CALL FOR PAPERS

Siena – Accademia Musicale Chigiana
3-5 December 2026

The International Conference Music Renaissance in Global History and Contemporary Practice explores the role that music played between the 14th and 17th centuries in Europe’s cultural transformation, shaping identities, aesthetics, and social practices. Yet the Renaissance was far from an isolated European phenomenon—its musical innovations emerged through expanding imperial and cross-cultural encounters via trade, diplomacy, and migration, linking Europe with Africa, Asia, and the Americas. From the transmission of modal systems through Islamic regions to the adaptation of instruments, rhythmic patterns, and the influence of performance practices from non-European traditions, music offers a lens to understand the Renaissance through the perspective of global history.
In recent decades global history has emerged as a fast-growing discipline. As Sebastian Conrad notes, it responds to questions about modern globalisation, to social challenges, and the need for more inclusive and diversified narratives and voices of the past. To understand the entanglements and networks that shape realities beyond the borders of nation states, it has become necessary to explore the role of “exchange relationship” and to rethink historical categories and periodisation.
Drawing on Accademia Chigiana’s historic role in reevaluating Early Music repertoires in the early twentieth century, this conference seeks to reaffirm the Accademia’s leadership in promoting scholarly debates on Renaissance Music and its performance in the 21st century.
We invite contributions – papers and lecture-recitals – that challenge Eurocentric narratives and reimagine the foundations of Renaissance music historiography, exploring new approaches to studying and performing its repertoire, and highlighting early musical heritage as a resource for intercultural dialogue.

Themes and Topics
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
• Global networks and musical exchanges during the Renaissance.
• Non-European musical traditions and their influence on Renaissance soundscapes.
• Comparative studies of musical renaissances across cultures and epochs.
• Performance practice and historically informed interpretation in a global context.
• Colonialism and its impact on musical transmission and repertoire formation.
• Material culture of music: instruments, technologies, and their global adaptations.
• Music and migration: diasporic communities shaping Renaissance sound worlds.
• Intersections of music with visual arts and literature in transcultural contexts.
• The role of archives and digital humanities in rewriting Renaissance music history.
• Gender, ethnicity, and power dynamics in global Renaissance musical practices.
• Reception history: how Renaissance music was understood and appropriated beyond Europe.
• Theoretical frameworks: modal systems, tuning, and their intercultural transformations.
• Sacred and secular repertoires in cross-cultural religious encounters.
• Renaissance music as intangible heritage: strategies for preservation and reinterpretation.
• The impact of European categories and periodization on the representation of others and their past.
• Performing and recreating Renaissance music for the 21st century.
• The influence and reception of Renaissance music in compositional and performance practices from the second half of the twentieth century to the present.

Submission Information
The official languages of the conference are English and Italian.
A selection of the presented papers will be published in the 2027 volume of the journal Chigiana Journal of Musicological Studies (https://journal.chigiana.org/).
Proposals must be submitted to chigiana.journal@chigiana.org no later than 19 April 2026
Each proposal (to be sent in a single Word file) should include:
– the title of the paper;
– the name(s) of the speaker(s);
– the affiliation(s) of the speaker(s);
– an abstract of approximately 300 words.
Format of presentations: in-person; 20 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A, unless otherwise noted, lecture-recital.
Selection criteria: proposals will be evaluated by the Scientific Committee based on originality, clarity, and relevance to the conference theme.

Scientific Committee:
Giulia Accornero, Vincenzo Borghetti, Antonio Cascelli, Antonio Chemotti, Flora Dennis, Melinda Latour, Tim
Shephard.

Organising Committee:
Angelo Armiento, Antonio Artese, Simone Caputo, Marica Coppola, Stefano Jacoviello, Matteo Macinanti,
Susanna Pasticci, Nicola Sani, Marta Sabatini, Giovanni Vai.