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, 02:57:03am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Theories of Premodern Music: Expectations and Enigmas Session Chair: Laurenz Lütteken | |
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What’s the Point of a Musical Riddle? Playing Games with Elway Bevin’s “Five Wounds” Canon (1631) Yale University A little-known compositional treatise from seventeenth-century England, Elway Bevin’s A Briefe and Short Instruction of the Art of Musicke (1631; Bevin and Collins 2007), presents imitative canonic techniques as the ultimate musical achievement: a marriage of symbolic patterns with notated sound. Bevin’s canons are representative examples of musical riddles, an Early Modern subgenre consisting of performable pieces imbued with esoteric significance. The significance of a riddle is not conveyed through sound alone: insiders can only discern it by puzzling over the score and related text. Musical riddles, then, are oriented toward players rather than toward an audience, flouting the dominant listener-focused aesthetics of the period. This paper demonstrates how insights from current philosophies of games can shed light on the Early Modern practice of musical riddling. In particular, C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art (2020) offers a flexible theory of games within a player-centric aesthetic framework, which is not provided by Early Modern music-theoretical writings. Indeed, Zarlino—a strong influence on all early theorists and practitioners of musical canons, including Bevin—had argued that compositional “intricacies” which do not appeal directly to an audience’s sense of hearing “have no value at all” (Zarlino et al. 1983, 263). As this dismissal is echoed by most of Bevin’s contemporaries (Schiltz 2015), the persistence of musical riddles throughout the Early Modern period is difficult to account for on seventeenth-century terms. However, by applying aspects of Nguyen’s approach in an analysis of Bevin’s “Five Wounds” canon, this paper explains the appeal of musical riddles: these puzzling objects afford players an aesthetic experience of their own agency, engaging performers’ senses and imagination as they struggle to complete in-game goals. Layers of significance in “Five Wounds” are hidden to listeners, apparent only to performers—an outstanding example of how sensory and intellectual dimensions come together in the participant-focused aesthetics of this genre. Adopting Nguyen’s framework, this paper guides its audience through the game of Bevin’s “Five Wounds” canon, showing how Early Modern musical riddles offer players a powerful experience of music-making that transcends the sonic and opens interpretive possibilities for performers past and present. | |