Although the etymology of mystêrion is not entirely clear, scholars have traditionally thought it to be derived from the Greek μύω, meaning “to close” or “to shut.” The word may thus refer to shutting not only the eyes (during the initiation ritual), but also the mouth, since initiates were not allowed to reveal what happened in the ritual. Nevertheless, the mysteries were probably not as esoteric as scholars have thought (see R. Turcan and W. Burkert).
While scholars have, in the past, treated a variety of cults as mysteries, nowadays they operate with a stricter definition of the term. “Mysteries” designate, first, ancient Greek mysteries (the Eleusinian, the Dionysian and the Orphic-Bacchic Mysteries) and, secondly, new mystery cults worshipping divinities that Greeks and Romans adopted gradually from other cultures (Cybele, Isis and Mithra). Mysteries supplemented civil religion rather than competed with it: they had the same goal of creating an individual relationship to deities through votive offerings. Any individual could easily observe the rites of the state religion, be an initiate in one or more mysteries (whatever her/his status might be), and at the same time adhere to a certain philosophical school.
Emmanouil Giannopoulos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Music Studies Department) terrà da Lunedì 10 a Mercoledì 12 Febbraio 2020 al Dipartimento di Beni Culturali dell’Università di Bologna, per il ciclo “Byzantine Musical Heritage”.
Mercoledì 12 febbraio 2020 dalle ore 9.00 alle ore 18.30 presso la Sala Consiglio del Palazzo Liviano, Piazza Capitaniato 7, Padova si terrà la prima giornata del Convegno Internazionale: Lost voices. The reconstruction of incomplete polyphonic masterpieces between theory and methodology (direzione scientifica: Marina Toffetti, Università di Padova; Niels Berentsen, Haute École de Musique de Genève).
The Department of Musicology of the Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade, is pleased to announce its Fifteenth International Conference on the topic Music– Musicology–Interpretation.
The subject of the conference Music-Musicology-Interpretation focuses on the complex and multifaceted relationships between the constituent concepts. It proposes to re- examine these multiple relations by thematizing, from the point of view of interpretation, music as language, discourse, work of art and text, the performance of music and the discourse on music – musicology itself.
On the threshold of the nineteenth century, the hierarchy of the aims of music and the means employed to attain them changed, thereby affecting the relationships among musical works, their composers and their listeners. Our understanding of this new and complex situation of the musical work is enhanced by grounding the objects of interest in relevant contexts, not only comparing them with other works of the same type and genre, but also taking account of the specificities of the times, social practices, intellectual currents, reception history, and so on.
A musician cannot prove him- or herself as an artist without an audience, without a performance space, without the support of a benefactor, without an instrument builder to create musical instruments – the musician’s performing tools, without a reviewer who would spread the musician’s fame. He or she could probably have not become an artist without a teacher, or music to be performed – either from memory, or from a manuscript or a print. All these persons and artefacts make part of the infrastructure that enables The Artist to realise his or her special gifts, and each of them is a part of or creates their own network.
As, for example, a musicological or a cultural project theme gathers people in a vertical network in order to achieve a common goal, a musician creates various horizontal networks in achieving their own goal, an event that would give the musician the opportunity to present his or her artistic qualities in public (concerts, theatre performances) or in private (salon).
The life of Egidio Romualdo Duni (Matera 1708–Paris 1775) offers a paradigm of the international career typical of Naples-trained musicians in the early eighteenth century. Son of a maestro di cappe a in the town of Matera, formerly the capital of the province of Basilicata in the Kingdom of Naples, Duni was trained in one of the famous conservatoires of Naples, where musical education was dominated by Durante and Leo.
Thanks to a long tradition that began with Bach’s contemporary, Padre Martini, Italy is considered today as a “Bachian” country.
The past 250 years have seen an abundance of creative interactions with Bach and his music, including numerous transcriptions, arrangements and editions, scholarly and non-scholarly writings, Bach festivals, recordings and the use of Bach’s music in the media.
In November 1996, a musicological colloquium was held at University of Bern under the title Musikwissenschaft – eine verspätete Disziplin? (‘Musicology – a Delayed Discipline?’). The discussions and outcomes that took place were then published four years later in an anthology of the same title, edited by Anselm Gerhard. The aim of both the conference and the publication was to focus less on specific key people or institutions, and instead foreground general tendencies within the history of musicology: from its beginning in the late 19th century until the time of publication and with a scope also beyond the German- speaking world. Even if relatively late, this approach proved essential for considering the history of the musicological discipline as an object of study in itself.
La rivista Chigiana intende promuovere un dibattito scientifico sul ruolo della natura nella costruzione dell’immaginario sonoro del ventesimo secolo attraverso la pubblicazione di un numero monografico dal titolo Out of Nature. Music between Natural Sound Sources and Acoustic Ecology (vol. 50, 2020), con key-note papers di Aaron Allen, Gianfranco Marrone, Makis Solomos e Barry Truax.