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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Showcasing Virtuosity: Designing the Concert Experience Session Chair: Mark Pottinger | |
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In Defense of Carl Iken: Multimedia Concert Design and Imaginative Listening in Bremen’s Beethoven Cult Louisiana State University In 1820, the Bremen musician Christian Wilhelm Müller (1752–1831) acknowledged that, for many listeners, Beethoven’s music was “incomprehensible and not arranged according to prevailing taste.” To make it more accessible to audiences, Müller devised a series of Family Concerts that combined music with multimedia interaction through poetry and visual art. In these performances, the Bremen writer Carl Iken (1789–1841) declaimed poetic interpretations of Beethoven’s works, several of which survive in manuscripts that Iken sent to the composer in 1819. According to Anton Schindler, the poems “arous[ed] the composer’s ire.” Despite evidence that Schindler fabricated this anecdote, it has circulated through the Beethoven literature to cast Iken’s poems as aberrant overinterpretations and to enlist the composer’s authority against poetic readings of instrumental music. Reclaiming Iken’s texts from nearly two centuries of misrepresentation, this paper resituates them in the context of Müller’s concert design and considers them not as authoritative analyses of Beethoven’s music, but as declamatory performances within a multimedia concert format designed to promote engagement with this new and difficult music. It argues that in the Bremen Family Concerts Müller and Iken pioneered a multimedia concert design that explicitly linked Beethoven’s music with emerging Romantic aesthetics and positioned audiences to experience music through multiple imaginative registers—visual, poetic, intertextual, and immersive. Iken was not presenting what to listen for but showing the audience how he listens, modeling an imaginative mode of listening rooted in Romantic aesthetics (e.g., Schlegel, Wackenroder, Tieck). Offering the first sustained analysis of Iken’s manuscripts and drawing on Müller’s writings, the paper reconstructs the mediating elements of the Family Concerts using methods from the emerging field of concert studies (e.g., Tröndle, Uhde) to examine how historical concert design shaped reception. It builds on scholarship on musical signification, Beethoven reception, and listening practices (e.g., Bonds, Grey, Mathew, Solomon). By restoring Iken’s project to its performance context, the paper demonstrates that the practices Schindler sought to discredit were vital to shaping early audiences’ engagement with Beethoven’s music, and that multimedia concert practices played a formative role in cultivating the imaginative listening central to musical Romanticism. | |