ABSTRACT: Since 2015, I have been conducting with my students and former students an action research about music and migration in the Padana Plain. It intends to explore the potential of “transcultural capital” (Kiwan and Meinhof, 2011; Meinhof, 2009) as a resource that enables many migrants to creatively link the different values, strengths, and social networks they construct and employ as part of their life trajectories. The project follows three axes: 1) education to transculturality in schools; 2) the documentation and promotion of music in religious rites and musical activities of migrant’s cultural associations; and 3) music in the lives of asylum seekers. My talk will concentrate on the latter, addressing some of the experiences my students and I had in two reception centres in Cremona and in Vigolzone (Piacenza). In Cremona, we followed the development of the Ogene Damba Cremona Boys musical theatre musical group and then we proposed a workshop called Radiomusiché?. In Vigolzone (Piacenza), we organized a musical workshop that started from participatory listenings and led to the composition of songs. The compositional processes have highlighted a multilingualism that deserves to be analysed. Even in the case of these young asylum seekers, who are not musicians and have different levels of musical literacy, composition is a process strongly linked to belongings and affects.

BIOGRAPHY: Fulvia Caruso graduated with honors in ethnomusicology from the Sapienza University of Rome, where she also obtained a PhD in Cultural Anthropology. Since 2015, she has been Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology at the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage of the University of Pavia (Cremona), where she was a researcher since 2008. Since 2022 she has also been teaching Ethnomusicology at Bologna University School for Advanced Studies for Musicological Heritage. In the 2016-17 academic year she was visiting professor at the University of Jordan Department of Art and Music and the following year at the Tufts University Department of Music (Boston). Since 2014 she has been conducting an action research on music and migration in the central Po valley, articulated on the sound citizenship of both resident foreigners and asylum seekers. Her research specialisms include: the role of music in religious rites, vocal expressive styles, and processes of heritagization of intangible heritage. Since 2019 she has been Pavia University Rector’s Delegate for the Third mission for Cremona and vice-president of the Scientific Committee of the Pavia University Press.