XVI International Seminar in Ethnomusicology

Mainly focused on identifying systems, practices and contexts of use for different “musical languages”, ethnomusicology has long subordinated the aesthetic function to other primarily utilitarian and communicative/expressive functions. Moreover, in taking its distance from high-brow Eurocentric musicology, the discipline has often claimed to eschew the use of criteria of aesthetic evaluation in its analysis. Yet, in retrospect, we now realize that aesthetic criteria have played a far from secondary role in the choice of research subjects, the selection of music and repertoires to be included in recordings of collected music, the importance given to this or that feature of these repertories and performance practices, also in relation to the dominant aesthetic values in Western musicology.
But ethnomusicology has now opened up to new inter cultural synthesis and tackles key issues such as the relations between music and language, while critically revising many concepts of the “beautiful” in music in vogue in the 20th century among high- brow musicologists (from the romantic ideology and Eduard Hanslick to Theodor W. Adorno, Gisèle Brelet and Susanne Langer). The time thus seems to be ripe for a return to the question
of the relationship between aesthetics and ethnomusicology, especially as regards several major issues: the possibility and means of production of meaning in music; aesthetic-musical categories from cross-cultural
perspectives; relations between written texts and music; the relationship between forms and “content”; and the social values of musical communication.
Exploring these issues is in fact the aim of the XVI International Seminar of Ethno- musicology, promoted by the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies, in collaboration with the Department of History of the Arts and Conservation of Artistic Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University. Due to be held on the Island of San Giorgio from 27
to 29 January 2011, the seminar, organised, as usual, by professor Francesco Giannattasio will be attended by Italian and international experts from various disciplines.