Soundscapes of Naples: From the Medieval to the Early Modern.

Musical practices are inherently woven into a city’s urban fabric: as marker of identity, expression of religious devotion, sonic manifestation of power, or form of entertainment, musicking punctuates the salient moments of a city’s culture. In Naples, for centuries a cultural and political capital and among the most densely populated cities in Europe, music making has always occupied a prominent position in the soundscape of public and private, sacred and secular spaces.

The interdisciplinary conference, Soundscapes of Naples: From the Medieval to the Early Modern, aims to map intersections between the performative dimension of music making and the city’s spaces and places. The organizing committee invites proposals that focus on physical venues (churches, monasteries, theaters, aristocratic palaces, schools, the public piazza, and so on, including their visual programs) as they interface with music performance and production. We welcome proposals on musicking as a cultural practice from musicologists as well as scholars from sister disciplines, including art and architectural history, archaeology, history, literary studies, and anthropology, on themes and approaches such as manuscript and print production, archival studies, music and gender, patronage/matronage, performance practice, history of the senses, acoustics, history of pedagogy, relationships between music and specific works of art, notions of ability/disability, and instrument making.

Proposals should include a curriculum vitae, a brief narrative biography (max. 150 words), and an abstract (max. 350 words), and may be in either Italian or English. The abstract should also indicate the topic’s relevance to the themes outlined above, and whether the proposed contribution could take the form of a presentation on-site at the monument under discussion. Final presentations (20 minutes) may be made in Italian or English. Please combine these materials in a single Word or PDF document with Lastname_Firstname as the title, and send to lacapraiagmail.com by 31 January 2023. Selected participants will be notified in mid-February 2023.

Soundscapes of Naples: From the Medieval to the Early Modern is coorganized by the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities “La Capraia” (a partnership between the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas and the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte) and the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin.