Creating Identity, Community and Music as Cultural Heritage through Contemporary Storytelling

After five successful editions, we continue our summer course addressing music as a cultural heritage from theoretical and professional aspects. In 2024, we will focus on storytelling and music as intangible heritage, explore the pathways of community and identity building through storytelling, and look at audiovisual tools and the portrayal of heritage on film from a critical viewpoint. 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.

Course leader

József Laszlovszky, Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Vienna, Austria Martin Stokes, Department of Music, King’s College, London, UK

Target group

The course intends to bring together graduate and post-graduate students, as well as junior researchers and music professionals from the fields of cultural heritage studies, ethnomusicology, film studies, sociology, ethnology, and social anthropology. We also accept applications from advanced undergraduate students who have adequate prior study or engagement experience on the subject and make a compelling case in their application/statement of interest.

Course aim

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.