Dinko Fabris: Musicologists Without Borders: IMS Engagement in Mediterranean Countries

Global geopolitics is increasingly changing our lives in the third millennium, and it is also affecting social and cultural activities, including the relationship between music and communitiess. During my term as president of the International Musicological Society for five years (the first president elected from a Mediterranean nation in the Society's 100-year history) and during the five additional years as immediate past president until 2022, I decided to travel intensively with the scope of ascertain the state of musicology and the condition of musicologists in countries far from the Western cultural mainstream. In my project, which I immediately titled "Musicologists without borders", I proposed to recognize as indispensable, for a truly "international" society (in the past considered a post-colonial European society), to apply what I called a "collaborative musicology". Since 2013, each trip has been accompanied by field recordings of interviews, concerts, urban and local "sounds", which have flowed into a series of radio reports for the Italian RAI Radio3, framed as a program that we titled "Musicologists without borders". Here I would like to recount some of the data that emerged only from trips (and related radio broadcasts) made for IMS to Mediterranean countries (including Tunise, Israel and Palestine, Cyprus, Athens, Istanbul, Beirut, etc). After 2016 each trip was connected with the activity of IMS Study Group "Mediterranean Music Studies", which I have created and chaired as an example of "collaborative musicology".