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, 02:34:19am EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Archival Explorations Session Chair: Vivianne Asturizaga | |
    | |
Armorial Sound: Ekphrasis, Epistemological Transduction, and Materiality in the Making of an Armorial Archive Akademie Schloss Solitude. Stuttgart, Germany Created in 1970 by Ariano Suassuna (1927–2014) at the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship, the Armorial Movement was an artistic initiative that sought to reimagine national cultural identity by cultivating an erudite art form rooted in the folk traditions of the Northeast region. As one of Brazil’s most celebrated playwrights, Suassuna was a member of the “Lettered City,” a term coined by cultural theorist Ángel Rama to describe an intellectual elite that used writing to consolidate power and shape the historiographical discourses of the nation (Rama 1984). The Northeast occupies a contested place in the historiographical discourses of Brazil, being described either as a space of drought, poverty, and rebellion, or as the repository of an essentialized national cultural identity and as a locus of resistance to foreign cultural imperialism. Drawing on histories of sound reproduction and aurality (Sterne 2003; Ochoa Gautier 2006, 2014) and musicological and literary critiques of the Lettered City (Madrid 2016, 2025; McEnaney 2019), I argue that sound functions as an epistemological category that challenges the historiographies promulgated by members of the Lettered City in the South who have cast the Northeast as a culturally and politically regressive region in the context of national modernity. I apply the notion of ekphrasis, the vivid description of works of art in a literary text, to examine how Suassuna’s writings regarding the specificity of Northeastern culture were transduced into a sound episteme and subsequently inscribed by musicians into aesthetically mediated archives that performatively reproduce the ideologies of the Armorial Movement. Through a contextualized listening to archives such as the Armorial Quintet’s critically acclaimed LP, Do romance ao galope Nordestino (1974) and the instruments specifically designed for this recording, I seek to denaturalize the “Armorial Sound” epistemology and assess the entanglements of Armorial artists and intellectuals with the military regime’s nationalist agenda. By foregrounding sound as a politically and intellectually significant mode of knowledge production, I show how the Armorial Sound contributed to the production and dissemination of knowledge that elevated folk culture into an epistemology embraced by intellectual elites and integrated into the cultural politics of the authoritarian state. | |