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, 02:57:19am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Immersive Arts: Adapting Works for Dance Session Chair: Wayne Heisler, The College of New Jersey | |
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The Ballet Adaptation of Anna Karenina (1972): Shchedrin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, and Collage as a Critique of Polystylism. Princeton University, In Rodion Shchedrin’s Anna Karenina, a quotation from Tchaikovsky’s Second String Quartet (1874) stands as the lone area of depth and stability in a score full of shifting sounds. The theme appears in multiple forms - intact, atonal, or fragmented - yet recognizable through its rhythmic motifs. It generates a series of self-derived transformations, and Shchedrin relies on them to trace Anna’s psychological strain resulting from the conflict between the outer world of repressive conventions and her inner world of liberation. This introspection, achieved by borrowing, challenges the main trend in late Soviet music that Alfred Schnittke labeled ‘‘polystylistic,’’ an intentionally opaque term emphasizing the non-integrative citation of themes or styles (Schnittke 1971). Anna’s complex moral portrait makes Leo Tolstoy’s novel resistant to adaptation despite its melodramatic content: at its core, it is a forbidden love story that ends in suicide. Another reason is Tolstoy’s harsh views on music; he considered ballet and chamber music decadent, trapped in excessive sensual delight and unable to represent self-awareness (Tolstoy 1897). Still, Shchedrin found the means to represent Anna’s path to self-destruction through Tchaikovsky, whose aesthetic outlook stands in tension with Tolstoy’s. Rather than functioning as a mere citation, the quotation becomes a generative musical object whose successive transformations seal the score’s collage structure and give musical form to Anna’s inner division. This talk analyzes the manifestations of Tchaikovsky’s theme in Shchedrin’s previously unstudied score, treating them as an example of collage technique. Drawing on literary theories of subjectivity (Todorov 1970; Jackson 1981; Genette 1982; Morson 1994), I argue that the theme’s transformations expose Anna’s latent psychological dimensions that, in Tolstoy’s opinion, only literature could do. This introspective rigor problematizes the conventional perception of ‘‘polystylism’’ as the dominant interpretive framework in later Soviet music. Ultimately, this paper proposes that stylistic heterogeneity is produced by transforming a stable musical quotation into new forms of meaning, rather than mere representation, at a time in Soviet music when, as Richard Taruskin put it, “everything mattered, but nothing was possible” (Taruskin 1992). | |