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, 03:00:19am EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
French Opera From the Reign of Terror to 20th-Century Nostalgia Session Chair: Mark Everist | |
    | |
Entangled Communicative Action: Legal Discourse in Opéra-Comique, 1762–1789 1: Institut für Musikwissenschaft, Universität Bern; 2: Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance, Université de Tours Eighteenth-century opéra-comique emerged at the intersection of popular theatrical practice, institutional regulation, and the expanding public sphere. Situated between fairground performance and royal privilege, the genre evolved under juridical and administrative constraints that shaped not only its modes of representation but also its capacity to circulate and authorize knowledge. This paper approaches opéra-comique as a site of epistemic redistribution: part of a theatrical dispositif through which legal knowledge was translated from discursive regimes of authority and subjection into publicly intelligible and affectively persuasive form. Rather than treating law as thematic content, the study considers it as an enunciative mode structured by statements, discursive formations, constitutive absences, and regimes of visibility. From an archaeological perspective on discourse, drawing on archival evidence from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Archives nationales, together with literary, theatrical, and musical texts as well as legal-historical sources, this paper examines how legal authority becomes legible, credible, and emotionally compelling within the popular theatrical culture of opéra-comique, and how subjectivity is configured as observable under disciplinary power. It focuses on legally inflected opéra-comique works from the 1760s to the 1780s and asks: how are procedures, jurisdictions, and forms of legitimacy dramatized? What kinds of juridical subject positions, institutional actors, and legal issues are staged? How does musical rhetoric operate as a form of pre-judgment, shaping collective sensibility prior to formal adjudication? By foregrounding the opéra-comique’s negotiation of private laws and jurisdictional authority in the decades preceding the Revolution, the paper argues that opéra-comique functioned as a moderately counter-institutional arena in which epistemic hierarchies were subtly recalibrated. As an artistic genre with social agency, it participated in the construction, preservation, and relocation of juridical legitimacy. Opéra-comique complicates dominant models of knowledge production in the late Ancien Régime. It reveals how theatrical culture participated in reshaping epistemic authority within the late Ancien Régime, not by overtly contesting institutions, but by rearticulating the conditions under which legal knowledge could be seen, heard, and felt. The genre thus offers an illustrative example of how popular theatrical performance can mediate epistemic asymmetries and redistribute interpretive power within the public sphere. | |