Conference Agenda

This session lays the foundations for a proposed new AMS Study Group, one that seeks to stimulate research activities, scholarly dialogue, and an explicitly diverse, transnational, and interdisciplinary collegial community centred on contemporary musical modernisms. It does this in light of two recent developments in musicology and its sister disciplines.

First, in fields as diverse as literary studies, art theory, philosophy, and film, there is a renewed interest in recent reconceptualisations of modernism – as indicated in the emergence of neologisms such as ‘metamodernism’ (Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen), ‘altermodernism’ (Nicolas Bourriaud), ‘off-modernism’ (Svetlana Boym), feminist, queer, and other modernisms. Musicology has yet to take account of these developments. Within musical discourse, the term ‘musical modernism’ continues to predominantly refer to a specialised strand within early and mid-twentieth-century classical music. Addressing an urgent gap in scholarly discourses on both modernist and contemporary music, the study group provokes use of the burgeoning reconceptualisations of modernisms that have been overlooked in studies of music after postmodernity. This will enable new interpretative models for better understanding current composers’ and musicians’ creative work and practices, going beyond an anachronistic formulation of ‘modernism’ being applied to the music of today.

Second, related to this historic formulation, the term ‘musical modernism’ is often equated to a stylistically restrictive musical output, overwhelmingly associated with a set of white, male and European early twentieth-century composers. Nonetheless, several traits of modernism resonate through the contemporary music landscape, with diverse musical practices establishing critical frictions against traditional notions of selfhood, technology, consumer culture, and the mainstream. This presents an urgent challenge: the currently insufficient formulation of music’s contemporary modernisms is at odds with both recent social trends, with the diverse communities that shape a range of contemporary musical practices, and with the contested pluralism that characterises 'the contemporary'. This study group develops space for rethinking and reworking ‘musical modernism’ as appropriate to contemporary times.

Balancing focused discussion of these core issues, and multiple perspectives on music including contemporary classical composition, experimental music, popular music, and crossover genres, we seek to consider the ways in which the phrase ‘musical modernism’ still has urgent and plural relevance in the contemporary moment. The questions this session poses include, but are by no means limited to: what might ‘modernism’ mean for contemporary music? How does the ‘contemporary’ reshape modernist legacies? And to what extent do contemporary musical practices persist to exhibit modernist tendencies?

This organizational meeting will include short provocations from invited participants and structured discussion between all who wish to attend. The session will:

• assemble scholars from across various career trajectories, ethnocultural backgrounds, and musicological subdisciplines whose work engages repertoires, concepts, and concerns inextricable from modernity and modernism, but who might otherwise not convene in the same conversation.

• harness the ambivalent power of the term ‘modernity’ to invite more capacious and creative thinking and work on musical modernism in the longer durée and on a global and planetary scale —over and against the more period-and-place specific modernism of music studies’ traditional definitions.

• actively support domestic, transatlantic, and international conversations that begin a much needed rapprochement between otherwise quite distinctive disciplinary definitions of modernism as it relates to music.

• identify the prospective relevance to musicology of models of contemporary modernism from beyond musicology.

Following this meeting, we seek to formally propose a new AMS Study Group, one that works towards scholarly ventures through activities such as: panels, debates, roundtables, curated talks, posters, work-in-progress sharing, collaborative writing projects, and collegial mutual support.

This session will include provocations from: Amy Bauer (University of California Irvine), Seth Brodsky (University of Chicago), Chelsea Burns (University of Texas), Gabrielle Cornish (University of Wisconsin), Jessie Cox (Harvard University), Ryan Dohoney (Northwestern University), Christine Dysers (Uppsala University, Sweden), Michael Gallope (University of Minnesota), Samuel J. Wilson (Guildhall School of Music and Drama, UK), and others.