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, 02:59:53am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Musical Environments Session Chair: Sabine Feisst | |
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On the Air of the Vienna Woods: Musical In-spiration, Health Tourism, Environmental History c. 1900 University of Oslo Allusions to air, breezes, and rustling boughs abounded in musical references to the Vienna Woods (Wienerwald) around 1900. Apocryphal accounts written by music journalists imagined gentle breezes that, sweeping down from the wooded hills north-west of the city, carried the melodies of favourite waltzes into the waiting ears of canonized local composers like Johann Strauss Sr. The Wienerwald's air was thought to waft out of the works of naturalized composers like Brahms or those of the native Schubert. Turn-of-the-century Vienna’s newly solidified identity as a “city of music” where music was simply “in the air” emerged from common, essentializing arguments about and convictions in the innate musicality of the surrounding landscape (Nußbaumer 2007, Musner 2009). Although forest murmurs and air as a vehicle for creative inspiration were familiar Romantic tropes, this paper contends that musical references to the Wienerwald’s special aerial qualities take on further significance when read against their layered historical and environmental context. Parts of the Wienerwald formed the first component of a greenbelt legislated in 1905, whose primary function was to serve as an “air reservoir” (Gemeinde Wien 1905) for the city struggling with pernicious dust and smoke problems. The woods’ supply of clean air was considered its most vital offering for working-class day-trippers who could not afford summer vacations to the Alps. The Wienerwald was also home to sanatoria for both tuberculosis—so pervasive in the city it was nicknamed “the Viennese disease”—and nervous illnesses. Fresh air was integral to treatment regimens for both—and, in a way, so was music. In a compelling intersection of wellness tourism with popular music, two newspaper profiles advertising the Purkersdorf Sanatorium reference Hugo Schenk and Oskar Hofmann’s popular 1891 song, “Die Luft vom Wienerwald” (“The Air of the Wienerwald”), in lauding the facility’s healthful surroundings. Drawing on a varied archive of little-known musical and textual sources, and building upon recent musicological engagements with air (Davies 2023), this paper argues that musical references to the Wienerwald’s air were not only grounded in the symbolic imaginary underpinning the Musikstadt narrative but emerged from material environmental factors. | |