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, 02:57:54am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Cross-Cultural Exchange Session Chair: Bess Xintong Liu, Indiana University Bloomington | |
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Negotiating Transatlantic Musical Modernism and Exoticism through Song: The Case of Eva Gauthier CUNY Graduate Center As Carol Oja has shown, in the wake of the First World War the relationship between American and French modernist musical movements became increasingly close. A pivotal but overlooked figure in the emergence of this transatlantic musical modernism was the French-Canadian mezzo-soprano Eva Gauthier (1885-1958). Trained as an opera singer in Paris, Gauthier relocated to New York in 1914, where she established a reputation as an interpreter of song, with a focus on works by living composers. Much of Gauthier's repertoire was not only modernist, but specifically exploited the modernist taste for exoticism, in settings such as Stravinsky’s Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise, Delage’s Quatre poèmes hindous, Charles Griffes’ Five Chinese and Japanese Poems, and Bainbridge Crist’s Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes. At the same time, she had lived for four years in Java and regularly included Javanese and Malay folk song on her programs, complete with traditional costume. In the first part of this paper, I argue that though Gauthier’s performances did not often truly reflect authentic cultural practices, she positioned herself as a trusted interlocutor between Western and non-Western music. As such, she should be included among the cadre of artists whom historian of Indonesian performance Matthew Isaac Cohen has described as “reject[ing] nineteenth-century modes of spectacular Orientalism in order to engage in intimate communications with their audiences about far-away cultures.” In the second part of this paper, I draw on recital programs, press reviews, and Gauthier’s personal papers to show that Gauthier saw the appropriation of non-Western musical techniques as an integral part of the transatlantic modernist musical project. This was not unusual among her contemporaries, but Gauthier's specific contribution was to illustrate the complementarity of the two musical traditions in practice. By performing “authentic” folk song alongside newly composed repertoire, she negotiated a shift in the understanding of Eastern music from a foreign novelty to one of many possible cultural wellsprings on which modern artists might draw. Ultimately, her case emphasizes the need to analyze female performers and the genre of song as influential arbiters of transatlantic modernist musical and cultural exchange. | |