The FRANZ LISZT Academy of Music, Weimar is holding the thirteenth international congress of the German musicological society Gesellschaft für Musikforschung 16 - 21 September 2004. With its theme "Music and Cultural Identity", the congress aims to develop a broad interdisciplinary dialogue.

Virtually no other location in Germany seems as predestined as Weimar for a congress about cultural identity. It was Herder`s "Stimmen der Völker" and Goethe`s notion of "Weltliteratur", both having originated in Weimar, that set early landmarks in the scholarly treatment of cultural identity and the Other. However, contradictory aspects of the same phenomenon are also juxtaposed here: It was in Weimar both that Franz Liszt coined his idealistic concept of "Weltmusik", aiming at the elements of identity common to all nations, and that innocent people suffered the dreadful experience of maintaining identity with the help of music in an environment that sought the psychological and physical destruction of identity - in the concentration camp of Buchenwald.

The fact that music, in a similar fashion to language, is an essential element both of our individual and collective identity, whether locally, regionally or nationally grounded, has been the subject of Western discourse on music under a variety of aspects since Antiquity. Summed up in the catchword of "cultural identity", these aspects, in the context of globalization, have significantly regained relevance during the last decades in musicology, especially in ethnomusicology, the sociology of music, and the "new" or critical musicology.