Regional IAH conference in Subotica, Serbia in 2018
Date: Friday, August 17, 2018 through Sunday, August 19, 2018
Place: “Augustinianum” [theological seminary] in Subotica, Serbia
Information and registration: Dr. Réka Miklós, dr.reka.miklos@gmail.com
The language of the conference is German; the plenary lectures, summaries, and abstracts will be translated into Hungarian. The organizers will provide inexpensive accommodations and meals for conference participants.
Plenary lectures
- Franz Karl Praßl (Graz): Hymnology in the Training of Church Musicians in Austria Today in the Light of Traditions of the Last 250 Years
- Matej Podstenšek (Maribor): The Hymn with Organ Accompaniment: The Significance of Nineteenth-Century Slovenian Hymn Sources for the Organ Accompaniment of Congregational Singing and for the Training of Organists
- Franz Metz (Munich): New Borders, Old Hymns? The Consequences of the First World War for the Church Music of the Danube Swabians: Batschka as a Case Study
Conference review
The first southeastern Europeans conference of the IAH took place August 15–18, 2018 in Subotica, Serbia. Organized in collaboration with the Cor Jesu Foundation of Senta, it was called “Church Music and Cantor Training in the Successor States of Austria-Hungary: Church Traditions, Socio-Musical Heritage, and Perspectives.”
Three plenary presentations and eight sectionals focused on various subdisciplines of training, repertoire, and much more, which to date have been systematically investigated far too little, or not at all, although they are quite relevant for today, as Franz Karl Praßl emphasized in the closing discussion of the conference. There were lectures on country-specific problems concerning the training of church musicians in Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Serbia. In line with IAH tradition, the first southeastern European regional conference was designed not only as an international one, but also as an interconfessional and interdisciplinary meeting, and so the various traditions of the Reformed and Evangelical churches in the region were represented in the lectures. During the conference several printed and manuscript hymnbooks, prayer books, cantor books, and other liturgical books were exhibited, which allowed us a glimpse of the hymnological source materials used in the practice of church music in Batschka and Banat during the past 150 years.
The collected lectures will be made available by the publishing arm of the Hungarian Institute for Culture VMMI in Senta as part of a conference report. As a first fruit of the IAH conference in Subotica, in 2019 the publisher VMMI began the hymnological series Délvidéki Himnológiai Füzetek [Hungarian Hymnological Books]. It is edited by Réka Miklós, with Franz Metz, Ágnes Watzatka, and Gábor Barna forming the editorial committee.
Dr. Réka Miklós
Conference report (open access)
The bilingual conference report Egyházzene és kántorképzés – Kirchenmusik und Kantorenausbildung (Hungarian/German) is available in open access at the following link: https://www.vamadia.rs/sites/default/files/2021-07/egyhazzene_book.pdf