Conference Agenda

This paper advances a systematic examination of academic work on Cypriot musical culture documented in Greek universities between 1971 and 2025. Drawing on undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral theses from departments of Music Studies (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Macedonia, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and the Hellenic Mediterranean University), the study reconstructs the thematic, methodological, and historiographical contours of this dispersed corpus.

The research identifies recurrent domains of inquiry urban musical life, traditional repertoires and organology, vernacular poetry and performance practices, ritual and customary contexts, profiles of Cypriot composers and performers, and music-educational perspectives highlighting how these studies collectively contribute to the documentation of Cyprus’ musical past and present. A chronological reading reveals the evolution of research priorities, from historically oriented and philological approaches of the 1990s to broader ethnomusicological, cultural, and pedagogical orientations in more recent decades.

At the same time, the survey exposes significant lacunae: limited engagement with contemporary creative practices, digital and audiovisual heritage, sound archives, diasporic and intercultural musical communities, and technological or practice-based methodologies. Issues of access and bibliographical coherence are equally pronounced, since many theses remain inconsistently catalogued, insufficiently digitised, or difficult to trace across institutional repositories.

The paper argues for the establishment of a unified Cypriot Music Research Database, grounded in robust metadata standards and archival protocols. Such an initiative would enhance scholarly visibility, ensure bibliographical continuity, and align Cypriot music studies with international documentation and preservation frameworks supported by IAML.

This presentation aims to showcase two musical collections from Ottoman Greeks that are currently housed in Athens, Greece. The first is from Konstantinos A. Psachos (1869–1949), an Ottoman Greek musicologist from Istanbul who moved to Athens in 1903 to found the first School of Byzantine and Ecclesiastical Music at the Athens Conservatory. The second is from Nilea Kamarados (1847–1922), another Ottoman Greek musicologist who lived in Istanbul. Psachos’s collection remains a private archive, while Kamarados’s collection is part of the Greek Music Archive at the Music Library of Greece, "Lilian Voudouri." Both collections contain publications related to Byzantine and Greek folk music; manuscripts of compositions from both genres in the New Method of Byzantine notation, European staff notation, and Hampartsum notation; prints from their time; general bibliographies; drafts of their works; and correspondence. They also contain a significant number of Ottoman and Turkish folk music compositions written in manuscripts using the aforementioned notational systems, as well as published editions of these genres.The last testimonies are responsible for both collections becoming part of the Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae Project and being included in its online catalog. In addition to bridging musical archives, the project is also bridging different ethnoreligious communities by studying Ottoman Turkish music from the perspectives of not only Ottoman Turkish-speaking Muslim musicians but also Ottoman Armenians and Ottoman Greeks. It is known and proven that two Ottoman Greek musicologists collaborated and communicated continuously with each other and with other musicians of the Ottoman Empire. This can be traced through their archives, testimonies, and joint transcriptions. This presentation will discuss these aspects.

The announcement in August 2024 that Finale—the industry-standard notation software for over three decades—would cease development immediately, signaled a paradigm shift for the preservation of born-digital music. This paper presents findings from a comparative study of Greek art music composers, analyzing data from two distinct survey periods: pre-discontinuation 2019 (n=41) and post-discontinuation 2025 (n=51). By employing a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative usage metrics with qualitative assessment of archival practices, we quantify the systemic risks of "digital oblivion" facing contemporary cultural heritage.

Our research reveals a digitally mature community where the use of notation software has reached saturation stability: approximately 78% of composers employ digital scores as their principal compositional tool, a figure virtually unchanged since 2019. However, this high adoption rate masks a severe preservation crisis: for composers relying on Finale, over 90% of their total creative output is stored exclusively in proprietary Finale format. Alarmingly, for half of these respondents (median), 100% of their life’s work is locked in this now-obsolete ecosystem.Despite this, awareness of "vendor lock-in" remains low. Only 37% recognize this dependency as a significant threat, and resistance involves high friction: ~40% of active Finale users have no plans to migrate.

We argue that the "Finale crisis" warns of the obsolescence threatening born-digital archives. Dependence on proprietary ecosystems poses a systemic risk. The paper proposes that music libraries must evolve from passive collectors to active preservation hubs, advocating for software-agnostic literacy and mandating open standards to prevent inaccessible scores.