Museum focuses on East and West in music

ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News

Pera Museum hosts International RIdIM Conference on Music Iconography.

Pera Museum will be hosting a new conference series starting from June 5 and continuing until June 7. In partnership with the Association RIdIM (Repertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale), and in association with Don Juan Archive in Vienna, the museum will host the 14th International RIdIM Conference on Music Iconography, entitled “Visual Intersections: Negotiating East and West.”

The conference seeks to excavate musical iconography by paying particular attention to the iconography of musical instruments. On the other hand it also aims to focus on the concept of object-oriented analysis in musical iconography. A deeper understanding of the musical iconography of the East, with particular attention to Byzantine and Ottoman Art will be the main focus. In addition to that the participants and academics will serve an analysis of the dialogues of exchange between East and West.

According to a written statement, the subject of the conference is related to the music iconography of the East including the exchange between East and West and the discourses on “Exotism” and “Orientalism” aand the study of musical instruments. The program committee has been particularly encouraged by the numerous paper proposals received (more than 80). “The ample topical and methodological range of the 60-plus papers that were selected reflect not only the international scope of this conference but also the diversity and pluralism of music iconography research, not in the sense of a falling back on the hackneyed pluralism as a laissez-faire or as a go-anywhere ticket replacing intellectual exchange,” said the statement.
 
Rather, the focus is to provide a framework for multi-fold and interdisciplinary discourse, to promote the intellectual examination and exchange concerning the variety of musical cultures of the world, and, last but not least, to enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where, tumbled as they are into endless connection.