Conference Agenda

In recent years, musicians, activists, and scholars have investigated how different musical traditions interact with questions of identity and belonging. Since at least the nineteenth century, Western concert music has been used by divergent political and social causes as a rallying point, as model, and as a potent communicator of personal and group identities. Brahms’s music, for example, has represented the political ideals of Vienna’s Liberal bourgeois community (Notley, Brodbeck) and the upward social mobility of Black musicians in the United States after the Civil War (Thurman), while also being upheld as apolitical when treated as “absolute music” in the aftermath of World War II (Beller-McKenna). This preconference seeks to explore these and other ways that Brahms, his music, and the music of his circle have come to communicate personal and group identities since the late nineteenth century and the ways that different groups have addressed questions of belonging among those who engage with Brahms and his music as scholars, performers, and listeners.