Symposium: Sonic Traces – Revisiting the Recordings of the Wolf Dietrich Collection in Münster
Program with abstracts and presenters' CV's
September 15, 9:30 – 18:00 (CT)
DFG-Project “Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae”, Room 303
Domplatz 6, 48143 MünsterSeptember 16, 10:30 – 16:00 (CT)
Institute for Musicology, Münster, Room PS1
Philippistraße 2b, 48149 MünsterOrganized by: Evangelia Chaldæaki & Benjamin Sturm.
Contributors: Ralf Martin Jäger & George Kokkonis.
Poster and program design: Evangelia Chaldæaki.
The participation to the symposium is free.
To attend, prior registration is necessary. Please send an e-mail to sturm.benjamin@uni-muenster.de by September 14, 2025 the latest.
This symposium honours Wolf Dietrich (1938-2014), and focuses on his musical recordings from fieldwork in the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and West Asia during the decades 1960-1990. These recordings are part of the Dietrich Collection, which includes his field notes and a small photographic archive, a list of his publications, his collection of related books and the scripts of the radio programs he produced in Germany and Switzerland using this material. The Dietrich Collection is one of the five ethnomusicological collections at the University of Münster, alongside with the Neubauer Library, the MAMO Digital Archive of Oriental Musical Theory, the Jäger Manuscript Collection, and the Collection of Musical Instruments.
In this symposium, distinguished professors and researchers from Austria, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, and Turkey will present selected material from the Dietrich Collection in Münster regarding musical recordings from regions in present-day Albania, Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey. The focus of each presenter will depend on their scientific field and may include issues related to music, ethnomusicological research, culture, and society.
More specifically, the opening ceremony will take place on the first day of the symposium. Welcoming addresses will be read by Prof. Dr. Michael Custodis, Managing Director of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Münster, and Annegret Weil Helmbold, M.A., on behalf of the Institute of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies and the Institute for Interdisciplinary Cyprus Studies at the University of Münster. The first presenter will be Professor Dr. Ralf Martin Jäger from the Institute for Musicology at the University of Münster in Germany. He will describe the Wolf Dietrich Collection, his relationship with Dietrich himself, and how the collection ended up at this specific university. Then he will focus on Dietrich’s field research in Cyprus in 1971. Benjamin Sturm, a pre-doc assistant for Ethnomusicology at the Institute for Musicology in the DFG project “Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae” at the University of Münster, as well as a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Musicology at the University of Osnabrück, both in Germany, will make further references to Dietrch’s research and archival methodology. He will also present a case study on how Dietrich conducted research in the Balkans, especially in former Yugoslavia. Professor Dr. Eckehard Pistrick from the Gustav Mahler Private University in Austria will discuss Dietrich’s recordings in Albania as artifacts of post-dictatorship practices and listening. He will approach the (post-)communist folklore politics of Enver Hoxha’s regime, an important political figure in Albania. Next, Professor Dr. George Kokkonis from the Department of Music Studies at the University of Ioannina in Greece will discuss Dietrich’s research in Greece. He will present recordings of the Roma musical style from the village of Parakalamos in Epirus. More specifically, he will explain how Dietrich’s recordings from the villages of Repetista and Aristi reveal the local idioms of this musical style and its influence on Epirus. Dr. Evangelia Chaldæaki, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Music Studies at the University of Ioannina in Greece and a research associate at the Orient-Institut Istanbul for the DFG project “Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae”, will discuss one eponymous song from Epirus that was recorded by Dietrich in 1969 in Panagia, a village of Thessaly. She will demonstrate the value of a single song recording from the Dietrich Collection. The first day of the symposium will close with Dr. Dimitri Gianniodis, a researcher at the French School of Athens, will present on the Chios bagpipe repertoire (tsabounistá), as recorded by Dietrich on the island in 1978, and the conclusions that can be drawn from that research.
On the second day of the symposium, Professor Songül Karahasanoğlu from the Turkish Music State Conservatory of Istanbul Technical University in Turkey will present Dietrich and his collection as examples of non-academic researchers. She will emphasize his distinctive role within the larger context of his field based on her extensive research of his collection and life’s work. The rest of the day’s presentations will include material from Dietrich’s research in Turkey and Cyprus. Dr. Onur Şentürk, an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Music Studies at the University of Ioannina, will speak about Dietrich’s research on the folk instruments kemençe and tulum in the Eastern Black Sea region in the 1970. He will also discuss how this research connects his own fieldwork in the same region. Christodoros Mnasonos, a musician and independent researcher from Cyprus, will present Dietrich’s unique recordings from the Kormakiti regions of Cyprus, which is still inhabited by Maronites. The symposium will conclude with an exclusive tour of the Dietrich Collection for participants only.