Conference Agenda

Recent think pieces, panel discussions, and pedagogical initiatives concerning “public musicology” have proven invaluable in fostering a sense of shared commitment, clarifying what is at stake, and providing practical advice for addressing “non-academic” audiences. In our eagerness to overcome the presumed chasm between the university and society, however, we have arguably brushed over some fundamental, if potentially awkward, questions: Which public (or publics) are we talking about? What do we want to achieve by engaging with them? What might they have to teach us? Recently, scholars of Western art music have used their public-facing work to contribute to wider efforts to diversify the concert repertoire and to question established historical narratives. Yet even those important achievements have often been realized through familiar, monological modes of presentation, such as the program note and the pre-concert talk.

Written from the perspective of a music historian, this paper explores an alternative approach, combining elements of what Naomi André terms “engaged musicology” (2018) with the practices of music education and community music. Between 2023 and 2025, I worked with a network of partners from higher education, the cultural sector, and beyond to develop “Let’s Build a Town!”, a creative arts project in Oxford (UK). Taking inspiration from recent research on Paul Hindemith’s music for children – and seeking to reimagine his aspiration to promote young people’s agency and creativity through play – we organized a series of workshops and rehearsals at an elementary school and a high school in a socio-economically disadvantaged and culturally diverse east Oxford suburb. The project culminated in a performance in which scenes from Hindemith’s Wir bauen eine Stadt (1930), an experimental work of music theater, were interspersed with new, co-created music, movement, and performance games exploring issues relating to urban planning, local citizenship, and the environment. Drawing on interviews with a multidisciplinary team of artists and workshop leaders, I ask what added value (if any) a music historian might bring to a community arts project of this kind, and reflect on the advantages and limits of a more modest, localized, and genuinely collaborative model of semi-public musicology.

In 1971, the Shiraz Art Festival commissioned Iannis Xenakis to compose Polytope of Persepolis, to be performed at Persepolis, the historic capital of the Achaemenids (550–330 BCE). Xenakis’s polytopes are immersive, multisensory, and spatial events that integrate music, architecture, and light. Polytope of Persepolis, as Xenakis put it, “is neither a theatrical spectacle, nor a ballet, nor a happening. It is visual symbolism, parallel to and dominated by sound.”

Polytope of Persepolis became controversial in the festival due to misunderstandings surrounding its symbolism and compositional structure. While previous research has addressed the sociopolitical context surrounding Polytope of Persepolis, its compositional structure remains underexplored. Analyzing the compositional form of Persepolis is particularly challenging due to its unconventional sonic material and the cryptic nature of the available sketches and scores, which complicate decoding and interpretation of its formal structure.

In this presentation, I analyze the scores and archival sketches of Polytope of Persepolis. I propose a model that facilitates the interpretation of Polytope of Persepolis as an immersive composition. This approach facilitates unpacking Xenakis's use of fire symbolism as a spatial element in the composition, explaining both its intended function and the misconceptions surrounding its reception. Furthermore, this study investigates the compositional techniques Xenakis used to achieve spatialization in his polytopes. Xenakis constructed a three-dimensional space through the interplay of sonic and non-sonic elements, composing an immersive work that develops spatial approaches to music and sound installations. The output of this research contributes to the discourse on early approaches to spatial music and offers ways to reimagine the ontology of music composition in Xenakis’s polytopes.

“Seemingly paradoxically” is an unsurprising phrase to read from composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert, this time in his treatise Precepts on the Polarity of Sound and Tonality, as he sought to bring into conservation two opposing ideas to reveal one underlying, new truth. This subtle echo of philosopher, and fellow German, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a clarifying clue to the ideas and musical construction of Karg-Elert. Hegel’s dialectical synthesis of two things that appear oppositional, thesis and antithesis, to create a new, higher truth are near-identical when applied to Karg-Elert’s own writings about music. Writing under one of his pseudonyms, Dr. Ottmar Bergk, Karg-Elert further ties himself to Hegelian ideas by describing his own “Doppelnatur” or dual nature, that begin to converge into his “most genuine” expression of his nature. Throughout his writings, Karg-Elert employs the discussion of opposites and the outcome of their synthesization as he identifies his own compositional shift through perceived opposites, from Impressionism to Expressionism, in a constant “struggle for truthful expression.” From this theoretical starting point concerning existing theories and approaches to writing music, came Karg-Elert’s own musical compositions.

Drawing on the work of David A. Byrne—who put forth the first comprehensive study of the harmonic theories of Karg-Elert—as well as the composer’s own writings and concert reviews by his contemporaries, I argue that Karg-Elert’s attempts to theorize a dialectical approach to musical harmonies was out of step with its time, and was one significant reason as to why Karg-Elert’s theories and organ compositions were not well-received in his home of Germany at the time of their writing. Furthermore, this paper builds off of Thomas Schinköth’s work concerning the changing terms of “mystic” and “revolutionary” used to describe the composer, at times by Karg-Elert himself. Ultimately, this work finds and explores a throughline between philosophical thought and music reception that explains the movement of these works to find audiences abroad geographically as these patterns of thought dispersed, while also understanding why this music is undergoing a revitilization now in the twenty-first century among performers worldwide.