News

The research team project “Our music, our world: Musical associations, wind bands, and local communities (1880-2018)” is pleased to invite submissions of proposals for the International conference Our music, our world: wind bands and local social life, to be held in Aveiro, at the Departamento de Comunicação e Arte da Universidade de Aveiro, from the 10th to 12th of October 2019.

Wind bands of mixed woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments represent, today, a musical phenomenon that has spread far beyond the “western” culture. The cultural, economic and social changes brought by the impact of the French Revolution and the militarization, colonization, and missionary work helped to spread wind band traditions, while technological innovations and mass manufacturing made the instrumentation more accessible to amateur musicians all over the world (Herbert 2000, Reily and Brucher 2013). The portability of wind and percussion instruments, combined with the legacy of their use in military, governmental and church rituals, made bands especially adaptable to widely different performing contexts, shaping and reshaping local sound landscapes. In Portugal, wind bands conquered an expressive relevance in the context of musical collectivities/recreational societies that appeared with the 19th century liberal movements and flourished with the emergence of the public sphere around the 1880s (Pestana 2014), comprising thousands of individuals in musical practice. With this conference, we aim to discuss the contribution of wind bands to the artistic, educational, and professional musical life; the weaving of communities (whether stable, fluid or fragmented) and of identities, constructing public spaces and reshaping the local soundscape; the historical individual’s and institutional contributions.

In order to comprehended the plurality of actors, musical practices and social contexts that emerge around the wind bands, we invite researchers to submit proposals within the following themes:

Musicians, conductors, and composers

Community wind bands, local communities and identity

Military wind bands

Repertoires, ensembles and instruments

Systems of learning and playing music

Cultural policies

Local, national and transnational cases

In addition to the above themes, we also welcome proposals exploring other aspects of wind band’s music, musicians and contexts.

We welcome abstracts, in Portuguese or English, of no more than 350 words for: Paper presentations (max. length 20 minutes): submissions should be accompanied by a short curriculum (approx. 100 words) of the presenter, and include 3-5 keywords Pre-formed Panels: please submit a general abstract and individual abstract for each named speaker, and a short curriculum of each of the presenters, and include 3-5 keywords. Panels should last 1 hour and 30 minutes, including discussion.