The music of the twenty-first century diasporas: research and methods

Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
plus Jan, 2325 2020

The fifth Music and Musicology of the Twenty-first Century seminar, The music of the twenty-first century diasporas: research and methods, is intended to discuss what we think is a highly topical issue: the role played by music in the diaspora migrations of the twenty-first century. This implies an updated reflection on the most recent phenomena and a fine-tuning of the methodologies used until now by ethnomusicology to study these processes. The diaspora are important phenomena in this new century, too, whether forced to escape war or persecution, or triggered by economic reasons. A phenomenon as old as man is now taking on new connotations as a result of changed social and economic conditions, major changes in the international political scene and new ways of producing and consuming music increasingly conditioned by the media and technology. The question that the seminar intends asking is whether new interpretive tools are needed and/or how the methodologies developed over the last century, when diaspora studies developed and took on a disciplinary independence (and interdisciplinary perspective), should be recalibrated.