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, 02:57:45am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Sounding Soft Power: Musical Diplomacy Across Borders Session Chair: Diau-long Shen | |
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The Occupied Organ-Piano: Caroline Pichler’s Music Salon as a Site of Cross-National Exchange during the 1805 and 1809 French Occupations of Vienna University of Texas at Arlington On 15 November 1805 the author and salonnière Caroline Pichler (1769–1843) answered a knock on her front door at Alstergasse 90. In the main entryway of her Viennese home, Pichler felt an involuntary shiver convulse through her body as she greeted two French officers and their accompanying servants. Just two days prior, the Pichlers and other residents of the Austrian capital had been informed that they would be forced to house enemy soldiers during the sixty-two-day French occupation of Vienna. In her memoirs, Caroline Pichler vividly describes the “humiliating” experience of billeting soldiers during both the 1805 and 1809 French occupations. Her recollections reveal that the Pichler household shared not only meals and domestic labor with their quartered soldiers, but also conversations and musical performances at Caroline’s regular music salon gatherings. Historians (Princi 2020; Pröve 1995) have described the occupied home as a “contact site” between military and civilian life; however, the nuanced interactions that transpired within these contact sites have remained underexplored. In this paper, I examine the encounters between billeted soldiers and Pichler’s regular music salon attendees to demonstrate how Pichler’s music salon expanded the contact site of the billeted home to also include the semi-private salon. As a result, French soldiers encountered not only members of Pichler’s billeted household, but also members of her salon circle—many of whom held strong anti-French sentiments. Despite the deep political and national divides that characterized these encounters, Pichler’s prioritization of sociability through intellectual conversation and musical performances made such exchanges possible. In particular, I consider how Pichler’s combination organ-piano facilitated these exchanges, serving as a physical and aural contact site where political and national divides could be bridged. Thus, this case study offers a glimpse into the complex, layered relationships that occurred between wealthy, German-speaking residents of Vienna and their billeted French soldiers during the 1805 and 1809 occupations. Moreover, this paper demonstrates how sociability and musical performances in the salon could expand the scope of such encounters and foster positive cross-national exchanges across enemy lines. | |