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, 02:57:55am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Musical Travels In and Out of Russia Session Chair: Keenan Reesor | |
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The Operatic Voice and its Diasporic Imaginary: Feodor Chaliapin in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo University of California, Berkeley Late in his career in 1936, the basso Feodor Chaliapin embarked on an extended tour of the Japanese Empire and the Republic of China. Though he did not originally plan to visit Japanese-occupied Manchukuo, the Russian émigré community in the region urged the artist to make a stop in the city of Harbin, a regional hub for Russian culture in emigration. Upon his arrival, Chaliapin fell ill and was forced to perform his sold-out concerts while fighting an intense fever. Though his vocal delivery came across as lackluster, many concertgoers in Harbin enjoyed his performances. As the cabaret singer Alexander Vertinsky put it, “Naturally, it wasn’t that Chaliapin, known by those who had heard him in Russia. But it was Chaliapin!” What was it about his performances, if not his usual vocal ferocity, that satisfied Harbin’s audiences? This paper reexamines Chaliapin’s voice as a dynamic site of diasporic imagination, inflected by its indexicality to prerevolutionary Russia, politicized interpretation in emigration, and hyper-distributed media reproduction. Scholars have long debated the ontology of vocal excess – be it “grain” (Barthes 1972), “sexuality” (McClary 1991; Koestenbaum 1993), “presence” (Duncan 2004), or “racialized enculturated listening” (Eidsheim 2019). These discussions have not fully addressed how celebrity voices engender feelings of communal belonging, heritage, and patriotism in politically volatile regions. The sheer ubiquity of Chaliapin’s musical recordings alongside that of his hectic international touring schedule resists a bounded conception of his voice as linked to a single performance, or even to his body in a single place. Drawing on previously unresearched first-hand accounts, concert programs, and recordings, I show how the reception of Chaliapin’s performances in Harbin was inextricably colored by the politics of Far Eastern Russian emigration. I argue that Harbin’s audiences listened to the hoarse groans produced by his infected vocal cords in counterpoint with a diasporic imaginary of the artist’s past performances, ideological convictions, and 78 rpm shellac oeuvre. To take seriously the diasporic imagination of the operatic voice illuminates its capacious potentiality as untethered from its vulnerable fleshy apparatus. | |