Conference Agenda

This presentation aims to discuss Greek popular music magazines that began to be published in the 1930s and 1940s. Driven by the recording industry and music publishers, these 20-30-pages magazines focused mainly on song lyrics but occasionally featured promotional material concerning composers and singers and their photographs, as well as advertisements. Their study allows us to examine the fluidity of musical categories’ meanings (even the titles of these periodicals hesitate between the “new”, the “modern”, the “Athenian”, the “popular” song), to reconsider the diffusion and popularity of these musical idioms among literate audiences in interwar and occupied Greece, to explore the expanding business of phonographic compagnies and the multiple connexions with other geographical spaces and repertoires (namely French, Italian but also Russian).

Historically, research on the musical press has often been conducted in the domain of bibliography: of lists, citations, large corpora of texts in analog then digital formats. Great efforts have been made to render these sources in more useful and accessible manners, via indexing, search and retrieval databases, full text documents, and textual markup or enhancement. However, digital humanities and artificial intelligence (AI) open further possibilities in ways to access, visualize, and interpret a large numbers of historical texts. This presentation will present preliminary results on RIPM's use of these tools and resulting forthcoming enhancements.

A summary of RIPM's activities, publications, and initiatives in the past year and those forthcoming. The expansion of RIPM Jazz Periodicals into Europe, Latin American and other initiatives in the RIPM Retrospective Index,