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, 02:58:02am 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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Nietzsche as Composer, Philosopher, Antichrist: A Conceptual Art Song Analysis Northern Kentucky University, Friedrich Nietzsche primarily understood himself as a composer. From an early age and throughout his life, he produced more than fifty musical works, including art songs, character pieces, and a symphonic poem. Although colleagues and critics ultimately discouraged him from pursuing composition in favor of philosophy, music remained central to his intellectual and aesthetic outlook. Nietzsche’s musical works reflect philosophical concerns that closely parallel those found in his writings, revealing his conviction that music functions both as a mode of instruction and as an aesthetic expression of existence. A key philosophical idea that emerges in Nietzsche’s music is antiverbalism—the belief that spoken and written language are fundamentally inadequate for conveying certain meanings and affective states. For Nietzsche, music offers a means of surpassing the limitations of language, not merely supplementing verbal expression but, at times, replacing it altogether. This paper argues that Nietzsche’s compositions constitute an essential yet understudied site for understanding the reciprocal relationship between his philosophical and artistic projects. Despite the breadth of Nietzsche’s musical output and the pervasive role of music in his thought, his compositions have received relatively little sustained analytical attention. This presentation begins by examining Nietzsche’s musical education and situating his compositional practices within the context of late nineteenth-century musical culture, before addressing the critical reception and controversies that contributed to his eventual withdrawal from composition. It then offers a conceptual analysis of one of Nietzsche’s art songs using the framework of conceptual integration networks (CINs) developed by Lawrence Zbikowski in Conceptualizing Music. Focusing on a song set to a text by Lou Andreas-Salomé, the analysis demonstrates how musical and philosophical meanings converge within the work—meanings that resonate strikingly with Salomé’s own reflections on Nietzsche. By situating Nietzsche’s music within its historical, philosophical, and analytical contexts, this study seeks not only to recover the significance of a largely neglected composer, but also to shed new light on the thinker whose ideas profoundly shaped modern philosophy. | |