Mission of the Center for Research on Musical Traditions
In line with UA’s mission and with the mission of the FMM, the Center for Research on Musical Traditions (CRTM) is dedicated to the study of the monodic modal musical traditions of the Mašriq and, by extension, those of the Arab and Mediterranean worlds and related Asian cultural spheres. This study is the result of contextualized general musicological research, which is at once analytical, semiotic, anthropological and historical, and which is part of an interdisciplinary perspective, articulated in particular with cognitive research, educational sciences and artificial intelligence, cultivating excellence, in compliance with international standards, and whose results are original, relevant, peer-reviewed, effectively valued, transferable, and applicable.
Mission of the Faculty of Music and Musicology
In accordance with the mission of the Antonine University (UA) and the values it promotes, the Faculty of Music and Musicology (FMM) of the UA is committed to
- providing quality education to women and men who are interested in the musical professions or to incorporating a robust musical dimension, into the knowledge, practice, teaching and/or therapeutic or technical use of the musical traditions of Mašriq and Europe;
- developing an appropriate, creative and in-depth scientific knowledge based on the musical traditions of the East and the Mediterranean; and
- making society profit from this knowledge and know-how, through concerts, publications, dissemination activities (including through technological media coverage) and various types of teaching (including general school education and vocational music education).
Strategic Planning Guidelines
From 2020 until 2025, the CRTM intends to grow and develop. It plans to pursue the current research projects related to the modal semiotic analysis, the cognitive studies, the musical teaching/learning, and the valorization of the ecclesiastical music writing and the critical editions of Arabic manuscripts.
It aims at setting up projects in the field of neuroscience and music, digital encoding of musical monodies, artificial intelligence, and music.
On one hand, the realization of these objectives is based on the development of scientific cooperation on the national level (with other UA research units and other Lebanese scientific partners), on the international level with European institutions (Institute for Research in Musicology (IReMus, UMR 8223), IDEFI-CréaTIC program of the Université Paris VIII and other scientific organizations), and with institutions from the Arab World (mainly the Arab Academy of Music).
On the other hand, it’s based on the internal (UA) and external (CNRS, CEDRE, AUF) funding of these intellectual contributions and their publication in the Journal of Musical Traditions (RTM), in the Arab Journal of Music Education Sciences (AJMES), in books published by UA Press, and in international and Arabic scientific journals.
Besides the international visibility of these contributions, CRTM’s priority is to valorize them within the society, knowing that their results are to be applied, if possible, first in musical practices lead by the FMM, the Antonine School of Music and other musical institutions in Lebanon and the Arab World and then in educational policies at universities (the FMM, but also the Faculty of Pedagogy at the Lebanese University) and at schools (especially by spreading the Levantine music education method in Lebanese schools), and finally to be applied in the information and communication technologies, mainly in digitization and digital encoding.