The call for participation for the summer school Archives, Corpus, Creation targets Master’s and doctoral students who wish to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to the creation of archival corpora traversed by sound creation. The school is being run over two sessions. The first will take place in Aix-en-Provence (1-3 July 2025), on the theme Collecting, centralising, classifying: how and why to create a music archive? The second in Lisbon (15-17 September 2025) on the theme Writing a history of the Mediterranean through the music archive: processes and issues involved in the patrimonialisation of music. The text below sets out the school’s objectives and explains how to respond to the call for entries. Please respond by 30 January!

French version

The MedMus – Méditerranée(s) musicale(s): techniques, circulations et représentations (XIXe-XXe siècles) research programme examines the music making in the Mediterranean basin, in the light of sound electrification techniques and the circulations and representations to which they are subjected. To achieve this goal, we are combining musicology, anthropology and the history of techniques. This approach enables us to consider the multiple networks and musical exchanges (technological, melodic, rhythmic, human, institutional, media, etc.) that reflect, but above all create, a distinct cultural and temporal area, and to analyse what they tell us about the cultural and political history of the contemporary Mediterranean world.

With this in mind, one of the programme’s aims is to understand and compare the archival processes involved in the music of the Basin. Such a research question presupposes the mobilisation of original sources and diverse methodologies. In order to raise awareness and train master’s and doctoral students in these methodologies and to encourage them to adopt a multidisciplinary approach, a summer school is being organised in 2025 by the MedMus coordinating team¹ on the cross-disciplinary themes of archives, constitutions of corpus and sound creation.

We will be looking at the archiving approaches and techniques currently being applied to music from around the Mediterranean. In addition to questions relating to digital humanities, the durability of storage media and interoperability, we will be discussing the processes involved in the heritagization of music in the Mediterranean, its contexts (temporal and geographical), its legal aspects and the choices made by both institutions and individuals. Based on empirical case studies, we will look at the way in which musical corpuses are built up today, for both scientific and artistic purposes. This summer school will be divided into two sessions: a session in Aix-en-Provence (France), focusing on techniques for collecting and processing recorded sources, right through to their broadcasting, followed by a session in Lisbon (Portugal), which will look at the processes and issues involved in the music heritage making around the Mediterranean, impulse by the case study of Portugal’s national sound archives.

Session 1 – July 1st-3d, 2025 – Aix en Provence, MMSH 

Collecting, centralising, classifying:

how and why create a music archive?

Music archiving is intimately linked to the issue of recording. In less than a century, recording media have evolved considerably: from analogue, involving a predominantly mechanical reproduction of sound (phonographic cylinders, 78 rpm records, cassettes…), they have moved into digital formats that are now widely available. These formats have redefined the very notion of the music archive, enabling institutions, both public and private, to make some, if not all, of their sound collections accessible online, as well as enabling enthusiasts to build up their own online archives. Under these conditions, the very concept of musical heritagization is being transformed, with the thorny issue of the durability of the media and their content as an underlying theme. The aim of this first session is to examine the creation of sound and music archives, both from the point of view of collecting and consulting, and from the point of view of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) practices and individual archiving approaches. It will take place from the 1st to the 3d of July, 2025 at the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’Homme (MMSH) in Aix-en-Provence (France).

From an interdisciplinary perspective, this session will question:

– the technical aspects of planning and collecting sound sources in the field, from recording to processing (formats, data sharing, acoustic and material constraints, sound processing software);

– ethical issues, particularly with regard to contemporary legal aspects aimed at protecting copyright and intellectual property (the principle of open science, French and European law, etc.);

– classification, referencing, typology and preservation practices;

– the context of production of musical sources in the case of consultation of established collections, which depend on both cultural policies (state and/or private) and technical developments.

These themes will lead to the drafting of a guide of good practices, from collection to analysis, which will be drawn up over the three days. In preparation for the second session in Lisbon, we will be focusing on the geographical scale of our approach in order to:

1. Study the relevance of considering the music of the Mediterranean as a whole that can be subject to comparatist approaches (what story does this music tell us about the basin?);

2. Emphasise the heterogeneity of techniques since the emergence of the first archives over a century ago, and the epistemological developments that have ensued;

3. Consider the impact of state, cultural and university policies on the very notion of the archive and its symbolic charge – particularly in the era of post-colonial studies.

 

Session 2: September, 15-17, 2025

Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional do Som and INETmd – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Writing a history of the Mediterranean through music archives:

processes and issues involved in the musical heritagization

The aim of this second session is to raise students’ awareness of the making of musical history in the Mediterranean and the political issues involved. The concepts of musical archiving and heritagization have determined – and still determine – the production of different collective memories over time and in different places. The aim of this second session, which will take place in Lisbon from 15 to 17 September 2025, is to take a closer look at this production, to understand the individual, private and national approaches to archiving music in the Mediterranean region, and to reflect on the choices made: what happens to repertoires deemed unrepresentative of community or national identities at certain times, or too mainstream to be taken seriously? What are the consequences of these choices, for the music itself but also for the people who make it, and what meaning do they have? These are the collective memories and fragmented identities that we will be exploring in this second session.

One of the challenges of this school is its singular disciplinary dynamic: the archive lies at the heart of the discipline of ethnomusicology, and this has helped to shape its specific features and orientations throughout the twentieth century. New musical objects have emerged as a result of technical developments and, at the same time, the very principle of the archive has evolved considerably. Drawing on the experience of Portugal’s national phonographic archives, in this second session we will look at a century and a half of the history of techniques and ideas, to question the notion of the archive as it relates to new musical objects. We will also be looking at the creative possibilities offered by musical archives, firstly in terms of their enhancement, but also in terms of the composition and deployment of new modes of creation and dissemination of cultural offerings on the scale of music in the Mediterranean. This perspective will enable us to study:

• the institutional recognition of sound archive collections currently underway around the Mediterranean;
• the history of collections from the point of view of both the collectors and the tools and methods used;
• the future of the music archive for research, for creation and, by extension, for contemporary societies.

These two sessions will be led by archivists, anthropologists, political scientists, ethnomusicologists and specialists from the region. Lectures will be followed by discussion sessions and workshops based on each participant’s research. Reflections and results will be disseminated via podcasts on archival practices and the writing of blog posts presenting a corpus or an archive with a focus on a use presented during the two sessions. Our ultimate aim is to initiate a critical collective mapping of sources and private collections, identifying archive holdings likely to be of interest to musicologists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, sociologists and music historians.

Disciplines: musicology – ethnomusicology – anthropology – history – sociology

Application process

This summer school is aimed at master’s and doctoral students interested in musical practices in Mediterranean countries using social sciences tools, but also, more broadly, at those wishing to combine sound engineering, musical creation and epistemological reflection in their approaches. Most of the training and discussions will be in French and English.

To apply, interested students should send:

• A letter of motivation, specifying the empirical corpus built up in their work and the contribution of the archives used in their research (2 pages maximum)
• A curriculum vitae (2 pages maximum)
• A summary of their research project (2 pages maximum)

The deadline for applications is January 30 2025 (midnight Paris time).

Successful applicants will be notified in February 2025.

Applications will be reviewed by the school organisers: Panagiota Anagnostou (Université Ioannina), Séverine Gabry-Thienpont (IDEAS, CNRS, AMU) & Véronique Ginouvès (UAR 3125, AMU-CNRS). They should be sent jointly to panagnostou<at>uoi.gr, severine.gabry-thienpont<at>cnrs.fr, veronique.ginouves<at>cnrs.fr.

 

Partners Institutions:

– Ecole française de Rome

– Ecole française d’Athènes

– IFAO – Institut français d’archéologie orientale

– INET-md Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies

– Arquivo Nacional do Som

– IDEAS – Institut d’ethnologie et d’anthropologie sociale (MMSH)

– UAR 3125 – Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme (MMSH)

– Université de Ioánnina

Crédits photographiques de l’image “à la une” : Magnétophone en bois, oeuvre présentée au Mucem lors de l’exposition “Folklore”, 16 février 2021, Marseille, CC-BY-NC.

1. The coordinating team is composed of Panagiota Anagnostou, teacher-researcher in ethnomusicology at the University of Ioannina, Séverine Gabry-Thienpont, CNRS researcher in ethnomusicology, IDEAS laboratory, and Véronique Ginouvès, archivist, in charge of the research archives – sound archives department of the Médiathèque de la MMSH, UAR 3125, AMU-CNRS [↩]

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