International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance

A Non-Governmental Organization in Formal Consultative Relations with UNESCO

PROGRAMME of the MMS 16th Symposium – İzmir (Turkey), June 1-4, 2026

Audience: 
ICTMD Study Group on Mediterranean Music Studies (formerly Anthropology of Music in Mediterranean Cultures)

 

The Mediterranean Music Study Group (ICTMD)

is pleased to announce its

16th Symposium on the theme

The Mediterranean as Sonic Tourbillon: 
Interventions of Connection and Disconnection

State Conservatory of Turkish Music – Ege University
Ege Üniversitesi, Devlet Türk Musikisi Konservatuvarı, Türkiye
1-4 June, 2026

 

The Mediterranean has long been imagined as both a bridge and a boundary—a space of circulation, encounter, and entanglement, but also of rupture, exclusion, and contested belonging. Fernand Braudel (1949/1972) evoked it as a meeting place of civilizations, while more recent perspectives (Herzfeld 2005; Ben-Yehoyada 2017; Tziovas 2021) illuminate the tensions between mobility and immobility, hybridity and essentialization, intimacy and estrangement. It is a space of sonic connection and disjunction. The sea, as a material and metaphorical force, continues to shape dynamics of movement and stasis, connection and disconnection.
Inspired by poet Gherasim Luca’s Tourbillon d’être, we invite questioning on how music and dance in the Mediterranean geography operates as a sonic whirlpool: a vortex where voices, instruments, bodies and rhythms spiral, collide, and recombine. Just as Luca manipulates language and sound into stammering resonance, music in the Mediterranean region bends and refracts scales, modes, and rhythms— maqam, nuba, polyphony, heterophony, and more—creating sonic spaces that allow circulation and blurring through moments of connection, disconnection, grounding and displacement. Sound remains a force of becoming, deterritorializing boundaries, opening lines of flight, and generating networks across difference, echoing Deleuze’s affirmation of stammering, repetition, and intensity as creative forces.

The 16th ICTMD Mediterranean Music Study Group’s symposium situates itself within the framework of intervention theory (Marcus & Fischer 1986; Spivak 1993; Papadopoulos et al. 2008). Moving beyond ethnography as description, we approach scholarship as intervention: a participatory, situated act that unsettles and reconfigures the processes it engages. Mediterranean music, in this sense, functions as a critical research practice: through listening, performing, and enacting, knowledge is produced in the very act of sound, in the spiraling folds of melody, rhythm, and voice. Scholarship becomes a whirlpool or tourbillon itself, moving with the currents of cultural encounter, rupture or renewal.
Foregrounding intervention invites us to rethink how scholarship engages with the Mediterranean—not merely as an object of study, but as a lived and mediated field of negotiation, tension, and relationality, particularly at a time of accelerating digitalization and perceived social disconnection. Connectivism, as a theory of learning, guides this approach: privileging connection emphasizes the networked, collective nature of knowledge; privileging disconnection risks reinforcing hierarchies, silencing voices, and flattening the rhizomatic entanglements of sound.

Music, gesture and sound are simultaneously vectors of cohesion and instruments of disconnection—through censorship, rupture, displacement, and erasure (Stokes 1994; Guilbault 1997; Sugarman 2010). In our current moment, marked by migration, border fortification, digital mediation, and cultural politics, these dynamics acquire renewed urgency. The Mediterranean’s sonic whirlpool, like Luca’s poetic tourbillon, demonstrates how repetition, variation, and stammering produce connection without erasing difference, generating links across time, space, and affective experience.

The 16th Symposium of the ICTMD Mediterranean Music Study Group, hosted by the State Conservatory of Turkish Music at Ege University in Izmir, invites proposals that investigate how music, sound, and movement operate as vectors of connection and disconnection across the Mediterranean, historically and in contemporary contexts. We welcome ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, music theorists, anthropologists, sound archaeologists, performance scholars, and practitioners to explore the multiple roles of sound, gesture, and movement in shaping both solidarity and division, and to consider music itself as a critical research practice: a method of knowledge production that is relational (Pasler, 2024), sonic and embodied.

 

Links:

EGE UNIVERSITY - State Conservatory of Turkish Music

Mediterranean Music Studies blog

 

TIMETABLE

 

 

Time

1 JUNE Monday

2 JUNE Tuesday

3 JUNE Wednesday

4 JUNE Thursday

  

CHAIRS

CHECK IN

 

 

 

  

9:00-9:20

11

Artıktay Güncel Gürsel –

 From Migrant Bodies to Data Traces: Streaming Platforms as Genre Delimiters and Digital Border Infrastructures in Mediterranean Music Circulation

24

Fanioudaki Eleni -

Sonic Borders and the Construction of the Canon: Chronis Aidonidis as an Institutional Mediator and the "Tripartite" Thrace

 

30

Battioni Luca -

Prison Songs and Italy’s Southern Question in 1970s Recordings

  

9:20-9:40

12

Mavrogiannis Pandelis –

The musical materials of the Judeo-Spanish Oral Archive (JSOA): a first account

25

Gianniodis Dimitris -

Karsi project : Cross-ethnographies and digital mapping of shared musical practices in nine-beat rhythms in the Greek islands of the eastern Aegean  and the Turkish province of Izmir

31

Aydin Ali Fuat -

The walls of Yedi Kule: Re-imagining the prison soundscape of the Eastern Mediterranean through Rebetiko

 

  

OPENING CEREMONY

Ali Maruf Alaskan

Elbaz Vanessa Paloma

  

9:40-10:00

13

Elbaz Vanessa Paloma  -

Digital tourbillon: Sound archives as interplay between algorithm and resonance

 

26

Magarò Francesco –

Negotiating “Mediterraneanness” (Plastino 2003): Koinè or Label in contemporary Italian popular music

32

Emery Ed -

The Songs of Salah Farzeit

  

10:00-10:20

OPENING CHAMBER CONCERT

TEN DUO: PIANO & KABAK KEMANE

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

  

10:30-11:00

BREAK

BREAK

BREAK

BREAK

  

CHAIRS

 

 

 

 

  

11:00-11:20

1

Kilicci Jeanette - Reuter Christoph –

Armenian-Turkish Folk Songs, Memory, and Belonging in Diaspora

14

Baulot-Souckov Clement –

The Transformation of Bulgarian Instrumental Music in the 20th Century

 

 

 

STUDY GROUP MEETING

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STUDY GROUP MEETING

                                                                    

 

33

Gatto Simona -

Singing the last: personal biography and social protest in Rosa Balistreri’s "Noi siamo nell’inferno carcerati"

  

11:20-11:40

2

Erkan Seher -

The Context of Unity in Performance: The "Meydan Fasıl"

 

15

Colwell Rachel –

Loudness, Echo, and Reverb: An Acoustic History of Tunisian Sacred Ma’lūf

 

34

Ibraheem Dalia -

Prison for the Brave: Informality, Incarceration, and politics of the unspeakable in

  

11:40-12:00

3

Yıldırım Emin - Ersoy İlhan -

Qara Corġa Küy and Dance in the Context of Cultural Identity, Habitus, and Embodied Cultural Capital

16

Guillot Allia -

Recomposing Ritual: Gnawa Performance, Cohesion, and Fracture in the Diaspora

35

La Spina Riccardo -

From Infamy to Martyrdom – Imprisonment and Execution as Agencies of Immortalization and Emotional Manipulation in the US Recordings of “La Morte di Caserio”

  

12:00-12:20

4

Duran Bàrbara -

The female body as a tool of vindication: the case of the dimònies of Manacor (Mallorca, Balearic Islands)

17

Ruth Davis –

The 'Half Moon Camp' and the making of an ethnomusicologist: Robert Lachmann’s  musical encounters in Wünsdorf

36

Minniti Giulio -

Sceriffata neoclassica: Parody and Deconstruction of the Neapolitan Prison Song

  

12:20-12:50

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

  

12:50-14:30

LUNCH

LUNCH

LUNCH

LUNCH

  

13:30-14:30

 

Visit İzmir Ethnography Museum

 

Visit Carpet Museum

  

CHAIRS

 

 

 

 

  

14:30-14:50

5

 Özbilgin Mehmet Öcal –

Dance Culture in the Mediterranean Region of Turkiye

18

Sechehaye Hélène –

Amezian Laïla -

Resonating Modalities of Being: the Art of Musical Series Among Moroccan Women Musicians in Belgium

27

Fernández Sara Islán –

Musics of Turkey within the Iberian Musical Landscape: New Forms of Transmission, Creation, and Representation. The Case of the Labyrinth Catalunya Festival 

37

Morra Salvatore -

Musical Silence from the Italian Civilian Internment Camps in Fāyed (1940–1945)

  

14:50-15:10

6

Birmo Selvi Gizem –

Reconsidering Traditional Dances of the Mediterranean Region in Türkiye through an Ecochoreological Perspective

19

Breyley Gay -

From Trieste to Beirut, 1090 to 2025: The Whirling Juxtapositions of Slovenia’s Laibach

28

Michal Moch -

Hip-hop and Trap in Greater Cairo – Evolving Genres Between Cohesion and Disconnection

38

Visaggio Elisabetta -

“In the middle of the sea, there’s a fountain where prisoners go to drink”: the role of watery symbols in singing and remembering the carceral experience in early XX century Southern Italy

  

15:10-15:30

7

Güreşçi Ayşen Aymen-

 Mathematical structures in dance and music practices in the Mediterranean region of Türkiye: a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective

20

Marcus Alexander Warren -

Thresholds of Protection: Apotropaic Utterance in Late Antique Jewish Households

29

Jillian Fulton-Melanson -

Mediterranean Sounds, African Stage: Performing Morocco’s Identity at AFCON 2026

 

39

Wolloshin Maureen -

Sounding Together as a restorative act; the making of Carceral Scrivings

  

15:30-15:50

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

  

16:00-16:30

BREAK

BREAK

 

Muziksev Instrument

Museum

 

Excursion Historical İzmir

City Tour

 

(Sefarad Music Concert in Synagogue)

 

BREAK

  

CHAIRS

 

 

 

  

16:30-16:50

8

Prieske Sean –

The German Mediterranean. Musical Diplomacy at the Goethe Institutes in the Eastern Mediterranean

21

Bielenberg Aliosha –

Ptolemy’s Harmonics in Ottoman Istanbul

40

Tourny Olivier -

Sacred polyphonies of Corsica: an ethnomusicology of traces, strata and spatiality.

  

16:50-17:10

9

Tarkan Erkan - Ufuk Demirbaş –

The Dance Tunes Tradition In Turkey: Collective Memory, Ritual And Identity

22

Cohen Judith R –

 Telling a song across the Mediterranean: the death of the Duke of Gandia from Spain to Italy to Türkiye

41

Dussol Sébastien –

Polyphonies profanes de Corse : strates vocales et circulation des versi dans un contexte médié

  

17:10-17:30

10

Demirbaş Ufuk –

Yâren In The Western Anatolian Conversation Tradition: “The Example of Kula Yâreni”

23

Demir Aylin –

Communal Bonding and Fraction: Reflections on Performances of Alevi Music Genres

DISCUSSION

  

17:30-17:50

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

  

20:00-22:00

OPENING CONCERT

(Voice of Mesopotamia)

Turkish Folk Music

Military band PERFORMANCE

Popular Turkish Art Music CONCERT

Soloist: Dilek Şafak Çakar & Ahmet Utku

CLOSING DINNER with band

In Italian Restorant (konak pier)

  
Attachments: 
PDF icon Programme - 16th Symp MMS ICTMD.pdf