Musical Topographies of the Mediterranean
Virtuelle Tagung
International conference jointly organized by Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (Thomas Betzwieser) and Orient-Institut Istanbul (Judith I. Haug) in cooperation with Deutsches Historisches Institut Rom (Sabine Ehrmann-Herfort)
March 16-18, 2022, Online
The Mediterranean always has been and still is one of the most important cultural ‘trading places’, a venue of diverse processes of exchange and transfer. These processes took place also in the immaterial realm of music, resulting in a web of relationships across times and spaces. Musicological research has been exploring those intercultural processes for a long time, albeit mostly focusing on isolated phenomena. While historical musicology mainly engaged with the Medieval Mediterranean, ethnomusicology has taken interest in the region as a ‘space’. Mediterranean studies questioning multicultural and multiethnic phenomena are today an integral part of ethnomusicological research. However, in spite of various research activities, the question of “Mediterranean Music” is still pressing – or is it just a ‘mirage’?
The methodological gap between ethnomusicology and historical musicology is conspicuous, and it is especially important to sensitize historical musicology for the Mediterranean as a cultural phenomenon. It is one of the aims of the conference to motivate in this direction by proposing topics and areas relevant to both disciplines, inspiring the development of new figures of thought concerning categories of region and space and switching traditional perspectives.