Agenda UV

Nobody would argue the key role music plays for Valencian culture and society. The History of Music at the Valencian Country, however, is little known. Fortunately, in the last 15 years, the number researchers interested in it has greatly increased. However, the problem lays in the way in which the results of such researches is disseminated. The congress provides a space of debate for such researchers in order to favour the exchange of methodologies, experiences and information. All this is done in order to contribute in the consolidation of a local music history able of reconstructing how people thought and acted in terms of music in the past; to recognise the results of such ways of thinking and acting and to give it value in the present; to evince the interconnections between Valencian musical life and the rest of Spain and Europa. The congress aims, hence, at promoting an idea of music history in the Valencian Country that prevents reducing it to the pale reflection of a general history identified in the great composers’ canon, or a manifestation of a cultural and radical otherness. Regarding the contents, the congress centres on structural history, leaving theme and chronological criteria on the background: there will be three sessions on Historiography, Institutional History and Biography/Prosopography after an introductory and methodological opening conference. The reflections on the historiographical and methodological tradition will serve to generate a debate whose key point will be the historical path of music, the crossing point between institutional evolution and people’s vicissitudes under a historiographic perspective. Such shall focus music as a practice -through the reconstruction of processes including products and relations- whose past has influenced the present and finds in interpreting one of the possible ways for its comprehension: a perspective which should specify the crossing of musicologists and interpreters. The congress’ main objective is thinking of the History of Music at the Valencian Country from the most recent approaches in musical historiography. To favour this encounter with current methodologies, sessions will be divided into plenary sessions and free communications. In the plenary session, the debate will centre on each topic’s methodological framework, with a brief lecture followed by two responses and the corresponding debate. The free communications sessions (in parallel if necessary) will present the results of the research (the participation of study group and the presentation of posters is also scheduled). The lectures within the plenary session will be given by prestigious researchers within the world of European and American musicology. The responses will be mainly in charge of young researchers and specialists in close disciplines such as History of Art or Local History. In the free sessions, we expect the participation of musicologists who carry out researches in the Valencian area or in topics which involve it, on any aspects of historical musicology.