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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Daily Overview |
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Understudied Philosophical Approaches to Composition Session Chair: Lee Cannon-Brown, McGill University | |
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The Hegelian Logic of Motivic-Thematic Music Stony Brook University, This paper is part of a larger project of reading Hegel’s Logic in musical terms. The impetus for the project is a remark Adorno makes in a lecture in 1961, where he suggests that “an adequate interpretation of dialectical logic” is “feasible in categories of musical coherence.” While not specified further, the “dialectical logic” to which he is referring is unmistakably Hegel’s. As for “categories of musical coherence,” I argue that he is referring to the theoretical work of a tradition of compositional pedagogy that stretches from A.B. Marx to Arnold Schoenberg, a tradition that attempts to articulate the “logic” of “motivic-thematic” music—Beethovenian music. My thesis is that these categories can indeed be employed to grasp the immanent movement of Hegel’s Concept, and one of the aims of my project is to demonstrate how. The other aim, pertinent to the present paper, is reciprocally related. If one can interpret the movement of Hegel’s Logic in the categories of motivic-thematic music, the reverse should also be true: one should be able to systematically elaborate and develop said categories with Hegelian resources. Specifically, I claim that Hegel’s Logic holds the key to articulating to what Adorno referred as a “material theory of musical form,” something which he only intimated but never developed: a systematic exposition of the “universal” categories of compositional logic. My paper will explore the basis of this secondary aim: it will outline some categories of compositional coherence and attempt to situate them within a Hegelian framework. Key touchstones in my discussion will be the pedagogical work of both Marx and Schoenberg: Marx’s 1856 “Form in Music” and related elements from his Practical and Theoretical Method of Musical Composition, Arnold Schoenberg’s posthumously published Fundamentals of Musical Composition and related material from his “Coherence” and “Gedanke” manuscripts. Philosophical foundations are from Adorno and, of course, Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic and Science of Logic. | |