A key moment in the celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies will be a conference organised in collaboration with
\nthe Humboldt Forum f\u00fcr Kultur, Berlin, to reflect on the diffusion of music in the world in the\u00a01960s, the period when the Institute was founded. So far there has been little thinking on a crucial aspect of 20th-century music history: the important role played by the Intercultural Institute\u00a0of Comparative Music Studies and its predecessor, the International Institute for Comparative
\nMusic Studies and Documentation, founded in Berlin in 1963, from which the Venetian Institute stemmed. From an interdisciplinary perspective, historians, anthropologists, musicologists
\nand ethnomusicologists will explore the motivations and dynamics of the diffusion of extra-European music in Italy and on the rest of the continent. To do so also requires addressing topics
\nsuch as the Cold War and the confrontation between the East-West blocs and the creation of\u00a0international organisations and their cultural outlooks. A further significant task involves piecing together the debate between the ethnomusicologists that helped to shape the way we come to\u00a0know and evaluate the music of the world in cultural and aesthetic terms. Other topics that will
\nbe considered include the celebrated East-West Music Encounter, a conference held in Tokyo in\u00a01961, the role of organisations such as UNESCO, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the International Music Council and the International Folk Music Council, and the contribution of pioneering figures, such as Alain Dani\u00e9lou, Nicholas Nabokov and Jack Bornoff. In addition to the\u00a0various papers, the conference will feature conversations with some of the other protagonists of\u00a0that movement in those years: Simha Arom, Jacques Cloarec and Ivan Vandor.<\/p>\n