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Abstracts for Rethinking Music Heritage conference

This page contains all the abstracts for the conference Rethinking Music Heritage (15.10.2025 – 17.10.2025), at the University of the Arts Helsinki.

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The conference

More information, including the programme, can be found on the Rethinking Music Heritage conference website.

Keynote presentations

Auditorium 1, KO-156

Chiara Bortolotto: Beyond Nostalgia: the Sustainabilization of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis

Bortolotto is the Research Director at CNRS (CPJ Intangible Cultural Heritage and Environment) and UNESCO Chair in Intangible Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development at UMR Héritages : Culture/s, Patrimoine/s, Création/s

This presentation examines the sustainabilization of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) and its transformative effects on how heritage is represented, valued, and mobilized in response to contemporary global crises, including climate change. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork within the institutional and bureaucratic contexts of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, I trace how sustainable development principles are increasingly embedded in heritage governance at the international level. I argue that this mainstreaming of sustainability reconfigures the social and political functions of ICH with potential for shifting from a nostalgic and exclusionary identity-building apparatus to a pragmatic platform for shared innovation promoting alternative and more inclusive economic, social and environmental practices. This process not only expands the boundaries of what counts as heritage but also unsettles long-standing assumptions about its purpose and function in society and reflects a new paradigm: rather than us protecting heritage, heritage is increasingly framed as protecting us. While addressing ICH governance more broadly, this presentation aims to spark a debate on whether—and with what consequences—music and dance are being framed as resources for sustainable development. 

Marko Jouste: Skolt Saami Dance and Music – A Transformative Journey of Tradition and Resilience

Jouste is the Associate Professor of Saami Culture, University lecturer in Sámi Cultural Studies and developer of the Saami Culture Archive at the University of Oulu

A defining characteristic of Skolt Saami culture is its diversity, shaped by over two centuries of multicultural and multilingual interaction in northwestern Russia. Notably, the Skolt Saami adopted elements of European cultural heritage—particularly dance—through contact with Russian and Karelian populations in the late 19th century. In the following decades, dance, especially the kaʹdrel ‘quadrille’, along with associated music practices, became a central component of Skolt Saami cultural life, reaching its height in the village of Suõʹnn’jel during the 1930s. 

Following the forced relocation of the Skolt Saami after the Second World War, kaʹdrel tradition entered a period of dormancy. However, in the early 1970s, dance was revitalizied and it became one of the most important symbols of Skolt Saami cultural identity and resilience—particularly in the context of relations with Finnish society and other Saami groups. Today, in the 2020s, dance is recognized as a vital element of Skolt Saami cultural heritage, alongside the Skolt Saami language and traditional handicrafts. 

1.1 Managing Collections

Auditorium 1, KO-156

Exploring the changing physical and institutional contexts of a collection of items associated with the Finnish singer and actor Olavi Virta in 1995–2020, the paper discusses the role that material objects play in the creation of popular music heritage. The collection is owned by the Seinäjoki Tango Festival who procured it from the late singer’s son in the 1990s. Over the course of 25 years, the collection has been at the center of various interventions and collaborative efforts led the music festival and other public and private actors from the Finnish cultural field.

The Olavi Virta collection’s shifting contexts show that material traces with recourse to popular music’s past may undergo numerous changes in physical placement and institutional status during their lifespan. These shifts reflect changes within the cultural heritage sector but also recurring loss of institutional memory. The paper elaborates on previous observations according to which popular music presents a persistently precarious category of cultural heritage despite its profound embeddedness in everyday life and culture.

The study draws from a diverse source material consisting of media reviews, interviews and archival ethnography conducted on the collection.

Skrimsjö, Veronica & Seay, Toby: Musical Heritage Artifacts | Developing Collection Narratives 

Music recordings and related artifacts exist in archives, museums, libraries, and private collections, providing knowledge and evidence of events, individuals, institutions, and cultures. While individual music recordings and artifacts have limited meaning, their placement within an archival collection provides the opportunity to build new associations and knowledge through the process of curation (Knifton, 2017). Curated collections create narratives that “arise from and are trained into the perceiving bodies of the people–artifact ensembles that make them up (Marshall, 2014, p. 950)”. These institutes and private collections are often disregarded and undervalued for their cultural value when their focus is on popular music and/or popular culture, preventing many private collectors from even using the term “collection”. Therefore, how can narrative building be fostered through more inclusive and considered curation, and are these prioritised dialogues?

Collection curators place “multiple artifacts in dialogue with each other, instantiates them around a complex set of themes, elicits multiple meanings from related artifacts…” and “each artifact tells a [interconnected] story (Persohn, 2021)”. Curatorial work focuses on preserving the structure and content of material objects and the “rich understanding of the implicit and explicit values of materials at creation and over time (Gilliland-Swetland, 2000)” but also highlight how complex and entangled cultural consumption is (Cochoy et al., 2017), and their values intersect with society at-large. The material economy of collections serves as a mechanism for re-use, building new narratives, exploring the creative process, and raising questions around sustainability. Therefore, access to music recordings and artifacts is important for researchers to develop these narratives in coordination with curators and collectors. This coordinated access is a reminder of the impact of cultural physical media on personal experience. This presentation will explore narrative building and materiality in support of sustaining cultural heritage through various curatorial approaches.

Persello, Mara: The L in GLAM. Galleries, Archives and Museums. What About Heritage and the Library?

Thanks to a shift in the cultural politics, the definition of culture and culture making freed itself from strict hegemonic factors, but archiving cultural products from fragile subcultural narratives still in the making raises the question of the impact of institutional definition on spontaneous cultural expressions. While the debate on heritagisation engages archives and museums, public libraries are sometimes blissfully unaware of their role.

My paper focuses on the music as identification trait of subcultures, and how the subcultures narratives are entering the public libraries.

Public libraries have been collecting popular music since the spreading of the CD technology. CDs were resistant enough to endure multiple loans, the focus was on the format much more than on the content, and no specific choices were made on what was worth collecting or not. Nowadays nobody borrows CDs anymore, should we throw them away? These artifacts are not only a memory of the past, but also a potential tool to connect ideas and identities.

My point is, what if public libraries were the ultimate place of intercultural communication through music, the one space where a democratic definition of music heritage can be shaped? Starting from the ‘local history’ section of the library, different forms of shared experiences can gather in order to represent the local communities and the coexistence of different subcultures in the same area. Promoting the local music cultures through events, inscribing the listening process in narratives, collecting data and facilitating the communication between forms of knowledge, and simply offering time and quiet place to listen to music, could be a not yet investigated way of avoiding some heritagisation responsibilities. I will describe a few examples of good practices from different public libraries and would like to discuss and receive feedback on the idea of the public library as a safe place for the music heritage. I hope to get some advice on how to start working on this idea in the praxis of my workplace.

1.2 Orchestrating Heritage

Auditorium 2, KO-155

Barzan, Paola: Music Heritage and the Conservatory – A Case from Veneto, Italy

In 2023, at the Castelfranco Veneto State Conservatory, the first three-year course in Traditional Music was activated for a Level I academic degree, with specialization in Traditional Music of the Veneto Region. The question that immediately arose was: is there truly a heritage of traditional Veneto music to refer to?

Unlike the regions of southern and insular Italy, where traditional music is still a living cultural heritage and an integral part of community life, in Veneto only a few rare situations of instrumental music for dance, or liturgical and ritual singing, in marginal and isolated areas have proved somewhat resilient.

In an almost completely ‘desertified’ landscape, individual musicians, instrumental, vocal, and dance groups, festival organizers, and folkloric groups all feel they are the legitimate heirs and bearers of traditional musical heritage. However, they represent it in completely different ways, ranging from slavish imitation to reinterpretation, from hybridization to arbitrary invention: the desire for socialization often far outweighs interest in content and performance style. Veneto people, both as individuals and as local public institutions, while seeming to know many other aspects of their cultural heritage, are totally unaware of their precious and rich musical tradition.

What role can the conservatory play in mediating and negotiating a meaningful, conscious, and active reconnection of Veneto’s traditional musical heritage with both the lives of ordinary people and the institutional initiatives?

The encounter between the conservatory, historically dedicated to the technical and interpretative teaching of Western classical music, and a musical heritage transmitted mainly orally can only take place in the field of musical practice, which can provide spaces for different languages to meet and embody the expressive and identity needs of performers and listeners. The creation of a sound archive of the Veneto tradition will constitute a living resource accessible to everyone.

The paper describes how this challenge is met, amid enthusiasm, resistance, and a nascent interest on the part of young people, for whom what is old, insofar as it is unknown to them, is new.

Koning, Moos & Schuijer, Michiel: The Moving Targets of Counterpoint Instruction: A polyphonic account

Reading, writing, and interpreting music notation is generally a requirement for enrollment in a conservatory. For example, music students interested in honing their musical and notational skills may be introduced to “counterpoint”: a body of knowledge and skills inherited from the past that allows for the simultaneous unfolding of multiple melodic lines. It still has a place in Western conservatory education as a common musical “grammar”. Today, however, due to demographic and social changes and shifts in the student population and Western conservatories, the relevance of counterpoint is called into question.While counterpoint has enabled the continuation of a heritage of Western polyphonic art music, it has also raised a number of key issues over the years. First, it has contributed to the antagonism between learned and “elevated” styles of Western art music on the one hand and different, in some cases non-Western traditions of musical complexity on the other. On a pedagogical level, teachers of counterpoint are often criticized for teaching skills that are no longer in use. It has come to be seen as a craft that imposes dogmas on the creative process and requires prolonged dedication and concentration to master.

Our study attempts to map the different perspectives on counterpoint. How is the study of counterpoint experienced by today’s generations of conservatory students? What notions of music (Western and non-Western) are affirmed and conveyed through the teaching of counterpoint? We seek answers to these questions by engaging teachers and students in an exploratory case study.

2.1 Heritage Places and Spaces

Auditorium 1, KO-156

Jaworowicz-Zimny, Aleksandra: Reimagining Landscapes Through Music: The Tourist Gaze of Yorushika Fans

This paper explores the layers of meaning attributed to specific locations associated with the Japanese pop-rock duo Yorushika. Founded in 2017, the band has gradually received international attention due to its high-quality musical compositions, a blend of light sounds and heavy lyrical content, and its use of multimodal storytelling to create complex narratives. Fictional narratives in Yorushika’s intertwined concept albums are set in several real-world locations in Japan and Sweden. Some of these places are major heritage sites, such as the old town of Gamla Stan in Stockholm or Amaharashi Coast, praised by Japanese poets since the 8th century. Others are neither renowned nor outstanding: a small yellow house in the center of Lund, or a tiny coin laundry in Tokyo. Although none of these locations has been promoted as tourist attraction in relation to Yorushika, and the information about the spots’ exact locations circulates only among the duo’s fans, they nevertheless attract dedicated fans, both Japanese and international, even though these groups are driven by slightly different motivations and prioritize visits to different locations. Fans engage in various on-site practices, ranging from taking pictures and soaking in the atmosphere to performing Yorushika music and recreating the band’s music videos. This paper presents findings from an empirical study on music tourism, using online content analysis, ethnographic research (both online and offline), and interviews with Japanese and international fans. By analyzing the motivations and on-site behaviors of Yorushika fans, the study illustrates how music shapes the reception of physical spaces by assigning unique value to otherwise ordinary locations and shifting the focus from the historical to the fictional. Moreover, it examines how the “tourist gaze” varies based on an individual’s knowledge and background, even among fans of the same music artist.

This paper is going to reveal a dilemma of popular music practices at an industrial heritage site in Japan. As Western countries have experienced industrial decline since the mid-twentieth century, Japan is also faced with deindustrialization, and the effective approaches to revitalize former industrial sites are of great concern in the last few decades. Popular music practices, or more broadly art projects, are considered to play an important role in creative use of these sites.

The Namura Shipbuilding Former Osaka Site, located in the south-west part of Osaka city, has been used as a cultural venue, Creative Center Osaka (CCO), for musical concerts, theater performances, art displays, dance performances, and so on since 2005. When this site started being used for an art project, NAMURA ART MEETING ’04–’34, in 2004, club culture was valued for the creative regeneration of this site. Since then, CCO held many club events especially in the second half of 2000s. However, unfortunately, as the police strengthened restrictions on club events in the early 2010s, CCO made it difficult to keep club culture there. In addition, other limitations related to its location and expenses gradually encouraged it to increase in the number of commercial uses rather than creative ones.

By reviewing past materials and conducting interviews with stakeholders, popular music practices for creative use of an industrial heritage site is problematized as a case example in Japan.

Vikman, Noora & Rainio, Riitta: The Art of Echos – Traditions and Present-day Rituals

Listening to the soundscape of the past in prehistoric archaeological contexts is a challenging research task to fulfill when using fragmentary material sources. In historical contexts, there might be documented practices or living traditions available, but they are often general in nature and not sitespecific. The sources of inspiration for our “cultural echological” research are the numerous publications in the fields of sound archaeology and archaeoacoustics, but also the present-daymotives, experiences and interpretations of the people who have engaged with the environments in those places.

This paper explores the interaction and dialogue between sound, natural environment and reception at two historical sites in Finland: Vaskikallio in Lieksa, Eastern Finland and Pyhätunturi in Pelkosenniemi, Northern Finland. At Vaskikallio, we examined the acoustic properties of the cliff, where sages are said to have gathered and healed the sick in past centuries. We retrieved the local healer’s incantations from the archives and asked a contemporary rune singer to perform them in their original settings by the echoing cliff. In the same context, present-day visitors of Vaskikallio were interviewed to find out the meaning(fullnes) of this place today. In Pyhätunturi, we visited and observed the annual Pyhä Unplugged music festival, which is held on an outdoor stage in a gorge with remarkable acoustics. The nearby gorge hosts a historical Sámi sacred place. We interviewed the organizers, performers and audience at this sensitive performance venue.

This paper presents some of the first steps taken in our ongoing project, which seeks to trace traditions and practices related to acoustics and echos from the history of Fennoscandia. Furthermore, the paper arguments why “cultural echology” as a relative to ethnomusicology and acoustic ecology might be a fruitful new window to examine and deal with the different continuums of lived traditions and engagements with the environment.

2.2 Recorded Heritage

Auditorium 2, KO-155

Delegos, Spiros: Reimagining Greek Music Heritage: Creative Agency of George Katsaros in 20th-Century Greek-American Recordings 

Among Greek-American musicians from the period of mass migration to the United States, George Katsaros (Theologitis) from the Aegean island of Amorgos distinguished himself as a versatile solo performer, excelling as a guitarist, singer, lyricist and composer/arranger. He made his mark in the American ethnic music recording industry with recordings from 1927 onwards for labels such as Victor and Columbia. This study challenges the prevailing ethnocentric discourse that confines Greek-American musicians to mere bearers of Greek musical traditions within narrowly defined national heritage frameworks. Instead, it posits that Katsaros and several of his contemporaries contributed to the creation of a unique diasporic music that transcended the traditional Greek boundaries of the time. Through a historical ethnomusicological analysis of representative commercial recordings, I argue that Katsaros was a creative agent who cultivated a distinct guitarscape and demonstrated remarkable diversity in his vocal interpretations and recorded repertoire (hashish, love, satirical songs). By incorporating elements from a wide spectrum of musical styles encountered throughout his musico-cultural trajectories, Katsaros effectively introduced a stylistic heterotopia. In this regard, my perspective questions the rigidity of national music heritage, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of the contributions of Greek-American musicians to broader processes of music heritage-making in the 20th century where cross-cultural creativity and musico-cultural amalgamation were defining conditions.

Eggmann, Sabine: Does Swiss music heritage have a specific gender? Analysis of the media regime on Swiss television (1960-1990)

In Switzerland, folk music programs have been broadcast on television since the early 1960s and could count on a large audience, especially until the 1990s. From the very beginning, the selected musicians, groups, and the pieces of music played were presented as music heritage. The designation of musicians, sounds, instruments, dances, and other musical practices as “Swiss cultural heritage” has endowed them with a distinctive cultural significance within society. Folk music thus acquired both a cultural-political quality and a social function: national unification and stabilization were achieved (among other instruments) through media representations of folk music in Switzerland.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, however, women remained marginalized in these programs. The aim of this presentation is to examine this phenomenon and to rethink the representation of gender in folk music programs on Swiss television (SRF). The media monopoly of television in the second half of the 20th century led to the establishment of a media regime that – like other social institutions – created specific social positions by directing the gaze of the audience. Theoretically, this media regime is understood as a sociotechnical ensemble of practices that on the one hand produces social figures and on the other hand makes others invisible.

Using archival material from Swiss Television (SRF), including correspondence, shooting schedules, program sequences, recordings, and final broadcasts, this presentation aims to trace the specific gender-related presences and absences in SRF’s folk music heritage. The examination will be conducted through a praxeological-media-ethnographic approach, systematizing the observed phenomena as a television media regime. This micro-analytical reconstruction aims to trace and reflect on gendered positioning practices in the sense of a critique of representation.

The presentation is based on the empirical findings and discussions of the SNSF research project (01/2022 – 12/2025) entitled ‘Claiming Folklore’. Politics and Practices of Folk Music on Swiss Television (1960s-1990s), which is overseen by Prof. Dr. Bernhard Tschofen at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies – Popular Culture Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

Seidlová, Veronika: Czechoslovak Hazzanim on Record – Rethinking the Heritagisation of Jewish Liturgical Music from the Czech Lands

Czechoslovak cantors’ sound recordings, many of which have never been published, have re-emerged only during the last two decades through the cooperation of a transnational network consisting of family members, private collectors, ethnomusicologists, and memory institutions such as the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv, and the National Library of Israel. These efforts can be understood not simply as acts of preservation but as processes of cultural memory-making and heritage production, in which fragile traces of minority sound cultures are reactivated and endowed with new meanings.

The paper situates these recordings within broader debates on music as heritage. Rather than assuming heritage as a stable canon safeguarded by national institutions, I demonstrate how sonic heritage is, in this case, created transnationally through fragmentary family archives, precarious amateur recordings, and the affective labour of descendants who seek to hear lost voices again—often outside of national frameworks that have historically neglected or excluded minority sonic heritage. Once hidden or inaccessible, the voices of Czechoslovak hazzanim (cantors) are now circulating in digital spaces, reshaping how Jewish liturgical music from the Bohemian Lands is remembered, valued, and transmitted.

By combining multi-sited ethnography, historical ethnomusicology, and critical heritage studies, the paper argues that the heritagisation of these recordings challenges conventional boundaries between archive and community, formal and informal heritage practices, and national and diasporic frameworks. In doing so, it contributes to rethinking music heritage as a contingent, affective, and contested process, in which loss, survival, and transmission are as central as continuity and canonisation.

3.1 Music Cities

Auditorium 1, KO-156

Michelsen, Morten: Mediated heritage. Musicians remembering the Aarhus scene of the long 1970s

The Danish town of Aarhus is a so-called “second city” and has competed with Copenhagen (the capital) in various ways, not least musically. At the beginning of the 1970s an increasing number of talented young people from smaller provincial cities moved to Aarhus in order to study and to play. They constituted a growing layer of creative participants in a variety of cultural experiences, taking up instruments to play the new styles of music, establishing new music venues, and building a distinct, provincial city music milieu. Also, they constituted audiences for an increasing number of performers from the outside (Copenhagen and abroad), thus making Aarhus a significant point of musico-cultural transit. Historically, this resulted in Aarhus gaining a reputation as the premier Danish music city of the 1980s. This paper will be about how this scene as remembered has become a central part of both local and national, cultural heritage.

Analysing one aspect of this historical scene, I would like to demonstrate how the memories of 20-25 musicians active in this milieu have been mediated and remediated in television documentaries, in memoirs, and in newspaper and magazine interviews published during the last decade and a half. Memory studies and especially José van Dijck’s concept of mediated memories (2007) will serve as a theoretical framework for this investigation of the production of cultural heritage, and the central questions discussed are how the musicians and their mediators 30 to 50 years later recollect and construct their experience of the scene with regard to a) the close-knit scene, b) the second city syndrome, and 3) the conflicts within the scene.

This investigation is part of a larger research project on the music culture of Aarhus in the long 1970s housed by Danpop, the Danish Centre for Popular Music Culture at Aarhus University.

Tegelman, Airin: A Bit Like a Burroughs Cut-Up: Disoriented Music Heritage in Stephen Morris’ Record Play Pause and Fast Forward

“Midway along the journey of our life / I woke to find myself in a dark wood / for I had wandered off the straight path.” These opening words of Dante’s Divine Comedy are argued by Robert Tally (2012) to characterise the feeling of disorientation that emerges from the inability to locate oneself in the world; that is, where we come from or where we currently are. But what happens when an entire community feels disoriented about their sense of self and place?

In Manchester, England, such reconfigurations were commonplace in the 20th century as the city transformed from the first modern city to post-industrial decline – only to emerge at the end of the century as a high-profile site of popular music and culture, which greatly contributed to its local heritage and pride (Shapely 2017). However, the 21st century has witnessed an increased scrutiny of the city’s musical grand narratives (e.g. Russell 2014; Devereux et al. 2018; Golden 2023) which coincides with a growing turbulence over the ‘selfhood’ of present-day Manchester overall (Butler & Dobraszczyk 2020), implying that not only is this heritage not immutable, but connected to a wider process of transformations in the city.

To explore this connection, this presentation looks at the memoirs of Joy Division/New Order drummer Stephen Morris, Record Play Pause and Fast Forward (2019, 2020), and how they rhetorically navigate the experience of ‘wandering off the straight path’ of the city’s music history – mirroring not only the contemporary interest in interrogating Manchester’s popular culture narratives, but also the difficulty of preserving music heritage in the 21st century.

This presentation is part of an ongoing PhD project that observes the literary (re-)construction of 1970s and 1980s Manchester in rock music memoirs, and how these narratives produce local identities in the present day.

Tessler, Holly: ‘All You Need Is Love’? In Defence of Beatles Studies

The Beatles are unquestionably one of the most impactful musical and cultural forces of the 20th century. No place is their influence and legacy more prominent than in their hometown of Liverpool, where Beatles tourism and heritage is estimated to be worth nearly £100M annually to the city’s revenue. The group have also been the subject of countless scholarly research projects, with foci as unique and distinct as musicology, cultural studies, computational mathematics, health sciences, history and physics amongst them. Yet despite numerous efforts over several decades, a cohesive discipline called ‘Beatles Studies’ has yet to emerge.

This paper details my own experiences of trying to establish a discrete and critical Beatles Studies field through both the creation of the open-access, peer-reviewed Journal of Beatles Studies and through the establishment – and subsequent discontinuation – of the MA The Beatles, Music Industry and Heritage degree at the University of Liverpool, with exploration of the implications for the city’s Beatles heritage sector as well as the group’s own legacy-making activities.

I will argue that many of the challenges of establishing critical fields of study around popular phenomena are nothing new, often depressingly and predictably dismissed as the creation of ‘Mickey Mouse’ (Keegan 2024) or ‘Rip-off’ (Sunak 2024) degrees by political and academic elites. Yet no less difficult to navigate is the question of managing expectations and views of lifelong Beatles fans. Even from amongst sympathetic quarters, many long-established academics often see writing and researching about the Beatles as separate from their ‘real’ academic work; as such their articles and papers, whilst informed and heartfelt, lack the same kind of critical rigour of outputs published in their primary disciplines. For fans-turned-students, encouraging novice scholars to approach the Beatles with a detached and analytical eye rather than through the rose-tinted lenses of fandom can prove difficult if not also confronting both to them and to their lecturers who, whilst trying to advance new theorisations and thinking about the Beatles, are sometimes met with the steadfast recalcitrance of long-held and deeply felt fandom beliefs.

As we rapidly approach a time in which no Beatles or original-generation Beatles fans will remain, I will argue here that the establishment of the discipline of Beatles Studies is critical to the survival of the group’s stakeholders. As secondary narratives around the Beatles’ history, music and culture begin to supersede dominant primary voices and lived accounts, they will inform and shape the trajectories through which the Beatles’ legacy and its attendant notions of Beatles heritage will travel in the 21st century and beyond.

3.2 Heritage Politics

Auditorium 2, KO-155

In the context of the global North’s cultural dominance, the appropriation of hegemonic music genres can constitute a powerful strategy of access to the global music market as well as identity affirmation for the artists of the global South. However, it raises questions in relation to musical heritage: is producing a hybrid music akin to desecrating one’s own culture?

Championed by icons like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) has structured Brazilian musical life since the 1960s, earning national and international acclaim as a cultural institution. In contrast, funk carioca, born in the 1980s in Rio de Janeiro’s marginalized communities, remains stigmatized by Brazil’s elites because of its artists’ socio-cultural background. Despite their differing institutional statuses, both genres share a common strategy: the appropriation and reworking of national and exogenous musical codes to redefine Brazilian cultural identity.

MPB is indeed characterized by its hybridity and diversity, tracing back to the tropicalist movement of the late 1960s, which deliberately integrated Anglo-American “musical rubbish” to reinvent Brazilian popular music. Similarly, partly because of its fundamentally DIY approach, funk carioca relies on sampling, piracy, and lyrical hijacking to appropriate elements of foreign and local urban music.

This presentation will be the result of ethnomusicological fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, in the form of an analysis of live and recorded performances, as well as interviews with artists and the public of both genres. It aims to explore how MPB and funk carioca renegotiate the notion of Brazilian cultural identity and heritage and its relationship to globally dominant cultures, by examining their approaches to musical hybridization and the appropriation of exogenous musical genres, functioning as both a strategy for accessing the global market and a form of political positioning.

Lee-Niinioja, Hee Sook: Arirang in Lyrics-Melodies: Korean Living Heritage in (In)Tangiblity of Individual-Collective Emotions and Memories

“Arirang” is a Korean folk song that symbolises the collective contributions of many generations. Arirang, arirang, arariyo is the refrain of this straightforward tune, which has 60 versions and 3,600 permutations. The UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity now includes the South Korean Arirang (2012) and the North Korean Arirang (2014). The song conjures the ability to improve communication and togetherness among Koreans, announcing its meaning as “respect for human creativity, freedom of expression, and empathy.” Arirang emphasises the regional features of the many renditions while working towards broad popularisation and dissemination in the arts and media.

The term “Arirang” was most likely inspired by a romance between a bachelor and a maiden in the northern South Korean province of Kangwon’s Jeongseon neighbourhood. Arirang, which is linked to the silent film “Arirang” (1926), became a resistance anthem during Japanese rule of Korea (1910–1945). It represented itself at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics and the 2000 Summer Olympics in addition to TV and radio stations. In short, the song has conveyed Korean emotions, thoughts, and experiences to shifting social contexts in cultural identity.

From several perspectives, questions are raised regarding the emotions of Koreans. Does Arirang stand for both remorse and a desire to say goodbye? Does its heartbreaking melody or its pitiful lyrics account for its enduring appeal? What caused Westerners, even the Japanese colonizers, to be passionate about the song? Why perpetual heritage?

As an asset of intangible cultural heritage, the relationship between Arirang and its emotions over 600 years is examined in this paper. It also analyses the semiotic relationships between Arirang lyrics and melodies. Due to their shared sentiments, it could propose a platform for improved communication between the two Koreas and promote fresh approaches to presenting Arirang with an eye towards unity. It has splendour.

Pshenichkina, Halyna: The Voice of the Past in the Modern Struggle: Cossack Songs as a Marker of Ukrainian Identity

Ancient Ukrainian song folklore of the non-ceremonial cycle, with particular reference to Cossack songs, is characterised by the depth and metaphorical nature of its plots, the breadth of melody and its abundant ornamentation, melodic variation, and rich polyphony. The origins of Cossack songs can be traced back to the 15th and 16th centuries within the Ukrainian free army, the Zaporizhzhia Sich. They have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Intangible Cultural Heritage List, signifying their status as a distinctive folklore genre.

In the contemporary cultural landscape, Cossack songs have emerged as a means of self-identification for Ukrainians, owing to the relevance of their content and their characteristic musical features. In periods of crisis, particularly during wartime, the public performance of Cossack songs serves to demonstrate the resilience, unity, and indestructibility of the Ukrainian people, thereby functioning not only as a cultural symbol, but also as a means of consolidating society and serving as a reminder of the historical roots of the struggle for freedom.

Cossack songs, performed at meetings in support of Ukraine abroad (particularly in Lithuania), are performed by Ukrainian folklore groups and communities. Their performance in public spaces serves to transform traditional folklore into a modern cultural phenomenon, transcending its historical context and acquiring new significance in the context of the struggle for sovereignty and national identity.

The objectives and purpose of this study are to analyse the role of Ukrainian Cossack songs as a marker of national identity in the contemporary cultural space, in particular in times of crisis and wartime. The research materials are based on archival audio and video samples of Ukrainian Cossack songs in their original sound and recordings of their performance by contemporary folklore singers. The following methods were used: ethnomusicological analysis, historical and cultural, comparative, field research and socio-cultural analysis.

4.1 Live and Festive

Auditorium 1, KO-156

Cloonan, Martin & Tuukkanen, Roosa: The Helsinki Live Music Census 2024 – a living heritage? 

In recent years research in to live music has undergone something of a boom. Where once the recording industry dominated academic research in to the music industries, now live music increasingly comes to the fore. While this has involved various orientations and methodologies, one notable approach has been the undertaking of “Live Music Censuses”. Pioneered in Melbourne, such censuses have now taken place in places such as Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle and Oxford. Inevitably such censuses involve reflections upon a city’s musical heritage from which the current situation has emerged. A city’s musical offering emerges from a complex interaction of current and past initiatives.

This paper reports the findings of Finland’s first live music census, which took place in Helsinki on 11 October 2024. We reflect on the challenges of undertaking the Census and place our findings within broader debates about the value of music. We suggest that a city’s provision iof live music can be thought of as living heritage and theorise the implications of this. We locate this within notions of the “Music City” wherein a firm musical heritage is seen to be a prerequisite. Finally, we ponder the prospects of live music in Helsinki, suggesting that while the city faces similar issues top many other cities, the particularity of Helsinki means that the solutions will have to have a more local flavour, one built on the city’s musical heritage.

Dillane, Aileen: What’s in a name? Folk/Tradition/Heritage Music as a Progressive Force in Music Festivals

Heritage music may be viewed as “a homogenising counterforce to the diversifying and globalising forces of post or late-modernity” (Ronström, 2013). In such an assertion, the term ‘heritage’ may replace older terms such as ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’ while doing specific kind of work that may be understood as reactionary in some way. There is no doubt that festivals of folk or heritage music often push ideas of authenticity, based ideas of coherent identity and unbroken links to the past, underpinned, in many cases, by ethno-nationalist agendas. Yet there are many examples of where diversity rather than homogeneity characterise contemporary ‘heritage’ or ‘folk’ music festivals. This paper explores one such festival that has deliberately sought to move beyond exclusionary definitions of genre in heritage/folk music, to programme in ways that deliberately embrace equality, diversity, and inclusion (Raine & Dillane 2024). Not only has Temple Bar Tradfest, an annual folk festival in Dublin, Ireland, paved the way for dynamic programming across genres, held together by the centripetal force of Irish traditional music, but it has also modelled its practices and informed best practice for other festivals. The paper outlines the history of the festival, shaped by the city, tourism agendas, cultural diplomacy, and progressive funding dynamics of Irish governmental agencies, and based on a traditional music and dance form that has long been implicated in representing the Irish state (O’Shea 2008). Drawing on four years of fieldwork and consultancy with the festival, where the researcher is also implicated in shifting policy and programming practices (Schippers 2018; Titon 2009), the paper explores how applied ethnomusicology and dynamic relationships/partnerships reveal the contingent and contextual nature of terms such as folk, heritage, and tradition, in festive contexts, and argues for ethnographic specificity when exploring the efficacy and meaning of these terms on the ground.

Joons, Sofia: “From Near and Afar” Festival programming as a tool for heritagisation of music and community-building

The first Estonia-Swedes’ song and dance festival was held in 1933. After 80 quite years, festivals have been organised on regular basis since 2013. I have been artistic leader for the festival twice, in 2013 and 2024. In 2013, the festival was a re-enactment of the first one. When I once again was asked to work with the festival, it had been organised twice more and developed into a gathering platform for both Estonia-Swedes living in Estonia and Sweden, and people interested in Estonia-Swedish culture from Estonia, Sweden and Finland.

The aim of the festival is to make Estonia-Swedish culture such as choir-singing, traditional music and dance audible, visible and understandable for all participants and visitors. As not all Estonia-Swedes in Estonia born after World War II speak Swedish and only a few in the younger generations understand Estonia-Swedish dialects, the need for the festival to be thoroughly bilingual (or even trilingual) comes from within communities that define themselves as consisting of Estonia-Swedes.

The aim of my presentation is to shed light on the programming of a song and dance festival from the angels of cultural heritagisation and community-building. I intend to answer the questions what kind of heritagisation tool a song and dance festival can be used as and what kind of on-spot-community the festival invites to in what ways.

Methodologically, I have applied reflexive autoethnography based on my email conversations concerning programming of the festival with members in the organising team. While constructing a researcher position retrospectively, I re-read former email-conversations and added headnotes. Most of my suggestions for the program were accepted without discussion. Some suggestions of songs gave raise to broader discussions in the organising team. These discussions form the core of both research material and analysis.

4.2 Digital Music Heritage Studies

Auditorium 2, KO-155

Ferdeghini, Giulia & Meandri, Ilario: Keeping Music Heritage Alive: Open Data, Ontologies, and Semantic Web Challenges in next-gen Cataloging systems

Music and music-related activities play crucial roles in human culture, shaping and regulating social relations, rituals, public ceremonies, and identities. The massive documentation, produced by music-making or research, is testimony of musical processes, phenomena, and products and thus requires specialized cataloging to grant preservation, study, and valorization.

Adhering to international standards and aligning with institutional stewardship and digital innovation in museum practices, the Acusteme cataloging system aims to overcome some limitations through some key performances:

  • enhancing description and contextual representation through a granular data model that can better describe content, contextual data, cultural significance, and uses, and support heritage institutions in curating music both as cultural heritage and a living tradition;
  • allowing for semantic enrichment, interoperability, and connection between complementary knowledge domains. Being a native LOD system supported by a domain ontology, it facilitates federated access, interdisciplinary research, and valorization of musical collections;
  • supporting creative reuse of musical heritage through digital innovation. Aligning with 21st-century museum imperatives, semantic data retrieval ensures both preservation and activation of music’s cultural and economic potential.

Acusteme, through interoperability and the use of LOD, navigates a current technological frontier and shows possible transformations of heritage stewardship, ensuring wider FAIR data exposure and enrichment, heritage preservation, availability, and re-enactment, specifically granting the endurance of music’s diverse narratives in an increasingly digital cultural landscape.

Hsu, Hsin-Wen: Artificial Intelligence, Datafied Transcription, and the Computational Study of Music Heritage

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been shown to directly impact music research. Tools such as “source separation” and “automatic music transcription” now enable more precise, faster, and more efficient documentation of polyphonic music, including tracking the duration, frequency, and interaction of different parts. How do these AI technologies influence our understanding and appreciation of traditional musical practices? In what ways do they challenge existing perceptions and imaginaries of music that has been recognised as intangible cultural heritage? This paper reflects on the implications of using AI to transcribe historical recordings of traditional Hakka folksongs in Taiwan. It explores the interpretive differences between AI-generated analyses and those produced by human ethnomusicologists, thereby investigating the potential impacts of AI-driven computational musicology on evaluation and revitalisation within the process of heritagisation.

Santaella, Mayco: Rethinking Music Heritage in the 21st Century: Interdisciplinary and Digital Humanities Approaches at Sunway University

The Sunway Research Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (SCDHCH) is reimagining how cultural traditions and artistic practices can be sustained, revitalized, and adapted within contemporary higher education. The research centre, within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences develops projects on music and heritage not as a static inheritance but as a dynamic field for new creative, technological, and pedagogical innovations. Key initiatives of adaptation and renewal include projects such as Fading Shadows: VR Wayang Kulit which employs immersive technologies to teach and reinterpret performance for new audiences. The International Wayang Kulit Festival and Waye Kito – Wayang Kulit Kelantan Festival developing a platform for intercultural dialogue while positioning heritage within both global and local contexts. The Prof. Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof Archive project preserving rare materials on Kelantanese traditions, and the Merdeka Textile Museum (MTM) project reimagining heritage through collaborative curatorial work, among others. Crucially, these projects do not operate in isolation. They draw on multidisciplinary collaboration across music, film, theatre, art, design, and architecture within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, reflecting collaborative research and pedagogical models where students and faculty contribute actively to promoting heritage and traditions. This applied, practice-based engagement situates cultural heritage at the intersection of scholarship, creativity, and community engagement, offering new modes of experiential learning in higher education. As the discourse on heritage in the 21st century evolves, it is increasingly vital to consider applied pathways that respond to the fragile status of many cultural traditions. Interdisciplinary collaborations supported by the digital humanities offers a useful approach to ensure that heritage is not only preserved but reinterpreted and made relevant for future generations.

5.1 Reinterpreting Traditions and Histories

Auditorium 1, KO-156

Liang, Linyueying: The Inheritance and Development of Chinese Orchestra in Contemporary Singapore

Singapore Chinese orchestral music exemplifies the dynamic integration of cultural heritage in a multi-ethnic context. By incorporating Southeast Asian elements—such as Malay rhythms, Indian percussion, and gamelan-inspired tonal structures—local composers have developed a distinctive “Nanyang Chinese music” style, reflecting a living and evolving tradition. Many compositions also draw on Southern Chinese musical roots, including Hokkien, Teochew, and Hainanese influences, linking Chinese music to oral histories and intangible cultural heritage within local communities.

Firmly rooted in traditional Chinese music, Chinese orchestral practice in Singapore reinforces cultural identity among the Chinese diaspora. Through performance, education, and creative innovation, this musical form preserves ancestral values while evolving within a modern, pluralistic society. The Singapore Chinese Orchestra (SCO) plays a central role—not only performing classical repertoires, but also commissioning original works by local composers. These efforts foster a localized musical identity and elevate Chinese orchestral music as a uniquely Singaporean cultural asset.

D’Agostino, Simona: Tradition and Revival: some examples in dance and music heritage of Italy

In the ethnomusicological and ethnochoreological landscape of Southern Italy there are extremely vital contexts, in which traditional practices are perpetuated over time by each member of the community. While the older ones act as guides and dispense advice and suggestions, the many young people do their utmost to keep it alive.

During my fieldwork I was able to collect the testimonies of these practices widespread in Southern Italy and the characteristics of this different musical heritage shared by all members of the communities, outlining each time the different meaning and representations of these identities that are also expressed in the relationship between music and dance, musicians and dancers. This study explores how musical traditions – bound by geography, ritual, and oral transmission – are now subject to processes of reinterpretation, hybridization, and digital preservation, involving the dynamics of cultural memory, identity.

Among the different types of revival, there is the Ballo della Cordella of Petralia Sottana (PA), in which a wedding procession, the music and the dance are played.

Linked to Carnival is the tradition of Zeza and Quadriglia of Bellizzi Irpino (AV), in which the music, crystallized over time, accompanies the unfolding of the sung action and the square dance.

In more traditional contexts, the pilgrimage for the feast of the Madonna of the Mountain di Polsi (in the province of Reggio Calabria) is characterized by the incessant presence of the tarantella, played and danced by the faithful who crowd the Sanctuary during the days of the feast.

As in dance, variations and melodic embellishments are also introduced in music that give a unique connotation to tarantellas, renewing the ritual spaces in which they are produced and enjoyed. Music and dance still have the power to express on a representative level the identity traits that characterize both the individual and the community that recognizes itself in these expressive forms, producing and enjoying them in full vitality.

Sliužinskas, Rimantas: Lutheran Psalms from Historical Klaipėda Region as Marker of Local Lithuanian vs. German Singing Tradition

The main Church in contemporary Lithuania is Roman Catholic, known in almost all the ethnic regions here. And we know the very special situation in historical Klaipėda region, where the Lutheran religion was the main historically. We know the Lietuvininkai people as those ones in our localities. The historical fate of Lietuvininkai was very complicated, and they had to stand up against the culture and way of living influences both from Germans and Lithuanians.

The Lutheran psalms singing traditions are well known here. We still know the strong tradition to sing Psalms both in the church and at home. The main problem there are quite clear differences among German choral-style melodies and local, Lithuanian folk-style common singing melodies. There are the texts of all the Psalms in mentioned above Psalm-books, and this way a lot of melodic variants appeared in the singing practice. Keeping Lutheran religious ceremonies in great respect, our people are not able to accept the original German style of singing all the Psalms. Common Lithuanian Lutheran people from Klaipėda region use to change or simply to create new melodies according their own, much more understandable way of musical self-perception.

The objectives of this my paper are to analyse the role of historical Klaipėda region Lutheran psalms singing traditions as a marker of Lithuanian vs. German national identity in the contemporary cultural space.

The research materials are based on audio and video samples of local Lutheran psalms singing traditions. The scientific basis of the research is the works on the study of such non-written singing traditions and their functioning in the modern historical and cultural context.

The following methods were used: historical and cultural, comparative, ethnomusicological analysis, field research and socio-cultural analysis.

Thomas, Isabel: The Post-industrial Music History of Working Men’s Clubs and Institutes: Harmonies and Clashes Between Heritage and Living Venues

Working men’s clubs and institutes (WMCIs) were first set up by workers, industrialists and philanthropists to provide affordable recreational spaces in Victorian Britain. They became centres of music-making in many working-class communities, in the form of singarounds in the bar, concerts by members, brass band and choir rehearsals, concert rooms with stages for professional entertainers, and large halls for pantomime, music hall or classical performances. The majority have now closed due to social and economic change, particularly deindustrialisation. Those that survive take a variety of approaches towards their musical heritage, which is commemorated in the fabric of the building, lived out through continued use, reimagined through irony or hybridity, recreated through museumification, or simply disregarded.

Heritage studies may have an important role to play in considering how WMCIs might contribute to community-building in the past, present and future, while the study of music heritage in deindustrialising areas can contribute to ‘cultural justice’ by drawing attention to the disadvantaged or overlooked (Cantillon et al, 2021). However, this project emerges from the view that heritage research into a particular subject is inappropriate without a certain knowledge of its history. Therefore, I set out to discover some of the history of music in WMCIs, across the UK generally, and zooming in on case studies in three distinct locations, examining the role of music-making within these spaces in contributing towards the development of a distinctive working-class culture. I use oral histories, informal fieldwork and DIY archiving to fill in for the considerable absence of WMCI music worlds in traditional written sources.

This paper presents some of the intended fourth chapter of the thesis, which considers approaches to WMCI music from the 1980s to now, focusing on harmonies and clashes between heritagisation and the use of a WMCI as a living, mutating social and cultural space.

5.2 Music on the Move

Auditorium 2, KO-155

Chen, Ying Hsien: Relocation and Resignification of the Karelian Kantele Tradition in Sapporo, Japan

This paper explores the relocation of the kantele to Sapporo, Japan, and examines its evolving meaning among practitioners. The kantele, a traditional folk instrument from Finland and neighboring countries, holds significant cultural importance for Finns due to its close association with the Finnish epic poem Kalevala. The Finnish kantele was introduced to Japan in the 1970s, coinciding with increased Finnish immigration, Japanese travelers to Finland, and Japanese students studying there. Since then, it has gradually developed a small but sustained following, becoming a part of the cultural life of enthusiasts. Among the various kantele traditions, the Karelian kantele has received considerable attention within the Japanese kantele community. This paper, part of my doctoral research completed in 2023, examines how this tradition has been transmitted within the Japanese context. The findings reveal that while the Japanese actively engage with the tradition by traveling to Finland and gathering relevant materials, they also adopt and adapt it for their own purposes. In the process, the Karelian kantele tradition fosters a Japanese imagination of the distant North and creates a space for “healing”—an experience that is not only exotic but also serves as a reflection on the “rigidity” reinforced by the Western music pedagogy that still dominates music education in Japan today.

Palonen, Matti & Žvinklytė, Jurgita (Honeypaw): Workarounds while working with archive material and intangible cultural heritage music from Lithuania and Finland in Canada

We are a music duo formed 2019 in Toronto, Canada. Matti is a Canadian of Finnish heritage and Jurgita is a newcomer from Lithuania to Canada. The Toronto music scene is typical for musical collaborations combining musicians of different cultural heritage to create their own sound.  This scene influenced the formation of our band, but we place importance on researching less familiar archival materials instead of the typical format of working with well-known traditional songs. Our primary interests are the Lithuanian sutartine tradition and Finnish heterophonic folk singing. In recent years we have been drawn to the work of Finnish professor A.R. Niemi, who intended to conduct comparable studies of Finnic and Baltic folk song texts. Our current work is based on our study of Niemi’s archival material that was collected on wax cylinders in Lithuania in 1912, and held in the SKS archives since then.  We will discuss how we navigate maintaining integral aspects of traditional styles found on the recordings including traditional tunings while playing them on diatonic instruments, and how Niemi’s comparative work has influenced our artistic practice of connecting Finnish and Lithuanian texts and musical styles.

Polyzoidis, Nassos: Tsibitó rebetiko meets the Delta blues: transatlantic music heritage amalgamation

Rebetiko is an urban folk music that originated at the end of the nineteenth century in Greece, associated with marginalised communities in prisons and port cities. As rebetiko has declined since the mid-twentieth century, it was inscribed on UNESCO’s list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017. Rebetiko is strongly linked to the bouzoúki family of instruments, characteristic Eastern modal scales, known as drómoi (‘roads’, or ‘paths’), and irregular time signatures tied to specific dances.

According to urban myth, rebetiko is often dubbed ‘the blues of Greece’ or ‘the Greek blues’. Rebetiko evolved with contributions from Asia Minor refugees in Eastern Mediterranean ports, albeit blues traces its roots to enslaved West Africans in the Mississippi Delta region of the United States. Nevertheless, early twentieth-century rebetiko musicians who emigrated to the USA adopted a fingerpicking technique on acoustic guitars. This style was revived in 2017 by folk guitarist Dimitris Mystakidis in Amerika, reinterpreting the primitive tsibití technique of Giorgos Katsaros, Kostas Doussas and A. Kostis in a contemporary way. However, guitarist and storyteller Georges Pilali had already rearranged prominent rebetiko and blues songs by brilliantly merging their instrumentations in 1994.

Building on these cross-cultural bridges, three original songs and one re-imagined rebetiko cover were crafted using acoustic and resonator guitars. Their predominantly static harmonic structures were expanded with exotic drómoi – embellished by blues scales – over twelve-bar and eight-bar blues progressions. This paper examines the EP Piraeus Blues: Moldy Figs (2024) as an innovative approach to songwriting that amalgamates traditions considered music heritage. Dissecting these bilingual compositions – written in English, Greek, and a mix of both – showcases how drómoi are contemporised within a blues framework through Travis picking and bottleneck techniques in irregular metres. The discussion explores how modernity emerges through the fusion of cultural heritage.

6.1 Rethinking Archival Practices

Auditorium 1, KO-156

My presentation reflects on digitization and safeguarding efforts at the G.B.C. Gramophone Library, Ghana, of analogue music recordings (in different formats: 78rpm shellac, 45rpm and 33rpm vinyl records, magnetic tapes, cassettes) between 2008-2018. It connects this work to more recent efforts and activities of promoting and understanding repatriation as beyond “digital return” (see “Beyond the Digital Return: New Heritage/s, Sustainability, and the Decolonization of Music Archives in South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana”). The “Gram Library” as it is known in Ghana is one of the largest music archives in the world, it is by far the largest collection of music digitalized in Ghana and a huge repository of Ghana’s cultural and musical heritage. Its “return” depends on transforming archival practices into collaborative modes of re/appropriation, revitalization, and sustenance of music heritage. I will discuss archival practices which are mainly popular music-centred and evolved from engagement with this repertory over the years. They offer new and productive ways of rethinking musical heritage as cultural practice.

These collaborations include publications from the archive, Ghana Muntie – Recordings from the G.B.C. Gramophone Library & Radio Ghana 1947 to 1962 (2012) as well as The Highlife Heritage CD Vol 1 Highlife in Ghana 1950s-1960s (2016), supported by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs; publications whose cultural relevance may have increased over the years; Gram Time – Music brought back from the G.B.C. Gramophone Library, the weekly radio programme on Uniq FM since 2010; the concept and organisation of the Gram Time Highlife Concert (2012-2015) and Highlife Heritage Concert in Ghana (2020/2022/2023), the latter a part of Beyond the Digital Return.

Repatriation/digital return and recirculation are subject to reappropriation as collaborative practices nurtured by initiatives of decolonisation of archives. Accessibility of digital archival sources and transformation of archival practices show Intangible Cultural Heritage as a creative process and collaborative research practice with relevance to UNESCO’s agenda and terminology while this musical heritage also questions this category. The Gram Library may remind us not only of its special potential as research repertoire but also for contemporary music and artist practices as well as the growing (scholarly) interest in Popular Music Heritage and particularly, Highlife Heritage, which demands a new approach to popular music as cultural heritage. The presentation approaches music heritage through a reconceptualization of archival practices which also questions contemporary notions of safeguarding music heritage.

Drewett, Michael: Recorded music, digital mixtapes, and musical heritage in South Africa

In May 2020 Mixtapes.org.za was launched. It was (and remains) a site dedicated to listening to and documenting recorded South African music heritage while celebrating the mixtape format with its distinctive allure, its ability to immerse people in a specific listening experience.  It explores the diversity of South African music styles through various mix tape themes. It has successfully brought together a community of listeners and researchers interested in South African music.

South African music has been notoriously poorly archived and maintained, with far fewer albums digitized and re-released on CD or as downloads than in many Western countries. This has meant that many aspects of South African music heritage have been forgotten and neglected. This paper explores how Mixtapes.org.za plays a crucial role in preserving South African music heritage, serving South African musicians, past and present, in South Africa or outside of the country, living and dead, and also the South African and global listening community. Knowledge of (and access to) South African music, and a wide contact base with musicians, record companies, and archives have been used to compile music around various themes. The recorded music form has made this possible, allowing for diverse combinations of songs to evoke a sense of interest and enjoyment in the listening audience, while also providing a continually growing archive of songs and information for researchers and fans. This is especially important given South Africa’s musical past, shaped very negatively by central government and state broadcast censorship, and the musical separateness of apartheid radio stations and record company marketing strategies. Recorded music serves as a crucial resource for fans, interested listeners, and researchers in preserving South African music heritage through the recorded form.

Niemi, Jarkko: Disconnections in the Study of Culture: Problems of Ethnography and Archival Work in the Research of Indigenous Cultures

This presentation aims to contribute to some of the current issues in the study of indigenous cultures by asking how to proceed with ethnographies and archival tasks in progress and in the future, given the present troubled and disconnected international political atmosphere. Furthermore, the overall methodological perspective of the presentation also considers the issues of representation, reciprocity, and responsibility along the lines of present heritage studies (cf. Messenger & Bender 2019) and indigenous studies (Smith 1999; Denzin & Lincoln 2008), and with the reflexive turn in (U.S.) anthropology of the 1980s (e.g., Marcus & Fischer 1986; Clifford 1986; Clifford 1988).

The case of the presentation is exemplified by the presenter’s ethnomusicological research with some of the indigenous cultures of western Siberia. This research has consisted of separate projects, with fieldwork phases and later communication with the local indigenous specialists. The major part of these research materials consists of interviews about song performances, cultural and generic contexts of the songs, language of the songs, translations, etc. The indigenous languages represented in these projects include mainly Tundra and Forest Nenets, Eastern Khanty, and Taz Selkup (Niemi 2021).

It is now time to ask: how should we proceed with this kind of research in situations of disconnections in the world? It does not seem reasonable to suggest the continuation of this kind of work if it risks participants’ safety. One possibility for working with this kind of research data would be to analyze how these forms of local cultures exist today. Another possibility would be to consider sung performances as representations of local cultures of sound, entailing, for example, an analysis of the sound phenomena reminiscent of language. Here, some steps could be taken with the accumulated archival data.

6.2 Tense Heritage Encounters

Auditorium 2, KO-155

Daniel, Ondřej: Czech Punk: From Rebellion to Heritage

This paper explores the transformation of punk music and related genres, such as Oi! and hardcore, into a form of cultural heritage in post-socialist Czechoslovakia, later the Czech and Slovak Republics. It examines how punk’s rebellious ethos and countercultural stance have been reframed in the context of political and societal transitions following the Velvet Revolution. By analysing the processes of nostalgia, commemoration, and institutionalisation of punk’s legacy, the paper contributes to broader discussions on the dynamics of music heritage, particularly in relation to political change and cultural memory. The study investigates how punk music, originally an anti-establishment movement, has been appropriated into the heritage discourse. How do former punk actors engage with their own musical pasts to gain legitimacy and subcultural capital? How has the meaning of punk shifted from a symbol of defiance to an object of heritage? Through these inquiries, the research aims to uncover the cultural and political implications of punk’s retrospective evaluation. The research employs a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on ethnomusicology, cultural history, and political science. Archival analysis, oral history interviews with punk musicians and fans, and media discourse analysis form the core methods. The study also considers how digital platforms and museum exhibitions contribute to the heritagisation of punk. This paper aligns with themes such as music heritage communities, music and intangible cultural heritage, and the canonisation of music history. By addressing punk’s transformation from a subversive genre to a recognised cultural asset, it contributes to discussions on the intersections of music, memory, and societal change.

Iivonen, Tommi: Defiant Locality and Heritage: Counter-Cultural and Counter-Narrative Practises in Pori Alternative Music Scene

I base my presentation on an article that I am working on. I contemplate on the alternative and counter culture aspects of the Pori alternative music scene of the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Hailing from a mid-sized Finnish post-industrial city of Pori, the scene’s exceptionally uncommercial, avant-garde and art-orientated approach to music– as well as other forms of art–differed drastically from the Finnish mainstream band’s endeavours for public attention and international fame. At the same time, it also defied the expectations set for the economic depression mauled post-industrial landscape of the Finnish ‘90s. The distinctly local scene’s early influences and origins can be traced to the preceding local Pori-rock music, the city’s cellar band scene and swift transformation of the society immediately before and at the onset of the Finnish economic depression era (Iivonen 2023). But, during the ‘90s the scene increasingly absorbed influences from psychedelic, progressive and German “krautrock” music, as well as from art, classical, electric, and film music of various kinds. Merging these influences, alongside with a commitment to free artistic expression, lead the scene to move away from mainstream popular music conventions and music industry, and aligning itself with a long lineage of avant-garde, alternative and underground communities and practises in the music world. This alignment, same as the scene itself, was not global, or even particularly translocal, in its basis and nature, but intertwined in the locality of Pori and its home-grown conventions and practices. This insight reveals a perspective to examine and interpret the dynamics and nature of scene’s locality as a counter-cultural and counter-narrative practises, while still acknowledging its international influences and inspirations.

Ocaña-Guzmán, Maria M.: Heritagizating the anti-heritage? Doing ethnography in the experimental music scene in Austria

Understanding them as processes of legitimation, authorization, or memorial and aesthetic recapitalization, I analyse those mechanisms of heritagization effective in the experimental music scene in Austria. I will focus on the recapitalization of the very notion of heritage, which cannot be understood without approaching those devices that sacralise/ritualise/exorcise a certain distance/distancing from a “monstrous other” (Arendt, 1986; Bauman, 1989) associated to the notion of heritage–understood as a sociohistorical construct–, embodying, therefore, the “anti-heritage” (Alonso González, 2017).

This heritage exorcism occurs through a cult that acts as if the hands that touch the violin were those that the master of ceremonies places, with or without direct contact, on possessed bodies to dispossess them, making them “scream” or behave in “non-normal” ways. This ethnography aims to unravel the social conventions of this “monstruous”-convention transgression, as well as the struggle to define the validity/effectiveness/authenticity of both, the master of ceremonies and the methods used to expiate a sense of collective original sin or trauma.

Therefore, the notion of heritage is symbolically reborn having new/old “credos” (verbatim/field) that leave the door open for an ethnographic reflection about how “the artist tries to oppose the museum, as a legitimating institution, by nevertheless activating institutionally charged artistic gestures” (Schmid, 2014) or, rather, institutionalising ones.

As part of this exorcising/cult praxis corpus, I do not exclusively attend to sounding musical/artistic/performative practices, but also to those legitimising/exorcising “gestures”, such as those archivisation-/inscription-/preservation-oriented ones, which deal with the dilemma coming from the need or urge of preserving or safeguarding the value of that which is “underground”, through the act of, however, perhaps contradictorily, unearthing it. Ethnographically focusing on these dilemma spots allows me to deessentialize/expand the idea of “institution” by dissecting it into gestures, rituals, and “devices” (Agamben, 2011) that have new aesthetic/political associations.

The presentation addresses the discourse and narrativisation of Electronic Dance Music as represented in the German media and music community. For reasons of popularity, economical dimension, institutional efforts, prominence of persons, places and cities, my focus is on the politics of representation and orientation concerning the historicisation of house and techno music in and through the media. Problematic issues of identity, race, class, and gender, reflect prevailing norms and constructions in popular music history and its heritage. In acts of resistance, self-empowerment and self-liberation, house music and techno music emerged from the disco-continuum of queer/lesbian/gay/trans communities of colour in North America. It has since then been supported and marketed by members inside and, arguably to a greater extent, outside those marginalised communities. From the perspectives ofmusic sociology as well as gender studies it matters who presents and represents an authored and totalising history, whose visibility enables certain groups to position themselves and their peers in the foreground, to attain cultural legitimacy and accumulate symbolic (and economic) capital.

The presentation discusses key aspects of two TV documentaries as cases in point: First, We Call It Techno! (DE 2008), and as a second and recent example, episodes one to four of Techno House Deutschland (DE 2022). The analytical framework in this paper consists of “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (Scott, 1986) for gender as a lens to power relations in the making of history. “Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others” (Ahmed, 2006) on straightening lines and devices “in the specific question of sexual orientation” (Ahmed 2006:1). Finally, two types of heritage discourse identified as official authorised and self-authorised popular music heritage discourse are of interest in this essay (Roberts & Cohen 2014:243).

Discourses and narratives provide orientation of what is in line with dominant culture and omit what is not. Hegemonic—patriarchal and heteronormative—discourses reify the narratives and by that, reproduce hegemonic structures. For contemporary witnesses to document their experiences and lives, identities and biographies, ascribes symbolic and cultural capital, legitimacy and value to their contributions. In turning our attention to prevailing discourse, a queer theory informed analytical lens can highlight power structures and the framings provided by accounts of a patriarchal upper class; a class dominated by an elite minority of mostly white cis-male cultural entrepreneurs. To reassess and challenge dominant cultural hegemonies in top-down discourses of a heteronormative society and a politics-averse music industry, means to acknowledge club culture’s often overlooked origins, to acknowledge female-identifying, LGBTQIA+ and BIPoC cultural contributions to popular music.