The 8th Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History is titled ‘Music and The Archive: Fragmentary and Fragile Histories’. The symposium aims to explore how music’s histories are preserved, mediated, fragmented, silenced, reimagined, and contested in and through ‘The Archive’. Archives are generally understood as repositories for historical documents, personal and institutional, whereas ‘The Archive’ functions as a site of institutional power and curatorial processes which shapes both cultural memory and cultures of forgetting.
The symposium aims to explore how music’s histories are preserved, mediated, fragmented, silenced, reimagined, and contested in and through ‘The Archive’. Archives are generally understood as repositories for historical documents, personal and institutional, whereas ‘The Archive’ functions as a site of institutional power and curatorial processes which shapes both cultural memory and cultures of forgetting. According to Derrida, “the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future.” Digital technology furthermore has an impact for these futures by creating new ontologies, epistemologies, practices – and challenges.
Keynote speakers
Jeanice Brooks, Professor of Music, University of Southampton
Richard Freedman, Professor of Music, Haverford College
Alejandro L. Madrid, Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music, Harvard University
Further information on the call for papers and the conference