La materia della musica - About

Focus and Scope

The book series focuses on musical instruments, and more generally on sounding objects, studying their history, morphology, use, function, repertoire, intonation, and every other aspect. This is combined with a focus on the cultural contexts in which the “material” of music is created and used. Thus, the research methods combine historical, ethnographic, sociological, iconographic, and material culture perspectives. The scientific committee includes organologists and academics with expertise in various fields, from musical archaeology to new technologies and digital sound processing, as well as curators of museum collections and music archives. The series is aimed not only at an academic audience, but also at those who view the material configuration of objects as an essential source of information for understanding the nature of musical phenomena, in the broadest possible sense.

Series Roles

Scientific Editors

  • Domenico Staiti, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna (IT)

Editorial Board

  • Silvia Bruni, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna (IT), coordinatrice

  • Antonietta Loffredo, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna (IT)

  • Nicola Renzi, Università di Helsinki (FI)

  • Marcello Rizzello, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna (IT)

Scientific Board

  • Silvia Bruni, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna (IT)

  • Daniela Castaldo, Università di Lecce (IT)

  • Giovanni Paolo Di Stefano, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (NL)

  • Christian Ferlaino, Università di Cosenza (IT)

  • Giovani Giuriati, già Università di Roma La Sapienza (IT)

  • Fabien Guilloux, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Parigi (FR)

  • Raquel Jimenez Pasalodos, Università di Valladolid (ES)

  • Emanuele Marconi, Musikinstrumenten Museum, Berlino (DE)

  • Elisabetta Pasquini, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna (IT)

  • Nicola Renzi, Università di Helsinki (FI)

  • Gabriele Rossi Rognoni, Università di Roma La Sapienza (IT)

  • Albert R. Rice, già Fiske Museum of Musical Instruments, Claremont (US)

  • Enrico Tabellini, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna (IT)

  • Jacopo Tomatis, Università di Torino (IT)

Peer Review Process

The series submits all submissions to an anonymous peer-review process. Expert reviewers may be members of the Scientific Committee or are selected by its members. The peer-review takes place prior to publication under the responsibility of the series’ Scientific Editors.

For further information see the service policies.

Open Access Policy

The series follows an open access policy in all its contents, in order to facilitate as much as possible the diffusion of scientific knowledge among scholars and all interested people.

It releases its books under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commmercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

The authors who publish in this series retain copyright.

For further information see the service Open Access Policy

Submissions

Submitted volumes may be in Italian or English. The text must not have been previously published by a different publisher (or special agreements have been made with the previous publisher and the editors, and a written explanation of such agreements must be provided). The submission file must be in .docx format. The text must follow the book series’ editorial guidelines, as indicated below. The author must provide a copyright and reproduction release for any images. If the proposal is accepted, the author undertakes to provide the editorial office with the edited and formatted text, ready for publication, in .pdf format.

Submissions for publication should be sent to .

Editorial Guidelines

Cover: A template will be provided, with predetermined formats and dimensions, for Author (or Editor), Title, Subtitle, Image, and Publisher.

Title Page: Predefined templates will be provided for monographs, miscellaneous volumes, and editions.

Layout order: Table of Contents; Preface; Chapters; Appendices (if any); Indexes of Names and Things (if any); Bibliography.

Page Layout: Times New Roman font, 3 cm margins. 1.5 line spacing. Normal text font size: 12. Line breaks: 1 cm tab.

Footnotes: 11 font size. With numerical references in superscript in the text, after the punctuation marks.

Quotations: Less than 3 lines in angle quotes. More than 3 lines: 1 cm indent, 11 font size, 1 line spacing, without quotation marks. If part of a quotation is omitted, indicate the omission with […]. Quotations from languages other than the text’s primary one must be translated; the original text must be reported in a footnote.

Images: Images should be formatted by the author, either within the text or in separate sections. It is recommended that images be of good definition. References to images in the text should be indicated in square brackets: for example [fig. 1]. A caption should be placed under the image (for example: Fig. 1. Pietro d’Asaro “the Monocle of Racalmuto”, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1601, signed and dated, Galleria Regionale della Sicilia di Palazzo Abatellis, cat. XXX, from the church of S. Francesco in Chiusa Sclafani (AG). Or: Tambourine players at a wedding party, Jakova, Kosovo, 1992, photo by Nico Staiti). Given the wide range of reproduction possibilities of paintings, sculptures, manuscript miniatures, photographs, documents, musical transcriptions, graphics and so on, precise editorial instructions are not provided for each case. Authors are advised to follow consistent criteria for all images included in the volume.

Foreign words: in italics if not in current use. Titles of works of art in italics. Titles of poems and book chapters in quotation marks.

Bibliographic references: use the author (surname) and date system, with extended references in the bibliography. If limited to references to one or more works, they should be listed directly in the text, in parentheses, for example: (Guizzi 2002: 23; Staiti 2025: 32-33); if they contain more detailed information, they should be listed in a footnote.

Bibliography: Authors should be listed alphabetically by surname; works by a single author should be listed in chronological order (if multiple titles were published in the same year, they are distinguished by a letter of the alphabet: 1997a for the first, 1997b for the second, and so on). Full surname and given name, with the date at the top, in 2 cm indentation, title (in italics if a monograph or miscellaneous volume, in double quotation marks if a journal essay or volume), and other information as specified below. If there is more than one author, the first should be listed by Surname, First Name, and subsequent authors by First Name, Last Name.

Monographs: Title, city, publisher.

Edited by: Year, adj. (edited by), Title, city, publisher.

Essay in a volume: Year, adj. “Title”, in Title of the volume, edited by First Name Surname, city, publisher: pages.

Essay in a journal: Year, adj., “Title”, in Journal, issue: pages.

Encyclopedia entry: Year, adj., “Title” entry, in Title of the work, volume: pages.

Pages or websites: Year, adj., Title, online, web address.

Degree or doctoral thesis: Academic year, adj. Title, type of degree, university.