Music in Popular Theater and Ritual

Centro de Investigación en artes musicales y escénicas del litoral noroeste

Universidad de la República

Salto, Uruguay, 23–26 October 2019

Rituals exist in all human societies from the times immemorial. They could be religious, political, juridical, and calendrical; urban and rural; collective and individual; public and private. Some rituals have been long forgotten; the others are still being performed following hundreds of years of their tradition; new rituals are being formed in front of our eyes. As with all aspects of intangible heritage, that is constantly recreated by communities and groups, evidence about its past forms is often blurry, and besides travelogues, ethnological descriptions, and ceremonial book, visual and archaeological sources can provide a critical information about their past.

Popular theater is another form of intangible heritage, which is in a constant transformation, and it goes hand in hand with traditional rituals. Its scripts might be sometimes preserved, but only visual sources can inform us about its staging and what the audience was able to see on the stage. The Salto symposium of the ICTM Study Group on the Iconography of Performing Arts will examine visual sources documenting ritual performances and traditional theater. Papers are invited concerning the place of music in the following events:

• Religious rituals
• Political rituals; coronations and presidential inaugurations
• Sacrificial rites
• Dedication ceremonies
• Rites of passage and initiation; funeral ceremonies
• Calendrical and commemorative rituals
• Christmas celebrations in public and private; commercial aspects of Christmas
• Carnival and Halloween parties
• Rites of affliction (shamanism, divination)
• Traditional theater and its places of performance
• Designs of theatrical stage curtains

Program committee:

Zdravko BLAŽEKOVIC, City University of New York, The Graduate Center

Antonio BALDASSARRE, Hochschule Luzern: Musik

Egberto BERMUDEZ, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota

Daniela CASTALDO, Università del Salento, Lecce

Marita FORNARO BORDOLLI, Universidad de la República, Montevideo

Cristina SANTARELLI, Istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte, Turin

Zdravko Blažekovic

Research Center for Music Iconography

City University of New York, The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10016-4309

zblazekovic@gc.cuny.edu

Marita Fornaro Bordolli

Centro de Investigación en Artes Musicales y Escénicas

CENUR Litoral Norte, Universidad de la República

Gral. Rivera 1350, 50.000 Salto, Uruguay

maritafornaro@gmail.com