From the Field to the Screen and Back: Creating Identity, Community and Music as Cultural Heritage through Contemporary Storytelling

Our course takes a highly interdisciplinary angle at modern musicology. Postulating musicology as an integral part of heritage studies, we employ its methods to investigate broader subjects: music acts as a prism through which social processes and identity formation unfold. The erudition of our excellent lecturers, the openness encoded in the course, and the varied professional and cultural backgrounds of participants have contributed to a revelatory summer course of collective exploration, repeating each year. 

Our focus in 2024 is storytelling, its archaic, traditional, and contemporary forms, and its role in community and identity building. Musical storytelling has resonated over thousands of years of human culture, as accessible as few other creative outputs, and of unique binding force. The perspective of heritage provides valuable insight into deciphering audiovisual languages prevalent today as well as questions of identity, belonging, and imagined and actual communities.