Fifth Meeting of
the ICTM Study Group: Report on the meeting "Trends
and Processes in Today's Mediterranean Music" On the threshold between its first and second decades, the ICTM Study Group on the Anthropology of Music in Mediterranean Culture used its fifth meeting to reflect on both local and global histories in ethnomusicology and in the study of the Mediterranean's musics. Local questions were most clearly evident in the theme of "trends" in the meeting's title, whereby most speakers addressed changes brought about by historical events and musicians in the recent past, particularly during the 1990s. In their reflections on "processes" the participants turned to the historical longue durée of ethnomusicological engagement with the field's themes and paradigms, particularly those that had coalesced in the diverse cultures and exchanges in the Mediterranean. Trends and processes, therefore, came to shape different voices in the conference's own counterpoint, in which smaller moments and more expansive transformations interacted with dissonance and consonance, which together unfolded to provide precise and nuanced ways of taking stock of the past and today yield new theoretical models for understanding the ways in which today's Mediterranean musics will give way to tomorrow's. Building upon the tradition of previous meetings of the Study Group, the "Trends and Processes" of this meeting pushed and tugged at the very borders and repertories of the Mediterranean. The papers that examined more extensive traditions were balanced with studies of repertories whose histories were more recent and transitional. The work of individual scholars in the past stood in contrast with the careers of individual musicians, but the contributions of both ultimately provided the Mediterranean with its ethnomusicological genealogy. The classical and the popular were juxtaposed. And finally, the reflections of senior scholars contrasted richly with the voices of the young generation of scholars dedicated to the Mediterranean's musics. The "trends" in today's Mediterranean musics were most directly apparent in the ethnographic case studies presented during the meeting, that is, in papers by Caroline Bithell (UK), Deborah Kapchan (USA), Martin Stokes (USA), Irene Loutzaki (GR), Gabriele Marranci (I), and Josko Caleta (HR). Particularly striking in these presentations was the role of the musician as a voice within Mediterranean cultures. That voice, nonetheless, articulated different but distinctive trends, from resistance to national sentimentality, from a willingness to manipulate the international marketplace to the insistent recognition of the complex meanings of place in the musical practices of diaspora. "Processes" spread across geographical and historical landscapes, and charting the complex courses of such processes provided the common fabric in papers by Bruno Nettl (USA), Philip V. Bohlman (USA), Edwin Seroussi (IL), Franco Fabbri (I), Gail Holst-Warhaft (USA), and Ruth Davis (UK). If history and historiography unified these papers, it was not because of commonality, but rather because of the multiple ways in which music itself responded to history and resonated in the narratives of the Mediterranean past and present In the tradition of previous meetings of the Study Group, this one benefited from the intellectual generosity of the group's coordinator, Tullia Magrini (I), and from the impeccable hospitality of the Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi in Venice and its scientific director, Giulio Cattin (I). Revised and expanded essays from the meeting will appear in the Study Group's online journal, Music and Anthropology, and in Levi Foundation's journal, Musica e storia. Philip V. Bohlman |