Music Museum Guided Tours

Guided Tours

Museu de la Música de Barcelona

In collaboration with the Museu de la Música de Barcelona, the SIBE Congress is offering guided tours of two temporary exhibitions.

Additionally, from the 6th to the 9th of November, the Museu de la Música will offer free admission to those registered for the SIBE Congress. Entry will require the presentation of official congress identification.

Below you will find detailed information about the exhibitions:

Now I Sing for Myself: The Majorales of the Roser and the Pandeiro Songs

Curator: Ester Llop
Date and time: Thursday, 6th November, 7:30h pm

The songs of the majorales of the Confraria del Roser, accompanied by pandeiros (frame drums), were once present in many towns and villages throughout Catalonia. This exhibition explores the world evoked by the testimonies of the last remaining majorales.

The songs performed by the majorales or pabordesas of the Confraternity of the Rosary, accompanied by pandeiros or square drums, were integral to festive and religious life in many Catalan communities. The lyrics transformed “table lifting” ceremonies at weddings, baptisms, sung masses, and local festivals into oracular performances voiced by women, weaving together the social fabric of the community. The money raised through this female-led performance practice was used to fund the celebrations dedicated to the Virgin of the Rosary.

The most emblematic and visually striking object remaining from this tradition is the drum, fully painted with sacred imagery and adorned with ribbons and bells. From the late 19th century onwards, folklorists hastened to collect the remnants of a vanishing festive world. With this exhibition at the Museu de la Música, we aim to shed light on the cultural memory preserved through the voices of the last majorales.

Fragments of a Second Forgetting

Curation: Alfredo Costa Monteiro 
Date and time: Friday 7th November, 15h to 15'30h

This exhibition presents the most recent work by Alfredo Costa Monteiro (Porto, 1964): an installation conceived through immersive research into the instrumental and documentary holdings of the Museu de la Música’s collection, carried out between 2023 and 2025. The exhibition investigates the persistence of materials, the structures of classification, the mechanisms of documentation, and the boundaries of what can be archived.

The initial phase of the project, Fragments d’oblit, was an electroacoustic piece created in 2023 using sound recordings from selected instruments in the museum’s reserve collection. This work was structured through the acts of playing, recording, classifying, and composing.

In this second phase, the focus is narrowed to just one of these actions: classification — explored here through two approaches, one random and one systematic.

These methods are applied to two fragmentary archives, one sonic and the other visual, which operate independently. Both serve as traces of the identities and imperfections of the instruments — imperfections that time has gradually silenced.

The displayed classification records are deliberately heterogeneous. They form a kind of ontological catalogue that reveals, among other things, the flaws and irregularities that constitute the conceptual foundation of this sound archive: an archive made from surplus sounds of the first piece, arranged within a random playback system. This system disrupts order and actively avoids internal taxonomy.

Fragments of a Second Forgetting is thus shaped by chance — by fragments valued for their intrinsic properties rather than their categorical associations. The work crosses, and even confuses, references indiscriminately, in an attempt to detach sound from its conventional representation.

Guilherme & Ana Vaz

Curation: Manuel Cirauqui and Rosa Lleó
Date and time: Friday 7th November, 15'30h to 16h