Mediterranean Music Matera conference

In 2027 the International Musicological Society will celebrate its first centenary, being the oldest of the major international associations of musicologists. In 2016, IMS organized for the first time, in Naples (Italy), a conference held jointly with the Study Group of its sister association ICTMD, on the theme “Musicians of the Mediterranean: Narratives of Movement.” On that occasion, the IMS Study Group “Mediterranean Music Studies” was founded, bearing the same name as its corresponding ICTMD study group. Since then, the Study Group has organized conferences and study meetings in various locations across the Mediterranean almost every year: Cyprus, Lebanon, Greece, Croatia, Spain, and Malta, culminating in the major IMS Intercongressional Symposium held in Valencia in 2025, dedicated to “Global Mediterranean: Postcolonial Music Histories (16th–20th Centuries),” organized by Andrea Bombi at the Universidad de Valencia. Furthermore, in 2022 in Athens, the subgroup “Circulation of Opera and Operatic Companies around Mediterranean Theatres” was established, co-chaired by Dinko Fabris and Maria Rosa De Luca. Over time, further study groups devoted to the Mediterranean have emerged within IMS: “Early African Sound Worlds” (co-chairs Camilla Cavicchi and Janie Cole), “Music in the Muslim Worlds” (co-chairs Salvatore Morra and Kawkab Tawfik), and “Music of the Christian East and Orient” (chair Maria Alexandru). This reflects the considerable interest of international musicology in the Mediterranean — a region of historical significance as a site of dialogue among cultures, religions, and musical traditions — at a particularly delicate moment from a geopolitical standpoint.

In 2026, the year in which Matera serves as Capital of Culture and Dialogue of the Mediterranean, the newly established Interuniversity Observatory on Mediterranean Music — created at the Matera campus of the University of Basilicata, in collaboration with the Universities of Catania and Salento — will organize the first IMS Mediterranean Conference from 30 October to 2 November, thanks to the joint collaboration of its four Study Groups. The conference themes relate primarily to the activities and objectives of the respective study groups, but may address any musical topic connected with the Mediterranean, from any period and place. The following are among the suggested, though not exclusive, topics:

• Music and Otherness in the Mediterranean World
• Functions of Music in the Mediterranean: Rites, Rituality, and Practices Connected with the Symbolic or Sacred Dimension
• The Enlarged Mediterranean
• Music and Intercultural Dialogues in the Mediterranean
• Musicians and Musical Instruments of the Mediterranean
• Theatres and the Circulation of Opera and Operatic Companies