How do trans-cultural music archives respond to the increasingly complex, rapidly-changing realities of the music cultures they seek to document? Which principles of classification can they follow now that traditional ethno-musicological categories have been exposed as essentialist and Eurocentric? Which notion of tradition should they focus on? And how might they catch up with the quickly growing technical possibilities of the digital age?

This session introduces two archives that face these challenges: Ricarda Kopal (researcher and curator at the Media Department—Ethnomusicology, Visual Anthropology and Berlin Phonogram Archive at the Ethnological Museum Berlin) and Oliver Potratz (coordinator of the German-Afghan Safar music project, University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar) give short project presentations. Subsequently and together with Dahlia Borsche and the audience, they discuss questions and problems related to the up-to-date archiving of global music cultures.

Hosted by the Humboldt University's Chair of Trans-cultural Musicology.