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, 02:59:32am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Rebels, Freaks, and Feminists: Avant-Garde Women in the 1970s Session Chair: Kathryn Pisaro | |
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“…Because I Can Also Sing…”: Cathy Berberian and the “Freak” Voices of the 1977 Holland Festival Hochschule für Musik, Freiburg (Germany) During intermission at vocalist-composer Joan La Barbara’s performance at the 1977 Holland Festival, celebrated avant garde singer Cathy Berberian asserted that vocal experimentation had “hit an impasse” and singers who “dedicate their whole existence to developing” these techniques are “freak, they’re phenomenon—what they used to call me, but it wasn’t true in my case, because I can also sing.” This declaration could be regarded as surprising coming from the woman who had “vocalized” Luciano Berio’s 1961 Visage, an experimental tape work banned from Italian radio because it was “obscene.” How can we situate Berberian’s statement within the trajectory of 20th-century concert vocal music? One contextualization of that moment during the Festival is offered by Rizzardi (2021), who states: “Realistically, La Barbara was not the sole target of Berberian’s tirade,” referencing other featured experimental vocalists and groups. However, Rizzardi’s focus on the division of labor between the composer and performer, only hinting at “…all its gendered implications,” invites further scrutiny of how gender and its performance could instigate conflict between “singing” and experimentation. Although Berberian did not explicitly state this, her comment almost exclusively concerned women singers, who had long had the role of executing the wishes of, or collaborating with, male composers (Krüger, 2022). How, then, might the “performance” and “technique” of gender (Butler, 1990; Spatz, 2015), and its relationship to Western classical singing (and experimentation stemming from that tradition), operate across different generations of female-identifying vocalists during the height of Second Wave Feminism? Referencing related works including La Barbara’s own 1978 Cathing (sampling Berberian’s slights), Adriana Hölszky’s Monolog (1977) and Judith Weir’s King Harald’s Saga (1979), all of which investigate and develop contemporary subversions of the female voice, this paper argues that Berberian’s sharp comments—and her clinging to the Western classical expectations of “singing”—articulated a gender-driven rupture between generations of female-identifying vocalists in the experimental space. My investigation draws on both unexplored archival materials from the Festival as well as interviews with vocalists who performed on that occasion. | |