In 2022 Libreria Musicale Italiana launched Acusfere: Suoni_culture_musicologie, a multilingual, annually published, peer-reviewed print and online journal with abstracts in English. The journal’s scope is purposely broad; however, there are several general elements around which it coheres, including emphases on:
- Research from the fields of musicology and anthropology
- Musical writing, invention, improvisation, and composition in the contemporary world
- Local and peripheral music traditions
- Relationships between music and many other artistic and expressive activities
- Musical instruments and technologies
- Vocal expression as manifested in individual and polyphonic contexts
- The processes of thought, theories, aesthetics, and structures that shape musical meanings
- The multifarious behaviors detectable in the music-making of diverse cultures
- The spaces and places of music, stable and concrete, but also mobile and ephemeral
- Projections of music in media, rapidly changing and integrated into multiple perspectives
The journal’s tripartite subtitle—suoni (sounds), culture (cultures), and musicologie (musicologies)—reflects the pluralities and variabilities of viewpoints, processes, scenarios, contexts, and knowledges at the center of the critical reflection of music making.
Below, Marco Tomassi performs on his reconstruction of the 17th-century sordellina, the subject of an article in the journal’s inaugural issue.
