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, 02:59:08am EDT
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Jazz Research and Analysis | |
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Utopian Interruption and the Failure of Consolation in Marshall Gilkes’s My Unanswered Prayer SUNY Stony Brook University, Jazz in the United States has long served as a medium for public witness, carrying the capacity to register social crisis not only through texted protest but through musical structure, timbre, and affect. Using orchestration and form to reflect the emotional realities of contemporary American life, Marshall Gilkes’s My Unanswered Prayer (2024), written for the WDR Big Band, participates in this tradition through a composition that frames collective mourning as a recurring, unresolved ritual. This paper argues that My Unanswered Prayer engages expressive codes associated with American patriotic ceremonial music, shaping its central melody as a gesture of collective remembrance. Gilkes foregrounds a diatonic trumpet theme in C major whose narrow contour and emphasis on open intervals evoke the sonic world of Taps and related memorial idioms. Yet this ceremonial melody is repeatedly denied its expected cadential closure: across the work, dominant preparations return again and again without resolution, creating a formal and affective structure defined by deferral. Drawing on hermeneutic approaches associated with Michael Klein's utopian interruption and Edward Cone's promissary note, I show how Gilkes stages fleeting moments of clarity only to undo them. A brief D-major sonority in the contrasting middle section functions as a promissory harmonic event, projecting the possibility of release before collapsing back into modal mixture. Later, the piece delivers its only full cadence into C major during the improvised piano solo, momentarily granting the listener a sense of stability. This “utopian” space is quickly shattered by an eruption of densely voiced major triads; A♭, G♭, and D♭, superimposed over the C-centered melody, producing a conflict in which consonance and dissonance become difficult to distinguish. In My Unanswered Prayer, Gilkes mobilizes these musical strategies to render audible the collective grief, frustration, and mounting anguish that arise when national identity is forced into confrontation with ongoing social crisis. The piece ultimately demonstrates what happens when ceremonial gestures of remembrance are no longer capable of producing closure: resolution remains imaginable, even notated, but persistently unheard. | |