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, 02:57:20am EDT
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Networks of Modernist Influence | |
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From Vienna to Zürich: Decoding Arnold Schoenberg and Ferruccio Busoni’s Wartime Correspondence University of Chicago The composer Arnold Schoenberg and the composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni enjoyed a friendly correspondence from 1903 until 1920. In this paper, I analyze the letters they exchanged from 1916 and 1917, amidst the throes of World War I. These letters, held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Library of Congress, reveal how the two supposedly apolitical composers conceived of their roles and responsibilities as artists during this unprecedented inter-European conflict. Schoenberg sent his first letter to Busoni’s temporary home in Zürich on November 14, 1916, responding to the piece Busoni had published on Umberto Boccioni’s death in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In this letter, Schoenberg laments the violence of the war, claiming idealistically that, “if we two, and people like us in every country, could sit down together and discuss peace, we could give it to the world in a week.” This letter is followed by a second from January 30, 1917, which includes a draft of an article inspired by American President Woodrow Wilson’s recent peace rhetoric that Schoenberg intends to publish anonymously. In it, he details fifteen actionable tenets to ensure lasting international peace. Busoni finds Schoenberg’s political aspirations bemusing. He claims in his letter from November 24, 1916 that his article was “about the death of an outstanding painter as a soldier; not a peace piece, but one in which art is weighed against war.” Furthermore, he doesn’t respond to Schoenberg’s article draft. In this paper, I theorize the misunderstanding between the two composers, challenging prevalent assertions in existing scholarship that many early twentieth-century composers (including Schoenberg and Busoni) were disinterested or uninformed about politics. These letters evidence a situation that was infinitely more complex, speaking to competing understandings about the proper relationship between art and politics. Many intellectuals considered art an expression of European culture despite the sicknesses of modern civilization and thought that it should transcend the immanence of political life. In the 1910s, it became unclear whether this attitude met the unique challenges of the times. | |