Mário António Pinto Vieira de Carvalho
Academic Degree
Doctorate
Doctorate
Category
Full member
Full member
Host Institution
NOVA FCSH
NOVA FCSH
Research Group
Thematic Lines
Research Hub
Biography
Mário Vieira de Carvalho obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology 1985. His text was printed in Germany as volume 5 of the series Musiksoziologie (Bärenreiter) in 1999. Meanwhile, it had been translated into Portuguese, and was published in Lisbon in 1993. His research work has attempted to consistently exploring the relations between musical phenomena and the social environment. Both are social realms structurally coupled to one another. It follows from this that musicology not only must devise ever more refined approaches, including, for example, at the level of “work analysis” – a view he developed since the time of his encounter with Christian Kaden as a former doctoral supervisor – but also, primarily, at the level of musicology’s own self-critical potential, in the sense that a sociology of music must begin to be a “sociology of musicology”. By introducing in 1987 the discipline of Sociology of Music in the degree course of Musicology at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, and later also in the master’s degree course, he aimed at encouraging the students and young candidates for research to think critically music and musicology, to cultivate the interdisciplinary dialogue with different sociological and philosophical tendencies or approaches and, last but not least, to do not forget that knowledge of music may not suppress from the research horizon music itself as knowledge about society and the human beings. CESEM – Research Centre for Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, which he founded in 1997 and effectively directed until his appointment as Secretary of State for Culture in 2005, has since then developed and amplified such purposes, having become today, at national and international level, an important research centre of excellence in the field of Musicology. Beyond his scientific activity and outputs, especially since the 1980s, he had developed since 1963, still as student at the Faculty of Law and one of the leaders of the Students Association, an intense activity as organizer of cultural activities, inscribed in a larger movement of cultural and political resistance against the dictature. His first writings of musical criticism date back to the 1960s. By the end of the 90s he had published in several newspapers and magazines about a thousand of press articles about music and other cultural, also political issues (they are not yet listed in the present CV; a complete list of these press interventions is available at https://sites.google.com/site/mariovieiradecarvalho/press-articles-1).
Resarch interests and fields: Sociology of Music, Philosophy of Music, Critical Theory, Communication Theory, Opera Studies, Contemporary Music, Music and Literature, Music and Politics.