PERMANENT SEMINAR IN HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN MUSIC
The Permanent Seminar of the research group Historical and Cultural Studies in Music of INET-md intends to be a forum where all its members (integrated and collaborators), as well as other invited researchers from the academic, cultural and artistic circles, may present their work and discuss ongoing projects and research.
28-03-2026 | 3 pm-6pm | National Museum of Music, Mafra
Free admission, upon presentation of an entrance ticket to the MNM and subject to room capacity.
Note: Residents in Portugal may freely access the 37 museums, monuments and palaces of MMP, everyday, 52 days per year, presenting their Cartão de Cidadão at the ticket office. Non-residents may enter in contact through inet@fcsh.unl.pt with the subject “Entry SP EHCM – 28-03-2026”.
Investigating at the National Museum of Music presentation of works
For the March 2026 session of the permanent seminar, the Historical and Cultural Studies in Music research group invited doctoral students from the National Museum of Music (MNM), holders of FCT scholarships in a non-academic setting, to present their research work. Methodologies, new challenges, and discoveries arising from the museum’s collection will be discussed, crossing perspectives from Musicology, Art History, and Museology, among other areas. The session will be presented by Edward Ayres de Abreu (director of the MNM, member of the Historical and Cultural Studies in Music research group and co-coordinator of the Heritage(s), Archives and Museums thematic line) and moderated by Cristina Fernandes.
A study on musical instrument collecting in Portugal: guidelines and contributions
Joana Peliz | CESEM, NOVA FCSH
In 19th-century Europe, there was a growing interest in collecting musical instruments, and some of the most important museums in this field were founded from many initially private collections. Following this trend, Alfredo Keil (1850-1907), Michel’angelo Lambertini (1862-1920) and António Covacich Lamas (1861-1915) also devoted themselves to organising collections of this type. A large part of the pieces they collected and related documents on the collection process are now housed in the Museu Nacional da Música and provide a means of understanding the scale and characteristics of the musical instrument collecting movement in the country. This is the aim of the PhD project titled “O colecionismo de instrumentos musicais em Portugal na viragem para o século XX: o caso português” (“The collection of musical instruments in Portugal at the turn of the 20th century: the Portuguese case”), which draws on examples from the three collectors mentioned above. In addition to outlining some of its guiding principles, this presentation will seek to demonstrate how research based on the analysis of a set of instruments and documents can translate into contributions with very concrete applications and a direct impact on the management of museum collections. To this purpose, reference will be made to some cases of instruments whose analysis of documents associated with the collection from which they originate revealed a set of aspects such as provenance, dating and authenticity that were previously unclear, calling for a review of their inventory data and a historical reinterpretation.
Joana Peliz | Currently a PhD student in Historical Music Sciences at the NOVA
University Lisbon. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the same field at this institution. Her research project, funded by an FCT studentship in a non-academic environment, focuses on studying three collections of Portuguese musical instruments housed in the National Music Museum. It aims to characterise the phenomenon of musical instrument collecting in Portugal at the turn of the 20th century. As a studentship holder and member of the CESEM research unit, she has contributed to various research projects concerning 19th century Portuguese music.
From reserves to display cases: researching the collection of the National Museum of Music
Ana Ester Tavares | CITCEM/FLUP
The current exhibition project at the Museu Nacional da Música, now on view in its new facilities at the Real Edifício de Mafra, stems from the careful selection of 500 items, whose arrangement and contextualization seek to renew dialogues, interpretations, and understandings. Emerging from reserves where they languished for years due to lack of exhibition space, a broad and diverse array of pieces is now accessible to visitors. This has been made possible not only by their curation but also through the implementation of a dynamic strategy for inventory restructuring and cataloguing, which has itself generated fresh lines of enquiry. The comprehensive knowledge concerning each item now on display, disseminated through diverse interpretive means, represents the outcome of two years’ work by a multidisciplinary team comprising professionals with diverse academic backgrounds and expertise. This extended cluster has systematically examined the collection, sometimes confirming and deepening established knowledge, at others questioning and challenging concepts, contents, and meanings. Focusing on select studied specimens – including textiles, ceramics, furniture, paintings, and musical instruments –, this presentation aims to illustrate this dialogic process, underscoring the direct contributions of Art History to the analysis of certain pieces and thereby highlighting the discoveries and new narratives yielded by the research. It will also address workflows, methodologies, and concrete outcomes, alongside certain challenges encountered along the way, while pointing to lingering questions yet to be answered.
Ana Ester Tavares | PhD candidate in Heritage Studies – History of Art at Faculty of Arts and Humanities of University of Porto (FLUP), developing the project “Private spaces of music in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Portugal: proposals for interpretation, reconstruction and communication” under a doctoral research grant from the FCT (2023.02749.BDANA), in collaboration with the National Museum of Music. Her interest in themes bridging Music and Art History arises from her foundational training in Musical Composition (Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Aveiro, 2009–2014), combined with over a decade of professional practice as a teacher in specialised artistic education schools and as a performing artist. Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from FLUP (2021), she has been conducting research since 2020, seeking to establish dialogues between Music, Art History, and the study and interpretation of heritage through the lens of Digital Humanities – particularly via 2D and 3D digitisation techniques.
Challenges and paradigms in the documentation of musical instruments as functional objects in a museological context. From theory to practice: a procedural manual for the documentation of the National Museum of Music’s collection
Cláudia Furtado | IHA/NOVA FCSH, In2Past
This research focuses on the museological documentation of musical instrument collections, proposing a practical response to a recognised gap within the national context: the lack of systematised guidelines for recording this specific type of heritage, particularly regarding the functional dimension of these instruments and their performative use in a museological context. This work is grounded in the observation that musical instruments are frequently treated like other three-dimensional objects, thereby disregarding their sonic and experiential dimensions. Adopting a methodological approach, this research articulates international normative references – such as the Spectrum standard and ICOM principles – with the everyday reality of the National Museum of Music. The practical outcome of this process is the development of a procedural manual designed to support the documentation of the Museum’s instrumental collection.
Cláudia Furtado | Doctoral grant holder funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) and a PhD candidate in Art History, specialising in Museology and Artistic Heritage at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University Lisbon. She is also a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Art History (IHA/NOVA FCSH). Her current research is centred on the concept of functionality within the museological context, with particular emphasis on the standardised documentation of the performative use of historic musical instruments.
Plucked Chordophones Revisited: Updating Exhibition Narratives in the National Museum of Music’s Collection
Felipe Barão | INET-md/DeCA UA
This paper presents the results of a revision of exhibition narratives relating to 37 plucked chordophones in the National Museum of Music (MNM) collection. The research, initiated in January 2024, began with the systematic re-evaluation of these instruments within the context of the reorganisation of the museum’s spaces, providing the opportunity for a critical re-examination of this part of the collection. A significant number of the exhibition narratives had been produced at different moments, based on the research resources available at the time. The current analysis, grounded in direct material observation, organological analysis, and cross-referencing with historical documentation, enabled the re-evaluation of previously adopted attributions and frameworks, identifying revisions in five domains: (a) typological revisions, in cases where the instrument was found to belong to a different type of chordophone, with implications for its construction and functional characteristics, such as tuning and stringing; (b) naming revisions, involving changes in the designation of the instrument in exhibition narratives, without necessarily implying a typological reclassification; (c) attribution revisions, involving the reassignment of the instrument to a different author or workshop; (d) origin revisions, involving the redefinition of the instrument’s geographic or production context, with implications for its historical contextualization; (e) dating revisions, which revealed chronologies distinct from those previously established. In this presentation, seven representative cases are discussed, illustrating how the comparison between observable constructional characteristics and documentary sources enabled an evidence-based reformulation of attributions and chronologies, as well as the clarification of typological frameworks. The contribution of this work lies in the factual updating of data associated with these instruments and in the consequent reformulation of exhibition narratives, with a direct impact on the historical and contextual understanding of the collection.
Felipe Barão | PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Aveiro
(DeCA-UA), where he also completed his Master’s degree in the same field. He is a doctoral fellow of the FCT (2023.03687.BDANA), a researcher at the Institute of Ethnomusicology – Centre for Studies in Music and Dance (INET-md), and a collaborator at the National Museum of Music. He was a research fellow (BI/UI72/10644/2023) on the project “EcoMusic – Sustainable Practices: A Study on Post-Folklorism in 21 st Century Portugal” (PTDC/ART-FOL/31782/2017), in which he produced the documentary “Conta-me, Viola!”. His research focuses on plucked chordophones, especially Portuguese wire-strung violas, articulating practical experience in lutherie with their material and constructional analysis. He curates musical instrument exhibitions, including the permanent exhibition at the Museu da Música de Coimbra (MusMusCbr) and temporary exhibitions. He maintains an active career as a multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, and music producer.
Questioning Ornament: Rethinking the Musical Instrument Collection of the National Museum of Music
Ricardo Vilares | CITCEM/FLUP, CESEM
A musical instrument is a cultural artifact whose material and immaterial complexity calls for multiple disciplinary approaches. This paper, situated within the ongoing line of research developed in the context of the doctoral project, proposes to problematize ornament in musical instruments at the intersection of Art History and Music Studies, based on selected examples from the collection of the Museu Nacional da Música (MNM). Its central objective is to reflect on the functions of these objects that exceed their strictly sonic dimension, understanding ornament not merely as aesthetic embellishment but as a discursive and rhetorical device capable of opening up symbolic readings and acting as a mediator between the instrument, its contexts of use, and the sonic, visual, and social experiences it brings into play. The methodological approach is grounded in the direct examination of the objects, combined with archival research and their historical, cultural, and artistic contextualization. Aesthetic and symbolic dimensions become observable in multiple details: in the bell of a trombone modelled in the shape of a dragon’s head; in ivory plaques engraved with biblical scenes; in the painted flowers and faux marbling of an oitavino; in the pictorial themes represented on the lids of harpsichords, spinets, virginals, and clavichords; or in pegboxes carved in the form of human or animal heads in various bowed string instruments. Our perspective is necessarily distinct from that of audiences of earlier periods; nevertheless, a close study of the ornamentation of these objects may help reduce this historical distance and propose renewed interpretations that understand ornament as a site of negotiation—historically and culturally situated—between makers, patrons or owners, and audiences.
Ricardo Vilares | PhD candidate in Heritage Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto, where he graduated in Art History. He holds a Master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Aveiro and a Bachelor's degree in History and Theory of Music from the University of Évora. He is a FCT scholarship holder (2023.02646.BD) and collaborator of CITCEM and CESEM, developing research in the area of musical iconography and around ornamental programs of 17th and 18th-century keyboard chordophones, in a dialogue between Art History and Musicology.