17th International Seminar in Ethnomusicology
Since its inception, ethnomusicology has investigated mental processes concerning music making and listening to music, which is evidence of its positive, interdisciplinary tradition.
Indeed the first ever ethnomusicology research centre, the so-called Berlin school, created in the early 20th-century in a climate of evolutionary comparativism, was housed in a university institute of psychology. By the 1930s and George Herzog’s studies on the musical languages of various native American societies and, subsequently, also the inquiries of his two most illustrious students, George List and Bruno Nettl, ethnomusicology
was specifically dealing with the relations between music and language and the multiple levels of phonic and rhythmic forms in various cultures. Moreover, at the end of John Blacking’s most celebrated book, How musical is man? (1973), the author claimed that music can provide an unadulterated image of the mind and the general patterns of interaction between people. Then, of course, there was the very broad current of ethnological,
psychological and ethnomusicological studies on the relations between music and abnormal states of mind, which flourished especially from the 1960s to 1980s.
Particularly in the last twenty years, there has been a further growth in the field of neurosciences (but also neuropsychology, neo-evolutionary musicology, biolinguistics, paleoethnology, etc.), as well as in the scientific study of cognitive processes and music in relation both to the mechanisms implicit in those processes and another communicational expressive forms of human behaviour (even compared to those of other animal species), especially language and its phylogenesis. Progress is made almost daily in this field of studies thanks to the growing potential of information technology and the
possibilities of studying and experimenting with cerebral processes due to the introduction of new clinical instruments. This has led to the publication of works like The Origins of Music by Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker and Steven Brown (2000), Music, Language and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel (2008) and The Singing Neanderthals by the archaeologist Steven Mithen (2005). Such books have been remarkably popular, while terms and phrases such as cognitive neurosciences of music, musical processing, cognitive musicology, musical cognitivism, biomusicology, musilanguage, etc. now sound
familiar to musicologists, especially those who work on systematic and intercultural aspects and have always been interested in human musicality – i.e. ethnomusicologists.
Given this background, the International Seminar in Ethnomusicology organised by the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies at the Giorgio Cini Foundation is devoting the 17th edition (26-28 January 2012) to Ethnomusicology, evolutionary musicology and the neurosciences. In this way some leading international experts in the field will explore the state of the art of a complex relationship not sufficiently based on fruitful and reciprocal exchanges: namely the relation between ethnomusicology research and neuroscientific music research. While the former often still clings to typically 20th-century positions of musical-anthropological relativism, the latter, in its laboratory enquiries and experiments, at times does not seem sufficiently aware of the new cross-cultural conception of making music as well as the relations between music and language, which in fact ethnomusicology made a considerable contributing to establishing.
The seminar edited by Francesco
Giannattasio will participate: Simha Arom, Giorgio Banti, Emanuel Bigand, Bjorn Merker, Isabelle Peretz.
Info:
Istituto Interculturale di Studi Musicali Comparati
tel” 0412710357”
musica.comparata@cini.it ”
