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, 02:34:18am EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Crises of Masculinity Session Chair: Gareth Cordery, Columbia University | |
    | |
Alma Mahler-Werfel: Viennese New Womanhood and Insecure Masculinities at the fin-de-siècle (and beyond) King's College London, Alma Mahler-Werfel is one of the most well-known and yet simultaneously neglected composers of the 20th century. As well as being a gifted composer, she was a skilled pianist, writer, entrepreneur, and pioneer of the arts. Yet despite her impact on the musical cultures of Austria, Germany, and the USA, scholarship has chosen to focus on her romantic relationships, framing her as a muse, femme fatale, and a power-hungry temptress. And yet, even though her sex life has been the focus of every mainstream biography (of which there are currently five), none of them critically examine the impact that early 20th-century gender and identity politics had on her life and works. As Viennese New Womanhood swept across Europe many women began to seek greater economic and sexual autonomy, and Alma Mahler-Werfel was no exception. Just like the Viennese New Woman, she was intellectual, independent, athletic, and sexually liberated, and she strove to move beyond the domestic and take up space in the male-dominated public. This prompted a crisis of masculinity that Elaine Showalter describes an “awakening of consciousness of what it means to be a man.” Gustav Mahler’s marriage to Mahler-Werfel becomes a perfect site of excavation for such work, and Nancy Newman’s 2022 article ‘#AlmaToo: The Art of Being Believed’ offered a provocative and refreshing reframing of their relationship through the lens of the #MeToo movement. However, this study only scratched the surface of a much broader conversation that needs to be had about the politics of gender in Alma Mahler-Werfel’s world. From a consideration of her relationships with men such as Oskar Kokoschka or Gustav Klimt, to the sexist criticism of her in Mahler scholarship in the 1980s (and beyond), this paper situates Mahler-Werfel within a wider conversation on sex and gender in the 20th century. By examining the gendered climate of Vienna at the turn of the century, it interrogates the presentation of insecure masculinity in response to a rise in female agency in Vienna’s artistic cultures and considers to what extent this shaped the distorted view of Mahler-Werfel that still holds weight today. | |