Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:20am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Cross-Cultural Exchange Session Chair: Bess Xintong Liu, Indiana University Bloomington | |
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From Cultural Material to Methodological Resource: East Asian Composers' Reinterpretations of John Cage's Aesthetics Bangor University Given the relatively extensive research on John Cage (1912–1992) absorbing Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, this study shifts focus to examine how East Asian composers, in responding to Cage's aesthetics, reinterpret and reshape their own musical traditions. It further explores whether such reinterpretation generates cross-cultural musical expressions imbued with subjectivity. This study proposes that Cage's misreadings of Eastern culture did not merely constitute unidirectional cultural appropriation. Instead, within the East Asian context, they were transformed into an opportunity for reflecting upon indigenous traditions and reconstructing creative subjectivity, thereby propelling active cross-cultural musical practices. This study employs a combined methodology of textual analysis and semi-structured interviews. On the one hand, by analysing the works and theoretical writings of Cage alongside East Asian composers such as Tan Dun (b. 1957) and Tōru Takemitsu (1930–1996), it examines their distinct interpretations of Orientalism and modernist aesthetics, alongside their pathways of transformation. Concurrently, interviews with composition students from multiple music academies in China and Japan gathered affective materials concerning bodily perception, sonic experience, and aesthetic judgement during listening and compositional processes. This approach supplements the practical dimensions of creative work that textual analysis alone struggles to capture. This study finds that East Asian composers did not passively adopt Cage's aesthetic paradigm. Instead, within their dialogue with Western modernist discourse, they selectively extracted and reconfigured cultural elements. This process transformed Eastern traditions from mere cultural material into methodological resources, ultimately becoming fundamental approaches for organising sound, conceiving form, and articulating ideas. Furthermore, this process of cross-cultural interaction reveals complex power structures within the global musical context. While cultural misinterpretation and appropriation may indeed lead to distortions, they simultaneously provide crucial creative space for the generation of new artistic languages. By combining textual analysis with interview-based research, this study demonstrates how contemporary East Asian composers engage in processes of self-reflection and re-creation under the influence of Cage's aesthetics. It offers a new perspective on the bidirectional and agentive nature of cross-cultural exchange in contemporary music, providing theoretical insights into the construction of more equitable modes of artistic dialogue between Eastern and Western traditions. | |