At the basis of the cultural commitment of the IMLA operates the conviction that migratory phenomena, so important and extensive in the era we are living in, are a constant of human history that has not to be made object or pretext of demonizations or schematic idealizations. Instead, they are phenomena to be studied as a fundamental key to the understanding of our world, whose multiple and changing identities are the result of an incessant exchange between peoples and cultures. Latin America, the land of choice for the interests of the IMLA, presents us with an extraordinary example.

 

The IMLA aims to promote, encourage and support research on archival, documentary, organological and iconographic heritage concerning Latin colonial music and the subsequent development of relations between the performing arts and the spectacular forms of Europe and the Americas. This research activity involves and presupposes the dissemination of its results in order to spread knowledge of this heritage through publications, conferences, concerts and public radio, television, etc.

 

The Institute also proposes among its tasks to set up a stable archive, also in digital mode, which functions as a documentation center open to the public, promoting contacts between researchers and professionals. In order to facilitate the latter objective, the IMLA shall: 

- organize and promote conferences open to scholars from other countries to develop and coordinate similar initiatives.

- it also organises events, workshops, congresses, trips, courses, study and training centres in the field of education, conferences, workshops, training courses, competitions, meetings with the press aimed at achieving its objectives; thus encouraging opportunities for contact and exchange between people of various nationalities, students, teachers, ordinary citizens and between cultural associations.

 

For the realization of its institutional purposes, the IMLA was established as a non-profit association, in compliance with the legislation of the Italian State that regulates the entities of the Third Sector (ETS).

 

Alongside this Italian institutional reality, with offices in Padua and Venice, the Institute has a transnational articulation, thanks to its coordination activity of the RIIA study group, of the International Society of Musicology and thanks to articulations in other countries. 

In Argentina and Uruguay, a study group of Latin American students and teachers, coordinated by researchers associated with the IMLA, was established as a regional articulation of the Institute.