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, 02:57:04am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Understudied Philosophical Approaches to Composition Session Chair: Lee Cannon-Brown, McGill University | |
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Germaine Tailleferre’s score for Sous le rempart d’Athènes and Philosophical Music Temple University, When we think about philosophical music, we generally think about the Schopenhauerian inspiration for Wagner’s music dramas or Nietzsche’s Übermensch resounding through Strauss’s tone poems. But Debussy’s music might also come to mind thanks to Bergsonian readings of Jeux (Pasler 1982), Pelléas et Mélisande (Abbate 1998), and L’isle Joyeuse(Adlard 2013). Such readings reveal the critic’s connections between dispersed elements of cultural context. Direct demonstrates of how philosophy could be heard in French music have been more elusive. Germaine Tailleferre’s scoring of Paul Claudel’s philosophical play Sous le rempart d’Athènes (1927), for example, was all but inaccessible until the critical edition appeared (Wehage and Boisseau 2011). In this paper, through a careful reading of the text of the play, her score, and the philosophies of her time, including not just that of Henri Bergson but also those of Lionel Dauriac (1904) and Albert Bazaillas (1908), I show how the ideas become audible. I argue that the musical sounds directly relate to the concepts of multiplicity, change and movement, human love, and the sense of mystery that ties these concepts together. I show that, rather than the neoclassical “tapisserie sonore” Claudel heralded, Tailleferre’s music deepens the text, heightening the tension, conflict, and wholeness the characters experience. More broadly, positioning this score in a narrative connecting Debussy, Ravel, Satie, and Tailleferre helps de-center the traditional figures of genius, re-casting them as members of an interconnected network of which Tailleferre, who consistently under-sold her own creativity and originality, played an active part. | |