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.)
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:58:00am EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Crises of Masculinity Session Chair: Gareth Cordery, Columbia University | |
    | |
Henri Herz and the Feminization of Celebrity N/A Henri Herz (1803–1888) was the quintessential piano virtuoso before Liszt, a performer/composer so renowned, his music sold four times as well as anything by his competitors. But according to the Gazette musicale (1834), writing at the height of Herz’s fame, Herz’s music was just silly nonsense for “chatty girls.” This style of gendered criticism appears prominently in Herz coverage, but also appeared in discussions of other “popular” composers. Because awareness of gendered musical discourse is familiar to music history (since at least McClary 1991), this coverage has seemed unremarkable. This paper, however, examines the deeper assumptions and anxieties that drive statements like these, from the viewpoint of attentional and celebrity studies, arguing that these statements are the more visible remnants of a profound shift in conceptions about music and the self. Crucial to understanding the Gazette’s coverage is that it was planted as a part of a revenge campaign (Weitz 2019). Although the authors may have believed what they wrote, they were weaponizing an understanding whereby calling someone’s music girly was embarrassing. This is a psychological persuasion tactic called negative esteem, which I argue is structurally dependent on celebrity concepts. Within celebrity studies, Claire Brock (2006) has argued that fame became feminized in the late eighteenth century, as it became associated with stage actresses. But a popular male composer painted as effeminate allows a way to separate real women from the broader societal misogyny that, I posit, is woven into the historical suspicion of celebrity and discourse surrounding musical value. While claiming an effeminate present toward reclaiming a masculine past may be an old story (Head 2013), the rise of celebrity in the early nineteenth century—with its new concepts about selfhood that allowed taste to function as evidence of a person’s soul—gave this rhetoric a particular force that enabled a knotted set of associations about the musical “negative” to evolve. By examining how misogyny became laundered into aesthetic philosophy through an analysis of attacks on Herz and other “popular” musicians, this paper reveals how nineteenth-century attacks on popular music established evaluative frameworks that persist today. | |