Conference Agenda

Music Theatre, as a synthesis of music, theatre, dance, technology and visual media, poses distinctive challenges for archival preservation due to the heterogeneity, ephemerality and dispersed nature of its documentation. Scores, scripts, audiovisual recordings, images, patches, scenographic elements and other artefacts are often scattered across multiple sources or partially lost, further complicated by non-standard notations, obsolete carriers and a historical lack of systematisation. These issues obscure the collaborative and process-based nature of music theatre creation—improvisatory, interpretive and intervention-driven—hindering both scholarly study and performance reactivation, thus contributing to music theatre underrepresentation within Western music-historical narratives. Focusing on music theatre created from the 1960s onwards, this research aims to safeguard the memory of artists engaged in this performative genre and to promote the international visibility of Portuguese contributions. Ultimately, it offers tools to strengthen performance preservation in institutions, support new generations of artists facing evolving technological and expressive demands, and reinforce music theatre’s place within contemporary artistic and archival discourse. This project advances an archival preservation model for music theatre works that integrates musicological, archival and digital humanities methodologies, while acknowledging their diversity and ephemerality. By aggregating all relevant materials, including supplementary and contextual documentation, the project seeks to improve archival description, enhance user search pathways, and promote a more complete understanding of the artistic ecology of each work. Based on conceptual models such as RIC-CM, Dublin Core, CIDOC-CRM, and the DOREMUS ontology, it develops a conceptual modeling approach capable of representing the complex collaborative practices of music theatre.

This study investigates the conceptual organization of the domain of music as found in 16^th-century German music books (both elementary textbooks and advanced treatises). A number of distinct categorization strategies are identified and contrasted: some are direct applications of artificial dialectic methodologies, while others yield complex natural category structures familiar to modern Cognitive Science from the functional domains of everyday language.

Among the dialectically guided treatises we find adherents to Ramism (Beurhaus), Philippism (M. Agricola, Faber, Lossio, and the rest of the Lutheran textbooks produced in Wittenberg), “Mixt” Philippo-Ramism (Blistenius), and neo-Aristotelianism proper (Burmeister). The deep “methodized” Ramist divisions are ultimately traced to a dialectic methodology presented in jest in Plato’s Sophist. By contrast, the topical dialectic of Philipp Melanchthon yields shallow functional categories, akin to folk-biological taxonomies. Of great import are those classifications that operate at the intersection of their author’s own practical experience and traditional categorization schemas. Semantic analysis conducted on the musical and linguistic data of Burmeister’s innovative treatise Musica Poëtica reveals covert natural category structures superimposed on his historically grounded overt classifications. Among them, the natural chain category “compositional ornament or figure” encompasses two main sub-clusters: one radial, organized around the central prototype of fuga realis, the other functional, owing its coherence to a cognitive blend of information-rich schemata.

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.