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, 02:58:27am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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The Materiality of Music-Making | |
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Enspirited Instrument: On the Sentient Ecology of Making the Kazakh Qyl-Qobyz Assistant Professor, Wesleyan University Recent scholarship in ethnomusicology has called for a shift of focus in organological research from the human aspect of instrument-player interactions to the roles of instruments as both objects and subjects of social relations endowed with agency and power (Doubleday 2008; Bates 2012; Yamin 2019). Studies in ecomusicology have proposed a holistic and relational approach to examining the material world of music. Helena Simonett suggests that music should be regarded “not as an exclusively human invention but one that emerges from communicative relationships with the ecological world.” (Allen and Dawe 2016, 106) Kevin Dawe argues for an understanding of the political ecology of musical instrument-making as “a convergence of human and non-human, technological and affectual, material and cultural fields.” (Allen and Dawe 2016, 119) Informed by these perspectives, my paper explores the idea of the musical instrument as a sentient being, focusing on the Kazakh qyl-qobyz (two-stringed bowed lute) as a case study. A sacred instrument of baqsy shamans among nomadic pastoralists, the qyl-qobyz was suppressed during the Soviet era, and its players and makers were persecuted. The national revival in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, however, has reinvigorated beliefs in the instrument’s ability to heal, to sound on its own, and to mediate with the spirit realm. Based on fieldwork with an instrument maker, blacksmith, and baqsy from southeastern Kazakhstan, the paper examines the meanings of such discourses through the lens of Tim Ingold’s (2000) ecological theory. I argue that the instrument maker’s craft and his views on the sentience and agency of musical instruments offer insight into historical transformations within local music and ritual practice, as well as the complexities of the political and social environment of a postcolonial nation-state in a globalized world. | |