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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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:18am EDT
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Networks of Modernist Influence | |
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Boulez in the Fifteenth Arrondissement McGill University Pierre Boulez’s early music and writings are typically situated in relation to his well-known mentors, such as Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. Yet many of Boulez’s early works also bear the trace of a composer at Paris’s urban and social periphery: the Russian émigré, Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893–1979) (Campbell 2013, 70–73). I uncover the events that led Boulez to absorb Wyschnegradsky’s ideas about quartertones and musical space, as he visited the latter in a working-class, Russian-speaking enclave of Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement. Drawing on novel archival sources in both French and Russian, I argue that Wyschnegradsky’s ideas were crucial in shaping Boulez’s earliest conceptions of atonality. Boulez first encountered Wyschnegradsky through Messiaen, who had become fascinated with Wyschnegradsky’s music after hearing it in concert in 1937. Messiaen encouraged his students to visit Wyschnegradsky and absorb his ideas (Leroux 2019, 11), and Boulez performed Wyschnegradsky’s music in concert in 1945 and 1951 (Potter 2024, 71). Messiaen also taught his students some of Wyschnegradsky’s ideas, as evidenced in an unpublished, 1952 Paris Conservatoire syllabus held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and in Iannis Xenakis’s unpublished class notes, held at the Xenakis Archive in Paris. Boulez deepened his relationship with Wyschnegradsky through the émigré music patron Pyotr Souvtchinsky (1892–1985), who tried to help publish Wyschnegradsky’s music-theoretic manuscript, “La Loi de la pansonorité.” Drawing on Souvtchinsky’s Russian-language correspondence, held at the BnF, I reveal that Wyschnegradsky read aloud from “La Loi” to both Souvtchinsky and Boulez in 1952, and that Boulez tried to reconcile that manuscript’s ideas with serialism, presaging his later Darmstadt lectures. I further show that Wyschnegradsky’s music theories explain harmonic structures in several of Boulez’s earliest pieces—the Quartet for Ondes Martenot, the Prelude, Toccata and Scherzo, and the Trois Psalmodies—suggesting a longer relationship between the two men beginning around 1945. Although Boulez and Wyschnegradsky broke contact later in the 1950s, Boulez evidently took much from his émigré colleague, as archival evidence attests. Wyschnegradsky’s ideas provide crucial context for the young Boulez’s most enigmatic works, and for his conception of atonality in the aftermath of World War II. | |