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, 02:34:27am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Interpreting Early 20th Century French Art Music Session Chair: Sylvia Kahan | |
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A baritone, a philosopher, and a new musicology University of California, Berkeley Pierre Bernac’s (1899–1979) The Interpretation of French Song has been the essential method book for Anglophone singers since 1970, offering a comprehensive guide to the mélodie and to the French language. Yet, for a guide written not by a musicologist but “by an interpreter,” the book incorporates a surprising amount of reflection on aesthetics. The philosophical bent of the treatise is evident particularly in Bernac’s theorization of musical performance, which he derives primarily from Gisèle Brelet (1915–1973), a musicologist whose writings Nadia Boulanger had recommended to Stravinsky as required reading. In this paper, I investigate how Brelet’s thought intersected with and energized Bernac’s theory of performance. Bernac cites Brelet from the very first page, writing that “only the performer’s presence can give expression to [the composer’s] rendering.” For Brelet, “presence” means the performer’s physicality and inner life, which constitute music’s true reality; drawing heavily on the thought of Henri Bergson, her philosophy is predicated on the theory that music is the unified product of sound and gesture. Bernac adopts this idea wholesale in his guide, describing the musical work as nonexistent before the performer’s “personal vision” brings it to life. Yet Bernac stops short of endorsing Brelet’s claim that this is reversible, that music-making is “necessarily the construction of the self,” instead describing performance as inevitably a “spiritual improvisation” effected by the experience of the performer. Both Bernac and Brelet turn away from score-based interpretation of musical “works,” describing music as a set of gestures, habits, and performance techniques. Through examination of Bernac’s and Brelet’s separate analyses of the music of Debussy, I point to the ways they illuminated the “liveness” of music: Bernac, by stressing the technique necessary to enable its flash of inspiration, and Brelet, by hearing its formal qualities as the depiction of shared human time. Together, the unlikely pair embodies the midcentury’s foray into a new musicology that could capture the somatic, holistic—and truer—experience of music. | |