Conference Agenda

In 2026, while IAML celebrates its 75^th anniversary, the Manuel de Falla Archive commemorates the 150^th anniversary of the composer’s birth. This coincidence invites us to ask: how do we deal with an anniversary? The Spanish Government has declared Falla’s 150^th an event of exceptional public interest (Real Decreto-ley 8 July 2025), acknowledging its cultural relevance, international dimension, and social impact.

For this occasion, the Archive has prepared a programme presented in Paris in February combining dissemination activities as films, concerts, publications and others for all publics, with long-term archival work. Among these initiatives, there is also a calendar designed to gather all the events generated around Falla in 2026 —concerts, conferences, competitions, and staged productions— from a wide range of institutions and countries. Another result presented in Paris is the completion of the description of Falla’s correspondence —with more than 23.000 letters from 2.400 different correspondents— in pares.mcu.es, the Spanish Archives Portal managed by the Ministry of Culture.

These projects fit into three categories: those completed specifically for and presented in 2026; those prepared during 2024-2025 for development during the anniversary year; and those whose funding or initial steps begin in 2026 but whose execution will continue afterwards.

While anniversaries attract funding and public attention, they may overshadow the ongoing, essential needs of the institution: cataloguing, preservation, digitalisation, maintenance of the OPAC… This paper reflects on how to balance (or not) celebratory expectations with the daily responsibilities of an archive, and on what commemorations reveal about institutional priorities.

According to the traditional definition, an archive is a repository of personal,

collective, and historical memory, which provides investigation of the past and

projection of the future. The arbitrary choice of the personal and historical memories

proper exemplifies not only the discourse of memory, but also the discourse of

oblivion. Development of digital humanities since the 1960s resulted in the radical

redefinition of the archive, that is, the emerging digital web archives, which had a

strong impact to (ethno)musicological research too.

I will examine previously unknown archival sources that enable a new

perspective on musical life at the margins of the Habsburg Monarchy, particularly in

the Banat. The Historical Archive of Pančevo holds precious documents that attest to

a rich pluricultural musical life – the activities of German, Serbian Hungarian, and

Jewish choral societies, theatre troupes, instrumental ensembles and international

musicians. To enter the Austrian Empire, these groups had to receive official

permission with a detailed listed plan of activities and programmes, submitted to the

main office (Magistrat) at the southern border between the Austrian and Ottoman

Empires in Pančevo. This material will be framed within theories of archives and

memory.

The quest for Greekness (Hellenikotita), which runs through the works of the leading creators of the ‘1930s Generation’ (Genia tou Trianta), in literature, the visual arts, music and dance, is linked directly with the music and the soundscapes which emerge from the painting of A. Tassos and Giorgos Sikeliotis’.

Tassos and Sikeliotis were deeply anthropocentric with clear social concerns for the struggles of the people of the time in which they were militants. Both painters, almost the same age (born 1914 and 1917), lived parallel lives, with starting point two refugee neighbourhoods in which they grew up, respectively Dourgouti (Neos Kosmos) and Kaisariani. Consequently, it is obvious why the reference to the Rebetiko tradition recurs in their works, through depictions of popular instrument-players, musical instruments and the stage line-up of rebetika performers.

Searching for further evidence in old newspapers, journals and documents in the Tonis P. Spiteris Archive in Teloglion about the oeuvre of Sikeliotis and Tassos, became obvious the charm of their oeuvre regarding the depiction of music, especially of Rebetiko. Their lifelong friendship, a journey literally and metaphorically hand in hand in concentric circles crossed courses many times in Thessaloniki, in a particular for the city’s orbit of cultural development.

Rebetiko is a special chapter in Greek urban culture, during the first half of the twentieth century. With influences from folk song and the songs of Asia Minor, it reflects the historical and social milieu of the period, the life of the poorer classes and of vulnerable marginal groups; it was expanded to the refugees and –especially in the postwar years– to the middle class, while today it is a popular cultural legacy that was entered in 2017 by UNESCO in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

In the Interwar years Rebetiko was persecuted by the censorship of the Metaxas dictatorship. During the Civil War Foivos Anoyanakis, (Rizospastis, 28 January 1947), defended the artistic value of the genre, projecting its link with the Byzantine and folk musical tradition. He was followed by the young Manos Hadjidakis, who presented it in January 1949 in his historic lecture to the astonished bourgeois audience in Athens. Due to Christianopoulos and DIAGONIOS, Rebetico had a special blow in Thessaloniki, testified also by rare testimonies of the Christianopoulos Archive, kept in the Library of the Aristotle University of Thesssaloniki.

Tassos’ and Sikeliotis’ personal codes and vocabulary coincided with the ‘aesthetic’ of Rebetiko (cf. the Byzantine-oriental scales and the ‘horizontal’ melodic development without the ‘vertical’ harmonic accords of the West): the two painters consciously abolished in their works shadow and perspective, preferring the foreground level with clear shapes and single-file figures.

This abstractionist-aligned approach of Sikeliotis was in direct connection with the folk shadow-puppet theatre of Karagiozis as source of inspiration, a folk creation, the ‘absolute folk opera’.