Foreword

v FOREWORD MARCELLO SORCE-KELLER Chair, ICTM Study Group ‘Mediterranean Music Studies’ “Let the meaning choose the word.” George Orwell ThisSpecialIssueoftheJournalofMediterraneanStudiesistheresultofseveral fortunate circumstances, as well as of the collaboration of a group of congenial and creative people. For the record, and to satisfy the legitimate curiosity of the reader, I would like to concisely explain how it happened. TheStudyGroup‘MediterraneanMusicStudies’(formerly‘Anthropology of Music in Mediterranean Cultures’) has been active within the International Council for Traditional Music for many years, in fact since 1992, when Tullia Magrini, Professor at the University of Bologna initiated it. A couple of years ago the opportunity presented itself to organize its 8th Meeting at the Mediterranean Institute of the University of Malta. Indeed it was thanks to the enthusiasm and help of Dr. Simon Mercieca, former Director of the Mediterranean Institute, that our Meeting materialized and took place in Malta from the 1st till the 4th of July 2010. Professor Martin Stokes, of St John’s College at Oxford, now at King’s College in London, had suggested a wonderful theme for discussion: ‘Musical Translations across the Mediterranean’. That was a suggestion so rich in overtones ringing throughout linguistics, literary criticism, anthropology and, of course, ethnomusicology, that could only be enthusiastically accepted. Douglas Hofstadter, a physicist, computer scientist and student of cognitive processes, expressed years ago his fascination for the concept of ‘translation’ by applying it to ‘frames of reference’ in general (Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, Basic Books 1997). But most of all, and primarily, Martin Stokes’ idea reminded me of how literary critic Harold Bloom, employed the word ‘misprision’ to describe the process by which writers misread or misinterpret their literary predecessors so as to clear imaginative space for themselves (A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, 1975). One could very well argue that Bloom’s ‘misprision’, applied on a larger scale, easily becomes the ‘cultural translation’ that R.C.J. Young so aptly described: ‘Translation is a way of thinking about how languages, people, and cultures are transformed as vi they move between different places. It can also be used more metaphorically, as a way of describing how the individual or the group can be transformed by changing their sense of their own place in society’ (Postcolonialism, 2003). So fascinating is the theme that, unsurprisingly, it elicited wide and immediate interest, and with no difficulty at all I could obtain collaboration and set up a program committee made up of: Philip Ciantar (University of Malta), Ruth F. Davis (University of Cambridge, and Vice Chair of the Study Group), Simon Mercieca (University of Malta), Martin Stokes (Oxford University), and myself. Once the Meeting came to its conclusion, Professor Paul Clough (Anthropology Department, University of Malta and Chairman of the Editorial Working Group of JMS) immediately suggested that some of the presentations could easily become essays, and give substance to a Special Issue of the Journal. That was also an opportunity that could not be missed. Thanks to Paul Clough, here we are now, with a fine selection of thought-provoking essays derived from those papers presented in Malta back then. OnlyonethingneedstobeaddedbeforeIbringtoconclusionthisforeword, and that is my heartfelt gratitude to the Program Committee, to all participants at the Meeting, to Professor Philip V. Bohlman (University of Chicago) who opened it with his Keynote address, and, in a very special way indeed, to the editors of this Issue: Dr. Philip Ciantar (University of Malta), and Professor Franco Fabbri (University of Torino). ...