February 11, 2021

About us

MOISA: The International Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music and its Cultural Heritage is an interdisciplinary association that promotes the conservation, interpretation and enhancement of the musical heritage of the Greeks and Romans, and its cultural heritage from the Middle Ages to Contemporary age.

MOISA started from an idea of Andrew Barker, who already in 1993 identified and put in contact scholars from all over the world interested in these topics, founding a first association, International Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music, and creating the printed magazine Skytala Moisan. In 2006 the association was re-founded, with its current name, thanks to the collaboration between scholars active in different countries (UK, Italy, Canada and USA) and, in 2007, it was formalized as a non-profit cultural association based at Ravenna, in Italy, in the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna.

Since then, the members of MOISA have exceeded a hundred and the conferences, seminars, summer schools and other events promoted or sponsored by the Association have multiplied and intensified from year to year, opening up new research perspectives, also in relation to the music of other peoples of the ancient world.

Thanks to the commitment of the founders and members of MOISA, today the discipline is finally recognized in the academic field, and has become a widespread subject of study by antiquists, musicologists and ethnomusicologists, philosophers, anthropologists, historians of science, archaeologists, historians of art, and other scholars.

The Association’s activities also include a bibliography and a six-monthly periodical. The bibliography, De musicis, in open access, begun in 2000 by Gianfranco Mosconi, has been edited until 2020 by Dr Maggi Creese, who planned to complete it also including the previous publications. Actually it is edited by Dr Kamila Wyslucha. The journal, Greek and Roman Musical Studies (1, 2013-, Brill), founded by Andrew Barker and currently directed by Eleonora Rocconi, is the first and, at present, the only specialist periodical in this field of study. It is indexed by EIRH PLUS and Scopus and, since 2019, it has been included among the class A journals (for the ASN, in Italy).