Vol. 14 No. 1 (2025): Dossier – Ethnomusicology of Celebration: Encounters, Confluences, and Celebrations

This special issue aims to explore the multiple sonic and epistemological dimensions that "celebrations" assume as spaces and times of encounters and exchanges, flows and ebbs, conflicts and cultural confluences. Naming a wide and varied range of social phenomena, the so-called "celebrations" – popular, religious, community-based, private, rural, urban, or virtual – are populated by sonorities that operate as articulating elements of ancestral memories and multiple cultural belongings. Among artifacts, rites, bodies, sounds, and so many other performative and sensitive aspects, celebrations define a time that structures social relations in daily community life, revealing historical, political, and spiritual functions. In their sound-musical practices, celebrations transcend the merely aesthetic sphere, creating social contexts that involve identity markers of class, race, and gender, affirming traditions and modes of cultural re-existence. With this issue, the journal Música e Cultura intends to welcome works from the most varied theoretical and methodological perspectives, seeking to broaden the debate on the phenomenon of festive encounters and their sound-musical expressions. This special issue also aims to be a collective effort in the search for a more comprehensive and open perception, listening to the sounds and silences brought by celebrations in their various forms of encounter and cultural celebration.