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
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
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
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Time |
1 JUNE Monday |
2 JUNE Tuesday |
3 JUNE Wednesday |
4 JUNE Thursday |
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CHAIRS |
CHECK IN |
Tourny Olivier |
Davis Ruth |
Minniti Giulio |
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9:00-9:20 |
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Aydin Ali Fuat - The walls of Yedi Kule: Re-imagining the prison soundscape of the Eastern Mediterranean through Rebetiko |
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9:20-9:40 |
Mavrogiannis Pandelis – The musical materials of the Judeo-Spanish Oral Archive (JSOA): a first account |
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 |
Emery Ed – Salah Farzeit, and the prison songs of Tunisia |
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OPENING CEREMONY
Ali Maruf Alaskan Elbaz Vanessa Paloma |
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Elbaz Vanessa Paloma - Digital tourbillon: Sound archives as interplay between algorithm and resonance
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Magarò Francesco – Negotiating “Mediterraneanness” (Plastino 2003): Koinè or Label in contemporary Italian popular music |
Gatto Simona – Singing the last: personal biography and social protest in Rosa Balistreri’s “Noi siamo nell’inferno carcerati” |
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10:00-10:20 |
TENDUO SYMPOSIUM OPENING RECITAL |
DISCUSSION |
DISCUSSION |
DISCUSSION |
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10:30-11:00 |
BREAK |
BREAK |
BREAK |
BREAK |
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CHAIRS |
Morra Salvatore |
Emery Ed |
STUDY GROUP MEETING
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Sechehaye Helene |
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11:00-11:20 |
Kilicci Jeanette - Reuter Christoph– Armenian-Turkish Folk Songs, Memory, and Belonging in Diaspora |
Duran Bàrbara – Women’s instrumental practices in Mallorca: from traditional music to hotels scenarios |
Ibraheem Dalia - Prison for the Brave: Informality, Incarceration, and politics of the unspeakable in |
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11:20-11:40 |
Erkan Seher - The Context of Unity in Performance: The "Meydan Fasıl" |
Colwell Rachel – Loudness, Echo, and Reverb: An Acoustic History of Tunisian Sacred Ma’lūf |
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” |
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11:40-12:00 |
Yıldırım Emin - Ersoy İlhan - Qara Corġa Küy and Dance in the Context of Cultural Identity, Habitus, and Embodied Cultural Capital |
Guillot Allia - Recomposing Ritual: Gnawa Performance, Cohesion, and Fracture in the Diaspora |
Minniti Giulio - Sceriffata neoclassica: Parody and Deconstruction of the Neapolitan Prison Song |
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12:00-12:20 |
Artıktay Güncel Gürsel – From Migrant Bodies to Data Traces: Streaming Platforms as Genre Delimiters and Digital Border Infrastructures in Mediterranean Music Circulation |
Davis Ruth– The 'Half Moon Camp' and the making of an ethnomusicologist: Robert Lachmann’s musical encounters in Wunsdorf |
Morra Salvatore – Musical Silence from the Italian Civilian Internment Camps in Fāyed (1940-1945) |
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12:20-12:50 |
DISCUSSION |
DISCUSSION |
DISCUSSION |
DISCUSSION |
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12:50-14:30 |
LUNCH |
LUNCH |
LUNCH |
LUNCH |
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13:30-14:30 |
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Visit Ege University Ethnography Museum |
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Visit Ege University Paper Museum |
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Time |
1 JUNE Monday |
2 JUNE Tuesday |
3 JUNE Wednesday |
4 JUNE Thursday |
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CHAIRS |
Ersoy İlhan |
Cohen Judith |
Jimenedez Pasalodos Raquel |
Elbaz Vanessa Paloma |
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14:30-14:50 |
Özbilgin Mehmet Öcal – Dance Culture in the Mediterranean Region of Turkiye |
Sechehaye Hélène – Amezian Laïla Resonating Modalities of Being: the Art of Musical Series Among Moroccan Women Musicians in Belgium |
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 |
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 |
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14:50-15:10 |
Birmo Selvi Gizem – Reconsidering Traditional Dances of the Mediterranean Region in Türkiye through an Ecochoreological Perspective |
Breyley Gay - From Trieste to Beirut, 1090 to 2025: The Whirling Juxtapositions of Slovenia’s Laibach |
Michal Moch - Hip-hop and Trap in Greater Cairo – Evolving Genres Between Cohesion and Disconnection |
Wolloshin Maureen - Sounding Together as a restorative act; the making of Carceral Scrivings |
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15:10-15:30 |
Güreşçi Ayşen Aymen- Mathematical structures in dance and music practices in the Mediterranean region of Türkiye: a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective |
Marcus Alexander Warren - Thresholds of Protection: Apotropaic Utterance in Late Antique Jewish Households |
Fulton-Melanson Jillian - Mediterranean Sounds, African Stage: Performing Morocco’s Identity at AFCON 2026 |
Tourny Olivier – Sacred polyphonies of Corsica: an ethnomusicology of traces, strata and spatiality.
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15:30-15:50 |
DISCUSSION |
DISCUSSION |
DISCUSSION |
Dussol Sébastien – Polyphonies profanes de Corse: strates vocales et circulation des versi dans un contexte médié |
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16:00-16:30 |
BREAK |
BREAK |
Muziksev Instrument Museum
Excursion Historical İzmir City Tour
Concert in Old Bazaar Defxane |
DISCUSSION |
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CHAIRS |
Özbilgin Mehmet Öcal |
Duran Bordoy Barbara |
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16:30-16:50 |
Prieske Sean – The German Mediterranean. Musical Diplomacy at the Goethe Institutes in the Eastern Mediterranean |
Bielenberg Aliosha – Ptolemy’s Harmonics in Ottoman Istanbul |
FREE AFTERNOON |
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16:50-17:10 |
Tarkan Erkan - The Dance Tunes Tradition In Turkey: Collective Memory, Ritual And Identity |
Cohen Judith R – Telling a song across the Mediterranean: the death of the Duke of Gandia from Spain to Italy to Türkiye |
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17:10-17:30 |
Demirbaş Ufuk – Yâren In The Western Anatolian Conversation Tradition: “The Example of Kula Yâreni” |
Demir Aylin – Communal Bonding and Fraction: Reflections on Performances of Alevi Music Genres |
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17:30-17:50 |
DISCUSSION |
DISCUSSION |
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20:00-22:00 |
“Turkish Tangos” Concert Dokuz Eylül University Buca Faculty of Education, Department of Music Education Strings Orchestra MÖTBE |
Concert by the Aegean Army Band Command and the Turkish Folk Music Ensemble of Ege University State Turkish Music Conservatory MÖTBE |
Raks-ı Nağme Assoc. Prof. Ahmet Utku (PhD) & Dilek Şafak MÖTBE |
Closing Dinner & Fasıl Performance
KONAK PIER PRIMO ITALIAN RESTAURANT |
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22:00-24:00 |
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Terrace Café Musical Entertainment |
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