This edition of the Conferences on Doctoral Studies in Art and Musicology aims to encourage predoctoral researchers to reflect on how their research can take a step forward breaking from the hegemonic methodologies and discourses of their fields of study. We want to question how the disciplines of art history and musicology, as well as stage studies, literature or history, have traditionally been taught and studied. Our expectation is to bring up new perspectives that challenge the canonical conceptions of academia in order to implement a more updated and inclusive discourse in our research.

 

A fundamental change comes at the moment of constructing a historical thread and communicating it. The canonical history built on the name of "great artists" and "great composers" has for a long time been crumbling and there is a need for new discourses that structure the history of the arts based on aesthetic or ideological precepts. However, one of the problems associated with the study of the past is revisionism: how and who establishes the criteria to include new figures in the classical catalogue or repertoire, to make historicist recreations of the past, or to play ancient music in the present?

 

Many of us are already conscious that the world of Humanities has been traditionally approached and portrayed from a Westernized, masculinized and racialized point of view. The centers of power have implanted their vision of the events as the canonical reference that gender, post-colonial and ethnic studies have been refuting for years. For example, we know all about Roman art and Greek tragedies, but what about pre-Columbian civilizations? Classical repertoires are made up of court and palatine music, but what about popular music? How do we find a place in the academic world for the present-day creation that coexists with historical research? What new approaches can we bring in this respect to restructure our disciplines?

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In both museums and auditoriums, male names are still predominant, although exhibitions and concerts dedicated to female figures are becoming more and more common. New works are included in the repertoire, or re-readings of the classics are made, with the intention of breaking with the vision of women polarized between the femme fatale and the immaculate girl that comes from the 19th century. But, how can we include these new names in the structural canon, beyond occasional recovery events, and under what criteria can we equate them with the male "great names" or with the "great titles" of history under a general agreement?

Other cases are the colonialist discourse, which has codified a European iconographic and propagandistic language to justify itself, without giving proper consideration to the colonized. The religious legitimizations within the national cultures or the differences between social classes are also relevant topics for this issue.