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, 02:34:47am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Resisting Gender Stereotypes Session Chair: Amy Zigler | |
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Alida Vázquez and the Making of Electronic Music History Universidad Autónoma de Baja California This paper reexamines the electronic music of Mexican composer Alida Vázquez Ayala (1924–2015) in order to bring lite to her story, as part of the historiographies of postwar experimentalism. Although Vázquez engaged mid-century electronic practices in dialogue with U.S. institutions including the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and Mexican pioneers of electronic music like Hector Quintanar, her work remains largely absent from canonical accounts of electronic modernism. Drawing on archival research, correspondence, and oral history, this research situates her electronic compositions within transnational circuits of exchange that challenge models of technological innovation. Vázquez approached composition with feminist lenses, and stayed true to her voice and identity, she treated tape and studio media as extensions of compositional concerns rooted in timbre, gesture, and experimentations of form. Her resists narratives that equate electronic music with technological mastery, and invite reconsideration of how modernist value has been constructed—often through institutional affiliation, access to technical infrastructure, and preservation within stable archival systems. At the same time, Vázquez’s trajectory illuminates the gendered and geopolitical conditions that shaped participation in early electronic music. As a Mexican woman composer working across national contexts, her access to resources, circulation networks, and long-term preservation was uneven. Much of her electronic output survives only fragmentarily, dispersed across personal archives and deteriorating media. Engaging these materials necessitates a methodological shift: one that treats archival fragility not as marginality, but as constitutive of the historical field itself. By placing Vázquez at the center of analysis, this paper argues for a reconfiguration of electronic modernism that foregrounds migration, pedagogical labor, and informal networks alongside institutional innovation. This in conversation with feminist historiography, and the global re-mapping of twentieth-century experimental music. | |