, this repertoire of polyphony based on plainchant may reflect the practice of improvised counterpoint frequently used in cathedrals and monasteries of the period. This contribution will examine the function of plainchant, particularly in the repertoire of polyphonic introits, understood as a cantus firmus ornamented through polyphony -a technique that may have influenced its performance-, its use as a source for composition, and its relationship with the practice of improvised counterpoint. Ultimately, the aim is to determine to what extent this repertoire reflects improvisational practices and their presence in written repertories, both in cathedrals and in certain Hieronymite centers of the Iberian Peninsula.
Both the (transnational) genre of the musical film in the 1940s and the cultural-historical discussion of
the attached production contexts represent desiderata in musicological research. Using the example of the flourishing transnational musical film production of the 1940s that was located in the Mediterranean region of southern France, the contribution sheds light to the multiple transnational interactions between Germany and France under the angle of mobility and migration, in order to overcome the hitherto dominant linkage to the national in favor of a perspectivization that reconstructs the musical film and its production mechanisms as transnational and dynamic cultural-historical phenomena.
Building on the concept of cultural mobility (Greenblatt et al) Musical Mobility will be discussed (1) as a driving force for stable linkages between regions that extend over longer periods of time and are absorbed into diverse historical formations. On the other hand (2) territorial boundaries come to the fore, because they are experiencing resignification and revitalization in conjunction with the increasing historical, political, and cultural pressures faced by local, national, and international communities at various levels.
Deciphering the multiple interconnections between German and French Popular Culture in the 1940s the contribution further discusses the identity constructing potential of the chosen examples through the determination of the inherent personnel constellations during the production processes as well as through the analysis of the aesthetic references. Therefore the paper argues for a re-reading of music history that recognizes the processuality and dynamics of cultural practices.
"Some music may initially be perceived as elitist but can later shed that perception due to the possibilities offered by television", affirmed João de Freitas Branco in the music dissemination program Melomania, aired in 1978 on Portuguese National Television (RTP). Through this statement, Freitas Branco expressed the intention of dismantling the elitist perception of "Classical Music" and making it more accessible to a wider segment of the population, educating audiences on music and its connection to everyday life. This paper explores precisely this - how television fostered the cultural dissemination and shaped "Classical Music's" accessibility in Portugal during the post-revolution period of the 1970s and 1980s -, by cross-referencing historical materials with cultural sociology and media studies, particularly the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Jürgen Habermas.
My work focuses on the Portuguese context, but it is primarily about the historical impact of television on the discourse surrounding the so-called "Classical Music" as a medium for reaching a broader audience. Internationally, it is possible to find similar phenomena and draw parallels with this intention of expanding the social engagement with music through television. In this cultural context, dissemination of "Classical Music" was pivotal to the democratization of culture, as its longstanding elitist label ultimately turned it into a symbol of redefined cultural accessibility.
The findings suggest that, although participation in live concerts did not become more socially diverse within the studied scope, television made an unprecedented contribution to the democratization of "Classical Music" in mass communication medium contexts. People from different social backgrounds were now engaging with the same musical content through employed mediation strategies, using linguistic and aesthetic bridges to expand its reach. Nevertheless, despite growing public dialogue and greater recognition of its repertoire, "Classical Music" still faces social barriers, which are reflected in the social distribution of cultural habits.
This study investigates the musical representation of Spain in the cinematic news reports of the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano (NIL) between 1960 and 1990, examining how music articulates discourses on identity, resistance, and cooperation. By mapping the Bitácora del Cine Cubano III and conducting a detailed quantitative analysis, the study identifies news items related to Spain featured in the NIL, selected based on thematic and contextual criteria. Political events in Spain, visual arts, tours by musicians such as Ana Belén, Joan Manuel Serrat, Paco Ibáñez, and Victoria de los Ángeles, as well as performances by Spanish theater companies in Cuba, constitute the central themes of the news agenda curated by Santiago Álvarez and his team.
Using an interdisciplinary approach that integrates historical musicology, cultural studies, and audiovisual analysis, this research highlights the dynamics of musical exchange between Cuba and Spain over three decades of political transformation. The tensions during Francoism and the subsequent increase in cooperation following Spain’s democratic transition are represented in the NIL from a Cuban revolutionary perspective, with music playing a pivotal role in constructing this narrative.
The analysis reveals that between 1960 and 1975, music was utilized to reinforce discourses of resistance and solidarity. In contrast, from the late 1970s to 1990, the representation of Spain in the NIL reflects a decline in explicit political references, accompanied by a stronger focus on the artistic value of the featured performances.
This paper examines a founding legend of the rosary that likely originated from the Cantigas de Santa Maria (late thirteenth century) and circulated in northeastern Spain before migrating directly from Valencia to Mexico City in the late 1500s. At its core is the rosary, an instrument of Catholic devotion associated with the Dominican Order, which played a key role in promoting its use through lay confraternities. The most significant rosary confraternity of the early modern period was founded at the Dominican house in Cologne, Germany, in 1476 by Jacob Sprenger, a theologian, inquisitor, and co-author of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise that fueled widespread persecution of alleged witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the 1490s, confraternities following Sprenger’s model had emerged in Barcelona and Valencia. These, in turn, were influential in establishing the first rosary brotherhoods among the indigenous Mexica (Aztecs) and Catholic Europeans in Mexico City and its surrounding areas.
Central to the literature of rosary brotherhoods in Spain and Mexico is a purported founding miracle of Sprenger’s confraternity, known as "The Knight of Cologne." Interestingly, this story is entirely absent from documents directly tied to Cologne itself. After tracing the probable origins of the legend in Cantiga 121, this paper follows its transmission through the preaching of St. Vincent Ferrer, as well as through incunabula tied to the Dominican houses of Barcelona and Valencia, before it appeared in early printed catechisms in Mexico. Developed, adapted, and transmitted in song, sermon, and print over centuries and across vast geographical distances, the inter-Iberian and trans-Atlantic journey of "The Knight of Cologne" illustrates an impactful, multimodal dialogue among devotional cultures during the early period of globalization—one facilitated by emerging technologies in manuscript and print production.
Of the surprises that arose while completing my long-planned book Art Songs of the Burgundian Era, 1415–1480, the greatest was the number of the most widely copied songs of those years that are plainly transmitted with the wrong text. Already in the 1950s Sylvia Kenney had shown that Walter Frye’s Ave regina celorum, by far the most widely copied song of the 1450s, almost certainly began life with an English ballade text, even though there is no trace of any other text in its twenty-four sources from all parts of Europe (only none from England). We had all rather forgotten that, until Alexander Erhard’s dissertation (2010) made it almost certain that the famous O Rosa bella, ascribed to Dunstable or Bedyngham and the most often copied song of the 1440s, also began life with an English text, again despite eighteen sources and over twenty related compositions from all parts of Europe (only none from England); and I now have an English text that seems likely to be the correct original. Only recently has it become clear that the most often copied song of the years around 1480, Fortuna desperata, ascribed to Busnoys or Felice, cannot possibly have begun life with that text, though I do not yet have any clear view of its origin. Only at the last moment did it strike me how odd it is how many of these wrongly texted songs are among the most often copied of the century; or perhaps it would make more sense vice versa, that so many of the most often copied songs were repeatedly copied with texts that seemed more suited to purpose, leaving no clear hint of their wrongness. The general conclusion here must be that if the music was good enough it could circulate widely carrying the wrong text,
This paper will illustrate how different cultural contexts contributed to shape the rhythmic variety of European music from the late 15th to the early 18th century, connecting some of its features to the Islamic world (from the Persian-Arabic matrix up to Turkish hegemony) and West Africa. Particular rhythmic patterns, with asymmetric, syncopated or hemiolic characteristics, will be described and compared. The repertory analyzed will be mainly Iberian in origin, but musical exoticism in Lully's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, in their relation to either Turkish or Iberian models, will be also examined.
Esta mesa redonda presenta las principales líneas de actuación de la Sociedad Española de Musicología (SEdeM) en su compromiso con el impulso y la difusión de la investigación musicológica. Se abordarán las actividades desarrolladas en los últimos años —como las publicaciones en distintos formatos, la convocatoria de premios, la edición discográfica, la organización de congresos y los trabajos impulsados por las comisiones especializadas— así como los objetivos y desafíos más inmediatos. Entre estos, se destacan la ampliación del impacto internacional de la SEdeM, el fortalecimiento de sus redes de colaboración y la mejora de su visibilidad institucional, representada, entre otros avances, por la puesta en marcha de su nueva página web en la que se pondrá a disposición de socios y usuarios en general información y publicaciones de interés musicológico.
The round table serves as an important step in the research examining world sound and musical cultures from the medieval to modern eras using travel sources. The knowledge about odeporic literature has significantly advanced the historical reconstruction of the musical traditions and auditory ecosystems of cultures that did not transmit their musical heritage to us via systematic notation. It is now beneficial to examine the reception of these materials, considering the reconfiguration of knowledge on otherness within established musical repertoires, such as Venetian opera. The anthropological approach, emphasizing the traveler's subjectivity as an investigator of different worlds, has yielded significant findings (Dessì 2010; Irving 2010; Restani 2017; Dessì 2021; Olley 2023; Dessì-Pintimalli 2025). These advancements unveil a previously unexamined area of inquiry, centered on comparing travelers' accounts and analyzing the reception of features deemed "exotic" within the opera.
Participant 1 presents the web application “Echos. Sound Ecosystems in Travelogues”, born in 2021. Developed by a team of musicologists and computer scientists, Echos collects and organizes literary descriptions, musical scores, and images of musical events documented in travel accounts from the 14th to the 19th century. The platform provides a comprehensive overview of the sonic dimension across different historical and geographical contexts, which can also be explored through an interactive map.
Participant 2 examines the records of Venetian explorer Giovanni Giacomo Miani as documented in his diary of his first travel (1859-1860). Miani recorded the musical and choreographic traditions of the peoples he visited along the Nile via essays, paintings, and a comprehensive anthropological collection. The examination of this data is performed comprehensively with contemporary Veneto odeporic sources. This comparison uses the web application “Echos” as an innovative research instrument that facilitates the mapping and cataloguing of auditory, musical, and choreographic testimony recorded in travelogues.
Participant 3 examines the case study of the medieval travelogue with the highest number of visited locations: the riḥla of Abū ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (1304-1368/1377). This talk will begin with a concise introduction of the author in his roles as a jurist, traveler, and storyteller, followed by an exploration of the journey within its cultural, musical, historical, and anthropological contexts. A reading is then proposed, grounded in the source census from the “Echos” platform, and a comparative analysis of the musical lexicon in specific passages of the text.
Participant 4 focuses on the reception of "exoticizing tendencies" (Locke 2020) from the privileged viewpoint of opera performed in Venice throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By examining a specific case study, the presentation investigates the production and reception of the exoticizing processes by analyzing the spectacular media (musical text, libretto, scenography, costumes, and ballets) and their perception within the broader social context (evidenced in contemporary reviews and chronicles). Special emphasis will be placed on reconstructing the many discourses around the other, the relationships between particular stagings, and the cultural representations of otherness that were widespread in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Venice.
Recently, some opera productions have increasingly appeared to be “curated” by stage directors, even more so than in the tradition of Regietheater (director's theater). This trend, first noted by Jelena Novak, involves directors assembling segments from musical history or arias from classical operas and “curating” them into a new creation. I illustrate this trend through the 2024 pastiche Le lacrime di Eros by Romeo Castellucci at the Dutch National Opera, based on early Baroque chamber and theatrical music. In this production, the narrative thread is nearly nonexistent, as references are made intermittently to mythological characters like Orpheus and Eurydice, who primarily exist in a contemporary world, appearing on stage in two cars and committing suicide.
Christoph Marthaler employed a similar hybridizing and multitemporal approach when staging the canonical opera The Coronation of Poppea (1643) by Claudio Monteverdi last year at Theater Basel in Switzerland. This production included spoken interludes by Pasolini and D’Annunzio, along with musical interludes by Senfl and Schoenberg. Other innovations featured Mussolini’s daughter as a non-singing character, casting an actor who sang in French as Nutrice, using the conductor as an on-stage singer, and having all characters perform a madrigal.
I interpret this trend, which can also be observed in the United States, by invoking the “postdramatic” paradigm introduced by Hans-Thies Lehmann to describe theater and dance performances, which is rarely adopted for opera (except by Novak, David Levin, and Ulrike Hartung). However, it is not coincidental that the productions I discuss utilize works from the early Baroque period. I expand the postdramatic concept to encompass trends already present, I argue, especially in seventeenth-century Italian opera as "pre-dramatic." This is why the "post-" concept is well-suited to interpret the stagings of musical works from that era, but it loses its heuristic value for subsequent periods.
Abstract
This study examines the cross-cultural dynamics and shifting power structures in musical theater through a comparative analysis of Tan Dun’s Marco Polo (1996) and the 2024 Sino-Italian co-production of the same title. In the context of globalization, cultural exchange remains conditioned by historical power structures and established narrative frameworks. As an emblematic figure of East-West encounters, Marco Polo’s operatic reinterpretations reflect both historical memory and contemporary artistic market forces shaping the representation of the "Other." By analyzing textual structures, musical composition, character portrayal, and instrumental choices, this study critically assesses the ideological underpinnings of these two productions through the lenses of postcolonial theory and global cultural dissemination.
Tan Dun’s Marco Polo employs nonlinear storytelling and fragmented temporal structures, drawing from the "virtuality" concept in Asian traditional theater to present Polo’s journey as a negotiation of cultural identity. The opera’s sonic landscape traverses medieval Gregorian chant, Mongolian long-song, Indian tabla rhythms, Tibetan throat singing, and Chinese opera, constructing a cross-cultural auditory collage. Meanwhile, role reversals challenge the binary division of Western subjectivity and Eastern otherness. In contrast, the 2024 Marco Polo adheres to a conventional three-act, five-scene structure, embedding East-West dialogue within a European aesthetic framework. The personification of Venice, the incorporation of barcarolle rhythms, and the juxtaposition of theorbo and electric guitar highlight both its cross-cultural ambitions and the global art market’s recontextualization of Eastern culture.
This study reveals two divergent yet interconnected approaches: Tan Dun’s experimental disruption of Western operatic norms through fragmentation and sonic hybridity, and the 2024 production’s aestheticized recalibration of cultural power relations. These approaches underscore a broader question: How can non-Western cultures assert agency in cross-cultural dialogue within a Western-dominated artistic landscape? Can cultural power shifts transcend mere formal inclusivity to achieve a genuine reconfiguration of discourse? These questions extend beyond artistic practice, addressing the redistribution of cultural authority in a globalized world.
keywords: Cross-cultural, postcolonial theory, cultural power, globalization, Marco Polo, Opera
My paper reveals the profound impact of Philip Glass’s portrayal of the concept of “Satyagraha” (“truth force”) that shaped a movement that ultimately led India to independence in 1947. The term was coined by a figure synonymous with both Indian and world history, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, or "Mahatma" ("great-souled") Gandhi. His contributions to the Indian freedom movement have transcended generations and geopolitical borders. This is illustrated in Glass’s opera Satyagraha, inspired by Gandhi's years living in South Africa as a young lawyer from 1893 to 1914, during British colonial rule. The Indian community in South Africa primarily composed of slaves brought by the British to work on sugarcane plantations. It was during this period that Gandhi developed the principles of Satyagraha that would shape his legacy. My research analyzes Glass’s compositional process of Satyagraha alongside Constance DeJong’s libretto, which draws from the Hindu scriptures, the Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita, to weave the narrative of colonial India and the quest for independence into a Western opera. Glass establishes a parallel between Gandhi’s journey and Arjuna, the warrior from the Mahabharata, and therefore presents Gandhi’s life as a quasi-mythological epic. Glass also maintains a consistent undertone of various Indian art forms in Satyagraha, such as paralleling a Hindu mythological narrative, borrowing raag from Hindustani music, and employing exaggerated painted faces resembling those seen in South Indian Kathakali dances. This opera results in a depiction of Gandhi that is rich with cultural depth, utilizing a larger ensemble to create a dramatic tapestry that reflects his struggles, and the broader context of Indian slaves under British rule. As an Indian Hindu, I draw upon my lived experiences and deep understanding of Indian culture and folklore to inform this research, partly employing an autoethnographic approach to the analysis of how Satyagraha became a transformative force.
In spite of its enduring appeal to audiences, the technical demands and the high tessature of the solo part of Joseph Haydn's Cello Concerto in D major (Hob VIIb:2) have made it a trial by fire for modern cellists. However, the origins of the piece have resisted musicological investigation for nearly two centuries.
In the early 20th century, Hans Volkmann and Donald Tovey argued that the work was the fraudulent creation of Esterházy cellist Anton Kraft. In 1959, the discovery of Haydn's autograph manuscript definitively proved the concerto’s pedigree, but its association with Kraft persisted under the assumption that he had premiered the work. However, discoveries in 2019 by Simon McVeigh and Thomas Tolley cast new light on the concerto’s origins, demonstrating that it was, in fact, commissioned by Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of Abingdon for his concert series and premiered in 1784 in London by one of England's leading solo cellists of the period, James Cervetto.
This study examines evidence that, although Cervetto possessed a prodigious command of the upper extremes of the 4-stringed cello, Haydn seems to have conceived the work for a 5-stringed instrument fitted with an E string. It considers iconographic evidence and organological data on both Cervetto and his father, Jacob, with 5-stringed instruments. The core of the investigation is a quantitative analysis of the keys, range, and pitch median of Haydn’s solo cello part. It situates that data within the full corpus of Haydn’s concerti for stringed instruments, as well as Cervetto’s own compositions for 5-stringed cello. It follows with a qualitative analysis of the idiosyncrasies of technical execution of the work and concludes with a summary of arguments both in support and in opposition to the central hypothesis, in light of the performing traditions that shaped the reception of the work.
The global trade in aerophones grew exponentially in the 19th century due to the creation of new models, the adaptation of chromatic playing mechanisms, the expansion of military and civilian bands, the dissemination of teaching manuals and the diffusion of specific repertoires. These new aerophones and their repertoires were incorporated into the musical groups of several countries during this period. The coexistence of different models in the same band promoted terminological miscellany that was recorded into their hand-copied scores. This work proposes a critical examination of musicographic and iconographic sources located at the historical archive of the Military Police of Ceará musical band in Brazil. Moreover, similar sources from other bands and bibliographic sources such as instrumentation manuals and music dictionaries published in the same period will also be examined. The objective is to discuss the lexicography and terminology of aerophones in the 19th century, taking as an example the specific case of the ophicleide. For the analysis of instrumentation, we will use the concept of “lineage of musical vocabulary” proposed by the German musicologist Wilibald Gurlitt, understanding that musical terms have affinities among themselves and belong to family groups. If, on the one hand, the spelling of the term did not vary much between Anglo-Saxon and Latin-speaking countries (ophicleide), except for Spain, which maintained the use of the primitive term (Figle or Ofigle), the family lineage of the instrument presents two supposed origins that will be addressed in this work. The ophicleide reached its peak in the 19th century, mainly through the instrumentation of musical bands, being included in works by composers such as Berlioz and Wagner, following a decrease in the 20th century.
In the transformation of kettledrums from military to ceremonial and parade uses, serving as a symbolic and universalist display of political power, the role played by African mediation has not been sufficiently studied. This role has been obscured by the fact that the transition of these instruments to the Western world has always been analyzed through the lens of Near Eastern mediation. The adoption of paired timpani, in particular, is often attributed to the expansion of Ottoman civilization.
In fact, the evolution of timpani in Europe diverges, at least in part, from this traditional attribution, as the dimensions and uses of the instrument transform over time—from the small kettledrums or nakers (naqqāra) first seen by the Crusaders in the Holy Land, to the double instruments mounted in Africa on the backs of camels, and later, in early modern Europe, on horseback. Moreover, although timpani entered the Germanic world through Hungarian mediation in the mid-15th century, iconographic sources from other European cultures, dating back even to the 14th century, associate them with Africa and/or Africans.
From the second half of the 15th century, in Aragonese culture, both in Spain and Naples, the equestrian use of the ancestors of our orchestral timpani was entrusted to black drummers. During the time of Charles V, these instruments underwent an organological evolution—with their shells now hemispherical and made of copper and brass—to be used in Habsburg and imperial military practices. However, in the Netherlands, which were part of the empire, they were still entrusted to black drummers during religious or celebratory processions known as Ommegangen, visually depicted by various painters, including Rembrandt. Moreover, surprisingly, in the early years of Charles V’s reign, the German artist Christoph Weiditz, traveling through Spain, documented the Andalusian use of Ghanaian double kettledrums, constructed using African techniques, materials, and shapes.
Building on parallel research on frame drums presented at another conference in Spain last year, this paper proposes to historically recognize timpani as one of the most evident contributions of Africa to European culture and music, and to explore the role of Africa in the transcultural evolution of percussion instruments in early modern Europe in light of the cultural history of the African diaspora.
-Versió en valencià-
La preservació de les denominades “músiques de tradició oral” ha sigut possible, en part, gràcies a la presència que encara hi ha en el passat de moltes societats de materials tradicionals que romanen disponibles per emprar-se en la pràctica musical contemporània (Hobsbawm, 1983). Alhora, la digitalització i la globalització han permés repensar les formes de transmissió del patrimoni musical propiciant la interrelació i encreuament d’escenes i gèneres. L’objectiu d’aquesta presentació és analitzar dos estratègies de reformulació de les músiques heretades com a bagatge cultural en el context del País Valencià. Els meus casos d’estudi son “Sepeli” (2023), de La Maria, i “El iaio i la mare” (2021), de Noelia Llorens “Titana”. Ambdós constitueixen exemples del que Frechina (2011) descriu com una rearticulació de les formes tradicionals en un discurs integrat en la modernitat a través de la creació de nou repertori o la recreació del vell. En “Sepeli” es produeix la reinterpretació de dos fragments del Misteri d’Elx, peça totèmica del patrimoni inmaterial valencià, per part d’una jove cantaora que els inserta en una sonoritat urbana. Amb “El iaio i la mare”, en canvi, dos tonades tradicionals recentment recuperades són introduïdes en un enregistrament mitjançant la veu en primera persona de la seua informant. Es posa així en qüestió el procés tradicional de patrimonialització de la cultura, que sovint ha implicat una jerarquia unidireccional des de les institucions que han classificat i categoritzat els artefactes culturals a protegir cap a les masses populars que els havien mantingut vius (Machin-Autenrieth et al., 2023). Aquesta presentació, doncs, representa un dels primers estudis sobre el procés de patrimonialització d’obres musicals en l’àmbit contemporani de les músiques valencianes de tradició oral. S’atén així a pràctiques per part d’artistes joves de l’escena que transmeten el passat musical defugint la concepció essencialista del mateix.
Paraules clau: tradició oral, transmissió, reformulació, patrimonialització
-English version-
Contemporary Processes of Heritagization and Folklorization in Valencian Traditional Music: Two Case Studies
The preservation of so-called "traditional music" has been facilitated, in part, by the presence of traditional materials that are still found in the past of many societies and remain available for use in contemporary musical practice (Hobsbawm, 1983). At the same time, processes of digitalization and globalization have prompted a reevaluation of the ways in which musical heritage is transmitted, fostering the interrelation and crossover of diverse scenes and genres. This study aims to analyze two strategies for reinterpreting music inherited as cultural heritage in the context of the Valencia region of the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The case studies under examination are "Sepeli" (2023) by La Maria, and "El iaio i la mare" (2021) by Noelia Llorens “Titana.” These works exemplify what Frechina (2011) describes as a rearticulation of traditional forms within a discourse that is integrated into modernity through the creation of new repertoire or the recreation of the old one. In “Sepeli”, a young artist reinterprets two fragments from the Misteri d’Elx, a seminal piece of Valencian intangible heritage, incorporating them into an urban sound. On the other hand, in "El iaio i la mare", two recently recovered traditional tunes are introduced in a recording through the first-person voice of the informant. This approach challenges the conventional processes of cultural heritagization, which has often entailed a unidirectional hierarchy — from the institutions that classify and categorize cultural artifacts to be protected toward the popular communities who sustain them (Machin-Autenrieth et al., 2023). This presentation represents one of the first studies about the process of heritagization of musical works in the contemporary field of Valencian traditional music. It focuses on practices by young artists in the scene who transmit the musical past all avoiding an essentialist conception of it.
Key words: tradition, transmission, reinterpretation, heritagization
Referències bibliogràfiques / Bibliographic references:
- Frechina, Josep V. “La música de quan nosaltres érem nosaltres”. Caramella: revista de música i cultura popular, n. 25, 2011, pp. 38-41.
- Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions”. The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm i Terence Ranger (eds.), Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 1-14.
- Machin-Autenrieth, Matthew et al. (eds.). Music and the Making of Portugal and Spain, University of Illinois Press, 2023.
“The unknown Spanish Levant series” is based on the revitalization of the "Cancionero Villenennse" by the author and its interaction with multiple musical styles beyond the Iberian peninsula, encompassing nine albums recorded between 2021 and 2025 in Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Uzbekistan and Egypt. This paper specifically explores the legacies of al-Andalus in the creation of “The Unknown Spanish Levant Series in Egypt” from two key perspectives: by fostering geographies of musical circulation between Egypt and Spain, both historically and in the present, and by reconsidering the concept of multimusicality. The concept of multimusicality, previously used by the composer of the series, examines musical practices that incorporate multiple idioms across geographic regions in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. The notion of multimusicality highlights how the compositional processes of this album, which utilizes various musical systems, challenge the dichotomy of self-orientalization and the experience of being orientalized, as well as issues of sonic al-Andalus, nostalgia, and the broader concept of "al-Andalus and beyond."
In festivals, where time and space are experienced in ways that exceed everyday temporal and geographical boundaries, the border is not simply a two-dimensional dividing line cordoning off locals from the rest of the world. Through their aesthetic and performative modes, festivals straddle the normative borders that frame everyday life to produce a festival borderland, where new modes of being, thinking, and doing can emerge. In the case of the Falles Festival of València, Spain, such a borderland comes into being through the interweaving of three musical threads. The first depends on Valencian adaptations of familiar instrument types—the dolçaina, a double-reed soprano aerophone, and tabalet, a double-membrane cylindrical drum—which, given their centrality to traditional Valencian music, inscribe a regional soundmark onto official festival acts. Following the legacy of Spanish military bands, the second thread features wind bands that accompany both formal parades and raucous street concerts. Once the sun sets, a third musical style takes over as pounding EDM beats reverberate from the casals (Falles headquarters) that populate the city streets. The musical repertoires that mark the Falles Festival index distinct bordered histories in and through performance. But the juxtaposition and frequent recombination of these musical threads in the festival borderland also complicate the borders that frame these musics, as I explore in this paper. I argue that the blurring of musical borders during Falles serves to “relocalize” València, sounding out new conceptions of what counts as Valencian and extending the timespaces to which València’s borders correspond. If music cannot alter the geopolitical territories that circumscribe the Falles Festival, it nevertheless recalibrates the place-based associations that the music of Falles calls up and, in so doing, reimagines València’s national and transnational connections.
During the Early Modern period, processions disrupted daily work activities, integrating ordinary time with moments of closing workshops to engage in devotional practices. In the cities of the Crown of Aragon connected to the Mediterranean, a common feature was the prevalence of processions. In this context, cathedrals functioned as vertical acoustic epicentres, emitting sonic signals that regulated both daily time and processional time. These sounds operated as polysemic codes, capable of being interpreted across functional, symbolic, and ritual dimensions. Consequently, spaces with specific acoustic properties were created, reflecting a deliberate sonic distribution aimed at optimizing auditory propagation and constructing a collective acoustic memory.
Through the methodological triangulation of tools from historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and digital humanities—particularly mapping—it is possible to analyse different soundspaces by articulating three main dimensions: acoustic analysis (encompassing elements such as bells, trumpets, drums, ministrels, and singing); performative practices (such as proclamations, processions, and theatrical interludes); and symbolic systems (linked to social hierarchies and guild identities). This approach is further enriched by a diachronic perspective that considers historical temporality alongside a phenomenological analysis exploring culturally encoded sensory experiences.
This paper will employ these tools to examine acoustic communities associated with soundspaces, revealing how processions were configured as auditory palimpsests composed of stratified layers. Using examples drawn from the historical mapping of processions in cities such as Valencia, Barcelona, Tarragona, and Palma de Mallorca, it will demonstrate how these soundspaces operated as social technologies, shaping identities through auditory enculturation processes. In this framework, repeated exposure to specific sonic codes generated cognitive associations. This approach seeks to transcend superficial descriptions by proposing an analytical model that interprets historical sounds as expressions of power, collective memory, and mechanisms of cultural transmission.
The paper focuses on the musical practices in southern Italy - civil and military - of ‘fanfares’ and the first ‘bands’ between 1800 and 1870, indicating the relevance of their ‘sound’ and ‘colour’ even within a written and cultured tradition.
The reconnaissance of musical sources and archival documentation, carried out on a sample basis, shows the predominant role that wind orchestras played in the soundscape of the Kingdom of Naples (the largest pre-unification state occupying about a third of the Italian peninsula) and in its widespread musical literacy.
Bands and fanfares are active in multiple urban contexts and display a highly differentiated technical level: oscillating between amateurism and professionalism, they allow for real and widespread socio-cultural inclusiveness. Civic uses (religious devotion, civic celebrations, ‘cassette’ concerts, musical instruction) and military uses (parades, marches, etc.) characterise the variegated archipelago of the hundreds of concert bands, tour bands, municipal fanfares, displaying characteristics similar to practices in other European territories.
However, the current availability of ‘pure’ band compositions from the 1800-1870 period is far less than in other territories (Northern Italy, Austria, France). Why? The answers, in my opinion, are twofold. The first consideration is that our knowledge of that surviving musical heritage is still lacking and many band archives have not been investigated.
Secondly, in my opinion, ‘cultured’ music for bands in the pre-unification Mezzogiorno initially burst out forcefully in the theatre, in the orchestra of 19th century melodrama. From that new sound, from that already ‘band-like’ writing of opera linked to the ‘Neapolitan school,’ naturally descended the endless band rewritings that still characterise the southern soundscape today.
A few case studies will serve to offer an initial attempt to use the sources for the reconstruction of a long-lasting phenomenon that may prove the existence of a sensitivity for instrumental music in Italy in the 19th century period that is considered exclusively dominated by opera.
As a performer, opera conductor and composer, Giovanni Bottesini was a key figure in the nineteenth-century traveling Italian opera performing circuit. His career is exemplary of the transnational entanglements of musical culture in a century that brought highly accelerated land and sea travel. Bottesini’s engagements, performances, and show how music culture became increasingly global. These endeavours were not only intertwined with developments in public transportation, but also deeply embedded in global and economic power structures brought about by coloniality and hegemonic European culture. This study session sketches a collaborative research project on a global history of 19th century Western art music as embodied, and disseminated, by Bottesini.
The first paper gives a brief presentation of our joint project and introduces Bottesini’s musical activities, focusing on the “Mediterranean” stages in his life, namely his engagement in Barcelona at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. Regionalisms, nationalisms and exoticisms were also present in Bottesini’s compositional oeuvre, appearing in pieces like the orchestral ‘Saludo a España’, the string quartet ‘El Catalán’ and the orchestral composition ‘Notti Arabe’, consisting of ‘Nilo’ and ‘Il Deserto’. The paper intends to show how cross-national connections and historical entanglements going beyond the Mediterranean also emerged in Bottesini’s through the distribution and commodification of operatic italian music.
The second paper focuses on Bottesini’s time in Egypt, as an orchestra director and conductor of the premiere of Verd’s Aida, during the celebrations for the opening of the Suez Canal. The Canal, connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, opened in 1869, accelerating international trade and deeply changing the connection between worlds, bypassing the sea route around Africa and linking Europe and Asia. The opening festivities culminated in the foundation of the Khedive Opera House by Shah Ismail Pasha, and in the première of Aida in Cairo in 1871, both led by Bottesini. The time in Cairo would become the longest engagement of Bottesini’s career, ending only when the Theatre was forced to stop its activities. This paper examines autological and heterological influences on Bottesini’s work as a conductor and composer in Egypt.
The last paper utilizes Bottesini as a case study, examining the presence and influence of traveling Italian opera companies in the Americas, most specifically in cities like Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. According to Matteo Paoletti, the success of Italian opera in the Americas was not only a byproduct of the expansion of the business model beyond the Mediterranean, but also a consequence of the Italian diaspora in the second half of the nineteenth century, which created audiences for the genre in the global South. This paper examines how, on the one hand, Italian opera was perceived as a symbol of modernity in the Americas; on the other hand, this global music business had to adapt to new localities and audiences. By examining newspaper critique of Bottesini’s performances, this paper discusses how Italian opera became a transnational genre in the Americas, not only influencing local music making, but also influenced by local conditions.
In Spanish music history, the beginning of the Baroque represents an unsolved problem. Literary critics recognize a major break around 1580 (Montesinos 1959), as reflected in two closely related novelties: the rise of the comedia nueva, and the flourishing of the romance nuevo. I argue that this disruption was a broader cultural transformation that also involved music and whose key feature was the rise of popular culture.
I posit that several phenomena, traditionally regarded as distinct, came together to produce a deep and unified cultural shift: the rise of strummed guitar accompaniment for song and dance; the popularity of “immoral” dance-songs such as the zarabanda, and the chacona; the widespread adoption of triple meter with hemiolas; and the generalization of compás ternario menor (C3) with metric alterations represented by blackened figures that enabled a more precise representation of complex rhythms. The idiosyncrasies of the so-called seventeenth-century Spanish style (Stein 1993) cannot be explained without considering these transformations.
The cultural shift was catalyzed by the contemporary establishment of public theatres, which empowered commoners to demand entertainment suiting their taste. This transformed Spanish culture from a high-brow tradition dictated by the elites into one increasingly defined by plebeian preferences. In music, the appeal of popular song can be seen as early as Salinas’ De musica libri septem (1577), which aristocrats also soon embraced, as evidenced by the concurrent hiring of the mixed-race guitar player and singer Leonor de Guzmán around 1610 in the household of three grandees (Rodulfo Hazen, 2022).
The well-known controversy over theatre—more than 50 publications between 1580 and 1630—bears further witness of the impact of this process, as illustrated by Juan de Mariana’s Treatise Against Public Entertainments (ca. 1590), a vehement diatribe against the negative influence of poetry, theatre, music, and dance on Spanish society.
A key objective of global history has been to highlight connections and comparisons across vast distances and time-periods. Global music history shares that tendency, but also embraces relativistic studies of diverse local musical pasts that promote the de-centring of traditional historical-musicological focus. Within both fields, emphases on connectivity reflect an intricate relationship with studies on globalization produced since the late twentieth century. They also bring into sharp focus chronologies of large-scale networks, which in turn have implications for periodizations of ‘the global’. One view of this periodization is by historians Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, who have argued that until networks were sustained circumferentially, there was no ‘globalization’ per se (‘Globalization Began in 1571’, in Globalization and Global History, ed. Barry K. Gills and William R. Thompson (London: Routledge, 2006), 232-247). Of course, if that concept were applied to global music history, it would imply the relatively short timeframe of less than half a millenium. Another view of global connectivity sees it occurring not just through networks, but at a species-wide level. In an article of 2003 that examined different kinds of trans-state cultural processes, and anticipated many of the theoretical questions that global music historians have recently faced, Thomas Turino stated: ‘I want to reserve the term global to describe phenomena that literally encompass the geography and populations of the globe’, giving examples including climate change, life-cycle events, and radio (‘Are We Global Yet? Globalist Discourse, Cultural Formations and the Study of Zimbabwean Popular Music’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology 12, no. 2: 52-53). This paper explores a range of theoretical perspectives and examples in music history, and asks how re-engaging with the complex relationships between various kinds of connectivity and chronology across the longue durée might reveal new ways to contemplate human musical pasts in global terms.
The historiography of music in Greece, dating back to the late 19th century, has been profoundly shaped by the significant contributions of women such as Athina Seremeti (late 19th–early 20th century), Avra Theodoropoulou (1880–1963), and Kaiti Romanou (1939–2020). Each of these scholars introduced groundbreaking advancements to music historiography: Seremeti was the first to translate a comprehensive history of European art music into Greek (1888), Theodoropoulou authored the first inclusive history of both Western and Greek art music in Greek (1924), and Romanou provided an extensive and in-depth analysis of the history of Greek art music from the end of the Middle Ages to the present (2000). Their contributions acquire greater significance when viewed in relation to the broader evolution of music historiography in the Greek language. This paper employs critical textual analysis and historical contextualization as key methodological approaches. Additionally, it incorporates perspectives from gender studies to examine the motivations behind, and the impact of, the work of women music historians in Greece.
After the conquest of the Valencian Muslim territories by the troops of King James I of Aragon and the creation of the new Kingdom of València in the 13th century, many were the orders and legislation for the Muslim population that decided to stay in the new Cristian territories, the Mudejares. In origin, these laws where somewhat permissive, and the Mudejares could practice their faith and rituals, usually living in separated neighbourhoods (morerias). They could call the prayer on Friday, and celebrate rituals such as weddings, processions and funerals.
But for different political and social reasons, from the beginning of the 16th century this toleration ended, and new legislation started to force the Mudejares to convert to Christianism or leave the country (first in Castille in 1501, then, in 1525 in València). The ones who stayed and converted became the Moriscos or cristianos nuevos, who were always suspected of continuing to live as Muslims.
In this paper I will analyse the orders given to those Moriscos taking as case studies two examples of Valencian legislation, the Instruccions by Archbishop Ayala (1566) and the Constituciones by Archbishop Loaces (1568). These documents contain very interesting information about how the life of Moriscos was before they were obligated to convert, and how the most important things to eradicate for the Christian authorities were related to ritual (public and private) and to the use of sound as means of communication and identity.
Slavery was the official mode of production in Brazil from the occupation of the territory by Pedro Álvares Cabral in April 1500 until its official abolition in May 1888. For nearly 400 uninterrupted years, despite the violence inflicted upon approximately four million enslaved Black people, the interactions between Whites, Blacks, and Indigenous peoples across various social strata facilitated the consolidation of what came to be known as “Brazilian culture.” Studies in religion, music, dance, and popular festivities reveal countless cultural expressions rooted in an Afro-Brazilian axis. However, another aspect that warrants further examination concerns Black-Portuguese transmission.
By 1552, Africans from the western coast, from the Senegal River to the Zaire River, made up 10% of Lisbon’s population, a number that only grew until the 18th century as the slave trade proved increasingly profitable. These individuals worked as domestic servants, agricultural laborers, dockworkers, galley rowers, animal handlers, vendors, artisans, and musicians.
Barber-surgeons were highly regarded professionals both within and beyond European courts, and their services—including haircuts, shaving, tooth extractions, and bloodletting—were in demand in Portugal’s main colony, often performed by enslaved individuals. In Rio de Janeiro, most of them were musicians, particularly violinists and clarinetists. However, despite the admiration recorded by several German, French, and English travelers between the 1820s and 1850s, hundreds of escape attempts were documented in the same period, raising questions about their living conditions. This paper presents the results of a systematic analysis of travelers’ accounts and an extensive survey of archival documentation concerning barber-surgeons' musical activities in the Brazilian Empire.
A comienzos del siglo XX, la sublimación de las antiguas culturas “orientales” como Arcadias en las que proyectar formas de sexualidad no normativas constituyó una de las principales vías para la expresión de la diferencia homosexual en la música, las artes visuales y la literatura. Por “Oriente” se entendía entonces Oriente Próximo, el Lejano Oriente, el Norte de África y las antiguas culturas andalusí y gitana. EL orientalismo homoerótico de principios de siglo ha sido estudiado desde posiciones decoloniales en el ámbito las artes visuales y la literatura (Aldrich 1993; Boone 2014) pero apenas todavía en el de la música, en particular la española. Esta presentación constituye un primer paso en el análisis del orientalismo musical español desde perspectivas que sitúen la noción de otredad sexual en primer plano. Mi corpus analítico incluye Noches en los jardines de España (1909-15) de Manuel de Falla, Un perfume de Arabia (1922) de Ernesto Halffter, y Arabia (1923) de Adolfo Salazar. La presentación ahonda en los significados de estas obras en el momento de su composición y estreno, así como en la concepción no teleológica (y por tanto no normativa) del tiempo musical. Tal concepción constituía no solo una forma de exotización (Oriente como Arcadia atemporal) sino también una forma de lo que teóricos como Muñoz (2009), Freeman (2010) y otros han denominado recientemente “queer temporalities”. La presentación contribuye a renovar nuestro entendimiento de la modernidad musical española en la Edad de Plata adoptando una perspectiva que sitúa la subjetividad de género y la sexualidad en primer plano.
Spanish Orientalism and the Expression of Non-Normative Sexualities in Early 20th-Century Music
In the early twentieth century, the sublimation of ancient “Oriental” cultures as Arcadias—spaces onto which non-normative sexualities could be projected—emerged as one of the primary means of expressing homosexual difference in music, the visual arts, and literature. At the time, the term “Orient” encompassed the Near East, the Far East, North Africa, and the historic Andalusian and Spanish-Romani cultures. The homoerotic orientalism of this period has been studied from decolonial perspectives in the fields of visual arts and literature (Aldrich 1993; Boone 2014) but scarcely in music, particularly Spanish music.
This presentation serves as a first step in analysing Spanish musical orientalism through lenses that foreground the notion of sexual Otherness. My analytical corpus includes Noches en los jardines de España (1909-15) by Manuel de Falla, Un perfume de Arabia (1922) by Ernesto Halffter, and Arabia (1923) by Adolfo Salazar. The presentation delves into the meanings these works held at the time of their composition and premiere, as well as into the non-teleological (and therefore non-normative) conception of musical time. This conception not only functioned as a form of exoticisation—casting the Orient as an atemporal Arcadia—but also as a form of what theorists such as Muñoz (2009), Freeman (2010), and others have recently termed “queer temporalities.” The paper contributes to renewing our understanding of Spanish musical modernity during the Silver Age by adopting a perspective that foregrounds gender subjectivity and sexuality.
Aldrich, Robert.1993. The Seduction of the Mediterranean. Homosexual Writing, Art and Fantasy. London: Routledge.
Boone, Joseph A. 2014. The Homoerotics of Orientalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.
The celebration of Christmas in the Philippines, with its accompanying rituals and music, is widely regarded as as one of the longest and most festive traditions in the world. As a transcultural product of Spanish colonial engagement, the traditions and music of Philippine Christmas embody a complex interplay of cultural flows that trace their origins from the Mediterranean to the Far East. These traditions, marked by ambiguities and incongruities, reflect the broader processes of transculturation - where cultural elements are appropriated, adapted, and reimagined across geographies and histories. In the Philippines, a predominantly Christian nation in Asia, the intermingling of indigenous and Hispanic cultures has created a unique cultural praxis, but one that also raises questions about cultural identity, appropriation, and hybridity
This paper seeks to investigate the multifaceted realities of cultural transformation in the context of Hispanic colonialism, focusing on the appropriation and adaptation of the misa de aguinaldo ritual and the villancico musical genre within Filipino cultural practice. I will attempt to trace the process of how an appropriated ritual tradition from the Mediterranean (where the villancico originated as a Spanish musical form) becomes an crucial defining factor in the postcolonial identity of a nation in the Far East (where it was recontextualized in the Philippines). Despite the ambivalences inherent in their colonial origins, these rituals and musical forms have been reimagined and integrated into the fabric of Philippine society, serving as a means of maintaining socio-cultural equilibrium and continuity.
Musical epigraphies are historical musical sources written or inscribed on a hard or semi-hard support that endures over time. Musical epigraphies as historical sources are of utmost importance for religious studies, as they were part of a mode of cultural, social, and artistic expression created by Christian communities in their acts of worship and rituals. These are a pending case study within the musicological panorama in Spain. The known samples have been collected by different authors, who have reported on their findings. However, the lack of systematization in the studies raises the need to develop a theoretical and methodological proposal for the treatment of this type of musical sources that would accommodate a museum plan with the aim of restoring, disseminating, and preserving heritage. To this end, two case studies will be exemplified. The first deals with the musical epigraphies of a Salve Regina by Cristóbal de Morales located on the walls of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Pueyo in Villamayor de Gállego in Zaragoza. The second focuses on the epigraphies found in the former convent of the Calmelitas Calzados in Valencia. For the latter, a model of museumization will be presented, which was carried out through the Consorci de Museus and is currently on permanent display at the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània (CCCC) in Valencia. The recognition of this type of source, historical musical epigraphies, as cultural assets guarantees the preservation of a part of Valencian and Spanish musical heritage, promoting its research and study.
This paper discusses the research carried out as part of the project Artist's Piano Rolls in Spain, led by Lourdes Rebollo at the Universidad Internacional de Valencia.
Artist’s piano rolls are part of the history of recorded music. They provide valuable information about early recording technologies and performance practices, as well as the musical and cultural tastes of early 20th century society. While cylinders and early discs had technical limitations in terms of sound recording and storage capacity, recorded piano rolls captured in real time the performance of a pianist playing on a grand piano connected to a recording device. Piano rolls could also store up to 15 minutes of music. This made it possible to record not only a wider and more complex piano repertoire, but also chamber music and orchestral transcriptions. Many pianists and composers recorded on piano rolls between 1904 and 1930, including a generation of artists born in the mid-19th century, providing a link to 20th century performance practice. Piano roll recordings were also the best way of disseminating composers' works and preserving those performed by the composers themselves (Granados, Falla, Grieg, among others). This paper examines the companies, the artists and the repertoire disseminated on these piano rolls in the historical, cultural and social context of twentieth-century Spain.
The sentimental modinha stands as one of the most traditional song-forms of the Portuguese-speaking world. In the present paper, however, I shall highlight two nineteenth-century modinha songbooks that are currently held neither in Brazil nor in Portugal. Rather, though produced in Rio de Janeiro, the songbooks are presently housed at the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart and the Spanish National Library in Madrid. This unlikely situation raises a few basic but hitherto unexamined questions: how did these codices find their way into non-Luso-Brazilian repositories? What chain of custody did they go through? Was their transit isolated or representative of wider transnational flows? My paper demonstrates that, despite their common origin in the print shop of Pierre Laforge (1791-1853), a famous local publisher, these songbooks followed rather different paths under very distinct circumstances: up until the 1970s, the volume in Germany was the idle possession of a member of the former royal family in Rio de Janeiro; at the mid-nineteenth century, the one in Spain was actively enlivening the gatherings promoted by Maria Benedita Buschental (1815-1891), one of Madrid’s paramount salonnières. I shall conclude with comments on the textual relevance of these songbook-sources for the critical edition of the songs of Cândido Inácio da Silva (1799/1800-1838), a project I carried out under the sponsorship of the Brazilian National Library Foundation, American Musicological Society, and University of South Carolina.
“Arabesk,” a music genre that blends Turkish folk music with Arabic influences, has periodically dominated public discussion in Turkey since its emergence in the 1960s. The genre has always implied a relationship to the ruling elite: once heavily disdained by the bureaucratic center, it was later co-opted for populist ambitions. A robust academic discourse on arabesk is found in the influential work of Martin Stokes (1992), which accounts for the genre as a marginalized or counter-hegemonic one, as presented in the condescending stance of Turkey’s secularist bureaucratic elite towards arabesk. The relationship between arabesk and the political regime, however, had already started to change in the aftermath of the 1980 coup, as the genre became increasingly associated with the new conservatism in the power bloc (Özbek, 1991). With the construction of an Islamist hegemony following Erdoğan’s ascent to power in 2002, arabesk was further embraced by the political regime. During his 23 years in power, president Erdoğan pursued a concerted project of “articulating” (Hall, 1986; Laclau, 1977; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) arabesk to the new Islamist-liberal hegemony via particular populist and affective strategies. These include Erdoğan’s repeated performances of arabesk songs in election rallies, his deliberate integration of the love language of arabesk into political speeches, and his overt embrace of and collaboration with arabesk musicians. This paper traces the changing meanings of arabesk since its appearance as a potentially oppositional subculture in the 1960s, to its increasingly conservative political affiliations in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally to its more complete integration to right-wing ideologies by Erdoğan and the AKP government(s) in the 2000s. Drawing on media archives from the AKP era, the paper offers a reassessment of the history of arabesk, one that accounts for the genre’s association with hard-right populism today.
After its independence in 1964, Malta, a small Mediterranean island country, embarked on an extensive economic programme to diversify the island’s economy. This intensified in the 1970s under the socialist Labour government, which promoted the value of industriousness ('bżulija' in Maltese) as a key value for the country’s economic progress. In parallel with these economic and political developments, the Maltese music scene of the 1970s experienced a boom in the production of locally composed popular songs in Maltese, most of which depicted the Maltese landscape, the surrounding sea and the daily lives of hard-working people whose survival depended mainly on the hard work that industriousness entailed. Some of these songs achieved unprecedented popularity and are still popular today. This article will draw on this context to examine how the politically charged ideological discourse on industriousness was obliquely embedded in these songs, even those in which the worker as such featured only marginally or not at all.
My paper looks at the world's very first music periodicals from an editorial point of view. To do this, I will look at three major players in music publishing in France at the end of the 17th century: the printer Ballard, the ‘Mercure galant’ - the first musical periodical - and the composer Bertrand de Bacilly, who used the ‘Mercure galant’ as a forum to defend his interests against Ballard, who was publishing counterfeits of his vocal and theoretical works. The ‘war’ between Bacilly and Ballard lasted until Bacilly's death, with enlarged reprints, unauthorized editions and acerbic texts on both sides. While these facts are well known to specialists, there are two new aspects to the study:
1. It was because of competition from Ballard that Bacilly collaborated with the ‘Mercure’ and determined the musical style that marked the identity of the periodical which spread throughout the salons, as it was much better distributed than the musical editions.
2. Bacilly was the real inventor of the musical journals, creating the ‘Journal de musique’. The ‘Mercure galant’ and Bacilly's journal published in parallel for two years, and Bacilly published several airs in both journals before Ballard's attacks forced him to abandon his journal. Years of study of the Mercure galant have enabled me to establish that the diversity of subject matter in this well-known cultural periodical was based on the systematic borrowing of editorial models. A close analysis of the texts on music shows that the protection afforded by the Mercure, was in fact a means of stifling any competition in the field of music periodicals. This opened the door to a whole trend of publishing songs, arias and then instrumental pieces in the cultural press in France, England and, in the 18th century, in many European countries.
In diary entries dating 1926–29, the Viennese music theorist Heinrich Schenker displays a keen interest in Pablo Casals, reflecting on his activities as both a cellist and a conductor. These writings demonstrate a conflicted view. Schenker’s response to Casals’s performance of Bach’s Third Cello Suite was uncharacteristically effusive, commending the cellist’s “incomparable command of the instrument” and “uncommonly strong instinct for synthesis.” That performance not only prompted Schenker to immediately seek out tickets for Casals’s next but also inspired an extended analytical essay on the suite’s Sarabande. That essay includes interpretive suggestions that were in all likelihood inspired by the Casals concert that Schenker so loved.
Yet, despite consistently praising Casals the cello soloist, Schenker took issue with Casals the conductor, characterizing one performance as “shockingly bad, too fast, uninspired, as if he were not the same person who plays the cello.” Schenker was also critical of the cellist’s chamber music performances and what he perceived to be a “business sense” in the way Casals presented himself as a musician, including in an interview published in the Neue Freie Presse.
Although Schenker is today best known for his writings on music analysis, his diaries and correspondence provide a detailed account of concert life and musical broadcasts in Vienna during the early twentieth century. His reactions to Casals’s performances reveal an unexpectedly ambivalent, nuanced perspective on the Catalan musician in terms of his cello playing, conducting, and self-presentation.
This paper aims to investigate a series of unexploited official reports of the celebrations of the birth of the son of Louis XV (September 1729), originating from a dozen of embassies and consulates in the eastern Mediterranean, from Thessaloniki and Istanbul to Saïda and Rameh.
These festivals were ordered by the King and consisted of a twofold series of events: thanksgiving events – essentially a Te Deum - and festivities (bonfires, concerts, dances, theatre, suppers, balls, ritualized toasts, etc…)
A first line of enquiry will consider the extent to which the ritual framework of these festivals, as it has been practised in France and illustrated by dozens of reports in the French press, had to be modified in the Mediterranean context due to
1/ the political and urban context of the embassy, which means that these celebrations were a mixture of the official public festival’s model and the aristocratic « fêtes particulières »
2/ the co-participation of European, Turkish and Greek people according to very diverse roles and social statuses.
While the thanksgiving traditionally remains centred on the singing of the Te Deum with the artillery, the whole of the festivities has been profoundly marked by these two elements. This will be particularly illustrated by the study of the spatial organisation of the festivities and that of the performative modalities of Turkish, Greek and European dances.
A second line of inquiry will focus on discourse. Official reports are traditionally based on a eulogistic discourse. They also aim to perpetuate identity markers and collective values.
I will first analyse the place given to non-European cultural/musical practices in the discourse and the way they are integrated into. This will help us understand how they try to represent the joy and support of the multicultural participants while maintaining the national, religious and ethnic coherence of the French community.
One of the lesser-known aspects of Golden Age culture is the presence of Muslim ambassadors in theatre, not only as characters in plays but also as spectators. This proposal for applied research stems from the project Mediterranean Intercultural Diplomacy of the Spanish Monarchy (DIPLOINMED). Building on the study of theatrical and musical performances attended by Muslim ambassadors, this presentation aims to showcase the research findings and the creative process behind developing a contemporary theatrical and musical production.
The research is based on the identification of a corpus of approximately fifteen plays featuring scenes of Islamic embassies, authored by prominent figures such as Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Calderón de la Barca, and Vélez de Guevara, among others. Additionally, the study has identified the performances staged in Madrid to honour the Ottoman ambassador Ahmed Aga in 1649 and the Moroccan diplomat al-Ghassani in 1690. Both events included musical passages that have been located and analyzed.
This proposal outlines the research process, from identifying historical sources to selecting and adapting plays for modern production. The contemporary performance interweaves original theatrical excerpts with musical interventions, highlighting the roles attributed to ambassadors in the cultural imagination of the time. These figures were portrayed as comedic frauds, malicious enemies, or respected authorities, reflecting a range of perspectives that provide a lens to reexamine the relationships between the Spanish Monarchy and Muslim powers from a decolonial perspective within the Mediterranean context.
The project combines academic rigour with artistic creativity, offering adaptability from a minimalist format (two actors and a guitarist) to a full-scale production with a complete theatrical company. This interdisciplinary endeavour demonstrates how historical research can be transformed into performances that engage contemporary audiences, fostering a critical and enriching perspective on our Mediterranean heritage.