Taking place in the spring of 2027, this Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History marks the eighth event in the series. The symposium, held approximately every two years, brings together leading scholars of music history from around the world in Helsinki.
The symposium aims to explore how music’s histories are preserved, mediated, fragmented, silenced, reimagined, and contested in and through ‘The Archive’. Archives are generally understood as repositories for historical documents, personal and institutional, whereas ‘The Archive’ functions as a site of institutional power and curatorial processes which shapes both cultural memory and cultures of forgetting. According to Derrida, “the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future.” Digital technology furthermore has an impact for these futures by creating new ontologies, epistemologies, practices – and challenges.
The following (non-exhaustive) list opens some general thematic areas that the symposium looks to explore:
Fragmentation, loss and fragility: incomplete sources, damaged media, silenced voices, challenges of preservation in conflict and crisis Management of heritage, institutions, finance, and visitor experience, and their relationship to museum studies of all types Digitalisation processes and datafication: issues of access, interoperability, curation, and preservation of physical and digital archives and their future Ethics of collecting, stewardship, provenance, and rematriation/repatriation Materiality and mediality: manuscripts, recordings, instruments, ephemera, and born-digital artifacts
We welcome proposals in multiple formats:
Papers (20 minutes duration followed by 10 minutes discussion) Complete sessions and panels (two, three or four 20-minute papers, each with 10 minutes discussion) Lecture-recitals: 30–45 minutes combining performance and critical commentary; proposals should specify repertoire, performers, instruments, and technical needs.
Proposal length: individual presentation proposals: max 300 words panel session proposals: max 350 words + each panelist’s proposal 200 words.
Please find the full call for papers at the following link
