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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, 02:57:46am EDT

Daily Overview

Session

Transculturation, Heritage, and Misrepresentation
Session Chair: Andrew Chung

Presentation 1

Defending Cuban Heritage in Sound and Stone: Reviving Eighteenth-Century Music and Architecture in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Havana

Aimee González

University of Florida

This paper examines the role of colonial-era music and architecture in articulating Cuban cultural heritage from the 1930s until the present. I argue that Havana’s ongoing revival of eighteenth-century Catholic sacred music sonically reinscribes reconstructed cultural heritage onto Havana’s restored eighteenth-century spaces. Furthermore, I illuminate how, seemingly paradoxically, intellectuals and cultural officials have championed elements from Cuba’s imperial past in pursuit of an anti-imperial Cuban history and culture since the 1930s. Focusing on the preservation and restoration of the colonial Church of San Francisco de Paula as a concert hall and on the resonances of cultural theories by writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) within Havana’s early music revival, I demonstrate how performances of—and writings about—colonial-era music have supported a cultural politics that reclaims and reimagines the colonial past from the perspective of the post-colonial present.

First, I explore the eﬀort in the 1930s and 40s by intellectuals galvanized around notions of Cuban heritage, preservation aligned with modernization, and anti-US imperialism to save the eighteenth-century Paula Church-turned-concert hall. I then examine the recovery of Cuban-born chapel master Esteban Salas y Castro (1725–1803) during the 1940s–1960 as part of efforts to reevaluate Cuba’s “true” history and heritage free from colonial misconceptions and cultural imperialism, especially after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Finally, I show how, since the 1990s, the revival of colonial-era music has been tied to the revitalization of the previously neglected colonial Historic Center of Old Havana in the wake of new touristic and religious opportunities following the Soviet Union’s collapse. This paper thus builds on work by music scholars such as Marysol Quevedo and Susan Thomas, who illuminate the richly textured relationships among art music, cultural institutions, and race in twentieth-century Cuba, and Miriam Escudero’s pioneering studies on Cuba’s eighteenth-century sacred music repertory. I contend that Cuba’s revival of colonial music and its restoration of colonial architecture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries enrolls the fraught colonial past in the needs of the present in order to foster local identity in place, and to project a sense of belonging during times of profound change and uncertainty.