Report on the 9th ICTM Study Group Meeting „Music and Minorities“ in Rennes/Brittany

July 4-8 July 2016

The event was hosted by the Universtiy of Rennes 2, the Centre for Breton and Celtic Research, organized by Yves Defrance and Guy Christopher Coppel. Student volunteers provided helping hands for different tasks.

The program was structured according to three themes that were chosen at the ICTM World conference in Astana: Local languages and Music, Minorities within Minorities and New Research. Out of many more proposals the program committee (consisting of Ursula Hemetek, Adelaida Reyes, Yoshitaka Terada, Yves Defrance and Tom Solomon) chose those with the highest scores (in anonymous evaluation). There were 25 papers from very different regions of the world. Especially the Japanese as well as the Austrian inputs were numerous. There were far more participants than speakers which seemed to prove great interest in the symposium. The social program was extraordinary rich, including many workshops on Breton music and dance as well as excursions that always included traditional music. The participants could learn a lot about Brittany, its history, its landscape, its political positioning in minority discourses and the music as an expression of strong local identity.

A publication of results in an edited, peer-reviewed volume will be prepared. The next Study Group meeting is scheduled for 2018 in Vienna.

The participants had a wonderful time in Brittany including fruitful intellectual exchange as well as lots of local music.

The Institute of Folks Music Research and Ethnomusicology was represented by a presentation of the project “Music without Borders” by Hande Sağlam and Weiya Lin and by the Study Group Chair Ursula Hemetek.

(for both abstracts click here).