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, 03:00:19am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Responding to AIDS Session Chair: Dale Disney, University of Tennessee Discussant: Matthew Jones | |
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“Halted Voices: AIDS Testimony in the K. Robert Schwarz Papers” CUNY Graduate Center This paper looks to the K. Robert Schwarz Papers at Queens College as an underexamined archive of musical AIDS testimony, focusing on a December 5, 1992 taped interview between musicologist-journalist K. Robert Schwarz and baritone William Parker of the AIDS Quilt Songbook (1993), an album of art song about AIDS. This interview, which took place just before Parker’s AIDS-related death, would inform Schwarz’s Out Magazine profile of Parker titled “The Gift of Song” (1993), as well as his articles on AIDS and classical music for the New York Times and American Record Guide. At the top of Schwarz’s interview transcript appears this handwritten description of Parker’s AIDS-ravaged voice: “Voice halting, soft, clearing throat, needing to stop for air, imbued a wistful poignancy.” This paper analyzes Schwarz’s vocal description — as well as Parker’s recorded singing in the AIDS Quilt Songbook — through the lens of Roland Barthes’s “grain of the voice” as reinterpreted by disability and voice scholars Laurie Stras and Jessica Schwartz: How does the voice “bear witness” to trauma through its affective nature? Hindsight renders the Schwarz-Parker interview even more poignant: Seven years after conducting the interview, Schwarz himself died of AIDS. His papers — consisting of recorded interviews, typed transcripts and drafts, and handwritten edits, all meticulously preserved — show the recursive labor of relistening and rewriting. With such implied repetitions, the Schwarz-Parker interview becomes like a piece of Minimalist music in itself, recalling tape-based works like Steve Reich’s Different Trains, about which Schwarz wrote in his book Minimalists (1996). Using tape’s memorializing medium, Schwarz, like Reich, crafts what Amy Lynn Wlodarski calls “musical testimony” from others’ voices. Ultimately, I read the Schwarz-Parker interview as a form of “reciprocal testimony” for reporter and subject. The cassette recording captures both Parker’s voice and Schwarz’s active listening, with Schwarz’s questions shaped by his own coming to terms with mortality. Building upon Will Robin’s research on Schwarz and Minimalism, this paper positions Schwarz as an understudied figure in queer public musicology, arguing for his archive’s relevance to contemporary AIDS remembrance, currently under siege, forming a counter-archive to official state narratives. | |