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, 02:58:02am EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
French Opera From the Reign of Terror to 20th-Century Nostalgia Session Chair: Mark Everist | |
    | |
The Making of a Good Mother: Music, Filial Piety, and Female Citizens during the Terror University of British Columbia About three months after the onset of the Terror, a thirteen-year-old teenager, Joseph Barra, was killed on December 7, 1793, in Vendée during combat after uttering “Long Live the Republic.” The death of this young soldier during the Terror came to Maximilien Robespierre’s attention, who made a motion at the National Convention to commemorate his death. The National Convention subsequently commissioned composer Grétry to compose an opera about him. The opera, Joseph Barra, was performed at the Opéra Comique. The score of this opera was never published, but the autograph manuscript was examined by two music scholars (Pierquin 1991; Bartlet 1992). This paper aims to place Barra’s death and commemoration in the discourse of female citizenship. What has not been examined in published music scholarship, however, is that Barra died about a month after the death of the woman of letters, Olympe de Gouges, on the guillotine. Shifting the emphasis from Grétry’s activities during the Revolution to the political discourse about Barra’s death from December 1793 through July 1794 indicates that the discourse on female citizenship has been overlooked in music research. While Barra was primarily celebrated as a patriot, he was also simultaneously honored as a good son who wished to care for his mother on the battlefield. The National Convention gave a pension to Barra’s mother and credited her as a “citizen mother.” This paper presents evidence from sources that have not been examined in music research, including tableaus, engravings, writings, odes, songs, hymns by leading cultural figures in that period, such as Méhul, Cambini, David, Thomas Rousseau, Charles Nodier, and forms of commemoration of Barra not only in Paris, but also in Strasbourg, Avignon, and Dijon. While mothers were presented categorically in revolutionary festivals (Pasler 2009) and the notion of female citizen was sometimes employed as an insult (Darlow 2012), the case of Barra indicates that Robespierre and other Jacobins awarded Barra’s mother for her work as a passive citizen (Sewell 1994). Thus, the Terror framed some female citizens as useful and defended select mothers as passive citizens, even though de Gouges, also a mother, was guillotined. | |