Prospects for comparative musicology in the 21st century: ethnomusicology or transcultural musicology?

Looking back over more than 130 years of ethnomusicology, we realise there is an increasingly urgent need to assess the current status and tasks now being carried out in the overall framework of research into forms, behaviour and results of expressions and creations through sounds.
Can we still justify the role of ethnomusicologists as promoters, guarantors and protectors of “other” music? And on what grounds? This question challenges the current state of the subject and its fields which – by now more for convention than conviction – we still call classical music, popular music, oral-tradition music, electronic music and so on, but also ethnomusicology, art musicology, contemporary musicology and popular musicology.
There can be no doubt that the extent and boundaries of these fields must be revised, given that historical developments and the geo-anthropic, sociological and stylistic maps once referred to have changed radically and at a speed much faster than our response times and capacity to adapt.
These and many other related issues will be discussed by leading international experts in the discipline at the 18th International Seminar in Ethnomusicology, to be held by the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, from 24-26 January 2013.

Info:
Istittuto Interculturale di Sudi Musicali Comparati
Tel. 041 2710357 –
e-mail: musica.comparata@cini.it