Music and The Archive: Fragmentary and Fragile Histories

The symposium, held approximately every two years, brings together leading scholars of music history from around the world in Helsinki.

Photo: “magic tools and musical instruments in the Kalevala Room of the Ethnographic Department of the National Museum of Finland” (Source: Finna/ Finnish Heritage Agency, KK1159:13)

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  Archives are generally understood as repositories for historical documents, personal and institutional, whereas ‘The Archive’ functions as a site of institutional power and curatorial processes which shapes both cultural memory and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, held approximately every two years, brings together leading scholars of music history from around the world in Helsinki.

Schedule

  • 6/2026 Call for Papers published
  • 8–9/2026 Deadline for paper/presentation submissions
  • 10/2026 Review of submissions (acceptance/rejection)
  • 12/2026 Symposium program published
  • 2–3/2027 Registration for the symposium opens
  • 4–5/2027 Registration closes

More information


Marianne Mieskolainen
marianne.mieskolainen@uniarts

Time

26.5.2027 – 28.5.2027

Location

Camerata, Sibelius Academy

Mannerheimintie 13a

00100 Helsinki

Sonore, Sibelius Academy

Auditorium

Musiikkitalo, Sibelius Academy

Location on map

See directions