EnIM 24 | CESEM Participation

EnIM 24 | XIII Meeting of Research in Music will occur at the Algarve Regional Conservatory – Maria Campina (Faro), from the 7th to the 9th of November. CESEM will be represented by 25 researchers.

Andrew Woolley, integrated member of the Early Music Studies Group and Principal Researcher of CESEM, will present codicological work on the Livro de Bouro, a major source of seventeenth-century Portuguese organ music, focussing on the role and possible identity of the principal scribe.

Ângela Flores Baltazar, PhD student and a collaborator of the CTC Group, will present the paper ‘Disseminating music on television: Telescola and the public music education in Portugal between 1964 and 1975’, which aims to share the results obtained from analysing primary sources relating to Telescola between 1964 and 1975. This presentation will address the role of the media in education in Portugal and how cultural dissemination and music are part of the public curatorship of television, problematising the mass distribution of cultural products.

Bernadette Nelson, CEECIND 2017 researcher, will be presenting a paper concerning music and ceremony at the Portuguese royal chapel during the time of Dom João III: ‘The Vila Viçosa Ceremonial da Capella del Rey, and Contexts for Ritual, Ceremony, and Music at the Royal Chapel of Dom João III (r. 1521-57)’.

Caio Priori dos Santos, PhD researcher, member of the ‘Thematic History of Music in Portugal and Brazil’ project, and a collaborator of the CTC Group, will present a paper entitled ‘The ‘Brazilian Guitar’ in the periodical press at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century’. In this presentation, Priori dos Santos will examine how the term ‘Brazilian Guitar’ emerged, identifying patterns of use and understanding the influence of periodicals on its formation and propagation as an expression, based on sources from the Digital Hemeroteca of the National Library Foundation of Brazil (BNDigital).

Catarina Braga, doctoral student and member of the Music in the Modern Period Group, locates the ‘Dramatic-musical Societies of Lisbon between 1880-1910’ with the aim of discussing cultural life in Lisbon outside the major theatres.

Diogo Alvim, integrated researcher and member of the Research Group on Contemporary Music, will propose a reflection on the process of musical creation as an artistic device, seeking to develop mechanisms that transpose the limits of the “work”, rehearsing different forms of interference of the world in the work, and inscription of this in the world. To illustrate this, he will present two recent pieces, that explore different extra-musical mechanisms and dynamics in the construction of meaning.

Gonçalo Valente, an MA student in Musical Arts at NOVA-FCSH and a collaborator at CM Group, will present the status of his Master’s degree research. Through a presentation titled ‘Timbral Characteristics and Semantic Description of Sounds’, Gonçalo Valente aims to establish concrete bridges between objective parameters of the spectra of synthesized sounds and their semantic description in European Portuguese, in a transdisciplinary approach between Psychoacoustics and Linguistics.

Joana Freitas will present the paper entitled Imagination or the music of everyday life: a discussion on the online (re)definition of musical genres, which explores how, in the age of digital abundance, the ubiquity of music and the media convergence between video games, cinema and television have transformed listening practices and musical remediation. In online contexts, users’ musical practices increasingly reflect a curation based on moods and atmospheres rather than formal genres, using playlists and compilations to customise daily life. This analysis also highlights the dominance of a properly crafted orchestral sound and the importance of metadata in the construction of imaginaries on platforms such as YouTube, where musical content circulates without borders, creating potential soundtracks for everyday life.

Based on the collection and analysis of over 250 documents preserved in the Mário de Andrade archive (IEB-USP), Juliana Wady examines how the acclaimed Brazilian writer and musicologist engaged with Portuguese music and its figures. This study explores, on one hand, how Portuguese music — folk, urban, or classical — appears in Andrade’s systematic research, through sheet music, discographies, and bibliographic references. On the other, with a particular focus on his correspondence, it illustrates how his interest in music from Portugal and its composers became a vital tool for creating and sustaining connections with notable figures in the Portuguese intellectual-artistic sphere. These perspectives link Andrade with figures such as Francine Benoît, José Osório de Oliveira, Adolfo Casais Monteiro, Luiz Moita, and Gastão de Bettencourt, among others. Focusing especially on the 1930s and on contexts that bridge the Luso-Brazilian space, this paper examines Andrade’s views on music and Portugal beyond his published works, enhancing our understanding of the exchange networks and social dynamics that shaped musical exchange in the early 20th-century Luso-Brazilian context.

Luciano Botelho da Silva, a doctoral researcher on the ‘Thematic History of Music in Portugal and Brazil’ project, will present the paper ‘Opera Theatre in Rio de Janeiro during the Armed Revolt of 1893-94: The case of Marino Mancinelli’, highlighting the Italian conductor’s relations with Portugal and Brazil in a period marked by political clashes and a deep economic crisis on and off the stage in both countries.

Luísa Correia Castilho, integrated member of CESEM, presents a paper in the session about Challenges of the Patrimonialization of Music and Sound with the title ‘A sound look at the quilts of Castelo Branco’, aiming to analyze and characterize the reasons that suggest in some way any type of sound. She will also moderate the Musical Criticism in the 19th and 20th centuries session.

Luís Neiva, a doctoral researcher, will present the paper: ‘Singing for the dead: Renaissance polyphony in its relationship with the past’, a reflection on the concept of tradition and how the past should be seen as an ideological category by analysing the Iberian requiem masses of the Renaissance and the anti-polyphony sentiment expressed by some more conservative voices within the church.

In his paper, Manuel Pedro Ferreira will explore the possible influence of medieval music on his own choral and chamber music. After focussing on the uses that Jorge Peixinho and Constança Capdeville made of older music, Manuel Pedro Ferreira will begin by asking in which way the relationship observed between medieval music and the creative process was, in the work itself, extended or modified. If there has been a change, a second question arises: whether it was the result of his musicological identity, his artistic personality, or perhaps an aesthetic inclination common to his generation (or part of it); in which case we can treat such a mutation as a symptom of something broader and more significant in the history of recent music. An analysis of the compositional processes, by typology of use, will gradually lead to the conclusion that there has indeed been a mutation, but less linked to the author’s musicological facet, which emerged during the 1980s, than to his artistic and ideological stance, which goes back to the late 1970s.

Rui M. Pinto will discuss one of the topics of his Phd Thesis, specifically the waltz as an element of the reception of the music of the great masters and the transformation of the musical taste of Lisbon’s audiences between 1879 and 1888.

Regarding joint communications, Bráulio Vidile, CESEM researcher and PhD student, will present a systematic literature review on the use of verbal metaphors in musical instrument teaching and learning. Conducted in collaboration with Profs. Helena Rodrigues and Ana Isabel Pereira, the review aims to outline the state of the art on the topic and offer suggestions for future research. The possible functions of metaphors in instrumental teaching, the limitations of this teaching strategy, and potential measures to address these limitations will also be discussed.

In a panel entitled When Literature Thinks About Music, João Pedro Cachopo, Vinícius de Aguiar, and Filipa Cruz will present three studies that analyse different forms of writing about music in 20th-century literature. In a journey from the novels The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann and The Glass Bead Game (1945) by Hermann Hesse to the short story ‘A King Listens’ (1986) by Italo Calvino, each paper will try to discern the epistemological advantages of confronting musicology, understood in its disciplinary diversity, with other writings and other listenings, discovering in literature, between reality and fiction, an openness to another musical experience and knowledge.

At last, four researchers from the project ‘Echoes from the Past: Unveiling a Lost Soundscape through Digital Analysis’ (2022.01957.PTDC) will present the panel Chant in Braga through the Centuries (11th-17th): The Exchange between Traditional and Digital Research Methodologies in Case Studies that includes four presentations. The first three focus on case studies of liturgical genres, specifically Communion antiphons, antiphons in Evangelio, and Alleluia. The final presentation will introduce a new automatic digital analysis tool, the 0ECHOES MEI Analyser,” which is currently being developed in the project.

Inês Nunes Trindade. During the Council of Trent (1545-1563), a process of liturgical reorganization took place in Rome, which also considered musical aspects, particularly the importance of word transmission during the Eucharist. In this context, Braga was allowed to retain its local rite due to the antiquity of its liturgy. This presentation aims to unveil the Communion melodies heard in Braga Cathedral in the 17th century, as documented in the complete choir Gradual, comprising four volumes (Ms 35, Ms 36, Ms 37, and Ms 38), written between 1637 and 1643 and belonging to Braga Cathedral.

Carla Crespo. This presentation will analyze two noted breviary fragments located in the Arquivo Distrital (Folders 36) and in the Arquivo Municipal (No. 10 Codices) of Braga. Dated to the 13th century, the fragments share two antiphons: Amen dico vobis and the antiphon Si offers munus tuum, commonly associated with the 7th Sunday after Pentecost. Given that the Diocese of Braga maintained a specific liturgical tradition from the late 11th to the mid-17th century, this case study is based on a comparative analysis aimed at assessing whether these fragments might be considered witnesses to this tradition.

Francesco Orio. This research on the Alleluia in Braga seeks to explore the musical transmission of this Mass genre in plainchant from the 12th to the 17th centuries, contributing to the identification of the provenance of fragmentary sources. The presentation will share results from a survey on the liturgical and musical presence of the Alleluia in the surviving manuscripts and fragments from Braga and a comparison with selected Portuguese sources.

Elsa De Luca. ‘ECHOES MEI Analyser’ is a new tool built from scratch, without reusing existing resources, enabling cross-comparisons between versions of the same chant found in sources with different dates and musical notation styles. Although the chant repertoire that can currently be automatically analyzed is limited to about one hundred examples, the research conducted is already highly sophisticated, involving not only notes and melodic contour but also the presence of melismas and even specific neume shapes (e.g. liquescences, etc.).

In addition to these researchers, Luís M. Santos will also represent CESEM at EnIM 2024.