The Online Program of events for the 2023 AMS & SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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1650–1800, Opera / Musical Theater, Popular Music, 1800–1900, 1900–Present, African American / Black Studies, Film and Media Studies, Gender / Sexuality / LGBTQ Studies, Indigenous Music / Decolonial Studies, Material Culture / Organology, Race / Ethnicity / Social Justice, AMS, Roundtables
Presentations
Historicizing Celebrity
Chair(s): Clair Rowden (Cardiff University)
Discussant(s): Robert van Krieken (The University of Sydney)
Presenter(s): Shaena Weitz (University of Bristol), Emmanuela Wroth (University of Toronto), Sarah Hibberd (University of Bristol), Annegret Fauser (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
In recent years, celebrity has increasingly become a focus of historical inquiry. Whether the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represent an age of celebrity invention (Mole 2007, Lilti 2015) or transformation (van Krieken 2018), this period is an important locus for the development of celebrity culture due to changes in economic and media production, the public sphere (after Habermas 1974), and ideas about individual subjectivity. That musicology as a field developed itself in this celebritized society is deeply consequential yet almost entirely unexplored.
Amid transdisciplinary calls to further historicize celebrity, musicological contributions remain conspicuously limited. In some musicological quarters, celebrity continues to be compartmentalized as an unsavory image — the kind of figure that the field historically positioned itself against — rather than a framework to investigate constructions of value, phenomena of attraction, the history of canon formation, and more. Looking at celebrity as a material and discursive “apparatus” (Mole 2007) has significant potential to cut across both classic and emergent musicological concerns (e.g. biography or decoloniality respectively) in profitable ways, even for figures and processes that might not be immediately considered “celebrity” ones.
This roundtable explores several emerging approaches to historical celebrity through four ten-minute papers drawn from nineteenth-century music and a response by sociologist and leading celebrity theorist Robert van Krieken. Annegret Fauser will focus on evolving celebrity structures at the century’s close and how Wanda Landowska instrumentalized them to become a revered household name. Emmanuela Wroth will examine how the intersections of race, gender, and class influenced celebrity, both on the early- to mid-nineteenth-century Parisian lyric stage and in its representation in scholarly discourse since. Sarah Hibberd will analyze the dynamics of individual and group power captured in the 1840 Tamburini riots in London. Shaena Weitz will discuss how early nineteenth-century music journalism interacted with a growing economy of attention, by both protecting and extorting the celebrity of others. Together these papers and the ensuing discussion will develop new avenues for examining celebrity mechanisms before and after the nineteenth century, and start a new conversation about what celebrity offers historical musicology and — more crucially — what musicology offers celebrity studies.
