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.
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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, 02:56:01am EDT
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Introspecting "Children's" Music
Session Topics: 1800–1900, 1900–Present, Gender / Sexuality / LGBTQ Studies
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Introspecting "Children's" Music Organized by the AMS Childhood and Youth Study Group. This session will feature four lightning talks followed by our business meeting. What makes music “children’s”? As the category remains historically and culturally unstable, this session takes up the call to contemplate how childhood is constructed, performed, and mediated through musical practices across genres, institutions, and audiences. Bringing together historical, ethnographic, and media-based approaches, these lightning talks examine how children are alternately centered, marginalized, imagined, instrumentalized, and agentic in the canons and traditions of Western art music. Timothy Coombes examines Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye (1910) to argue that so-called “children’s” piano music stages an illusory child presence, revealing childhood as a performed and distributed form of agency rather than a stable subject position. Gareth Cordery then traces nineteenth-century criticism of the étude to show how critics defined the genre as children’s music by aligning Rouseauian concepts of chidlhood with gendered assumptions about young students’ need for both discipline and entertainment. Benjamin Liberatore turns to the present-day English choral tradition, demonstrating through deep ethnographic fieldwork how child choristers simultaneously perform music and “childness” as symbols of purity while the gravitas of the tradition requires disavowal of their labor as simply "children’s" work. Finally, Molly Hennig explores contemporary “baby operas” such as BambinO (2017) and NOOMA (2019), arguing that these productions reconfigure operatic practice by centering infants as audiences, ultimately allowing adults to indulge in both deconstructed opera and the "wonder" of babies' responses to operatic practices. Together, these papers reveal that “children’s music” is less a stable repertoire than a shifting set of practices through which childhood is imagined, enacted, and negotiated through pedagogy, performance, composition, or spectatorship. Presentations in this Session Consider the Children: Defining the Étude as Children’s Music In 1807, an anonymous critic in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung chastised Wilhelm Friedrich Riem for misjudging his audience, writing that Riem did “not seem to have considered children, and least of all girls” in his Petites études. For this critic, Riem’s études focused exclusively on laborious technical advancement while neglecting musical interest, betraying both the genre’s dual purpose and its primary practitioners. Throughout the nineteenth century, critics echoed this argument, particularly when études’ titles, like Riem’s, evoked the miniature. Suggesting that young, female students required education and entertainment simultaneously, music critics built on Rousseauian conceptions of childhood and policed the étude’s purpose and meaning. In this presentation, I dive into the étude’s reception history to contend that this strain of criticism actively defined the nascent genre as children’s music. By focusing on these critical interventions, my paper offers a new approach to understanding the alignment between genre, gender, and childhood. “A full-time job but, like... as a choir. Like, as a person. As a child”: Performing Children and Performing Child in the English Choral Tradition This paper, drawing on over two years’ ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 165 children and adults, examines child choristership in the 21 st century English Choral Tradition. In particular, it considers how choristers’ child-ness both complicates and matters to the liturgiomusical work they perform in the cathedrals of the Church of England. With voices long celebrated as pure, clean, angelic, and white, that choristers are children, not adults, is affectively and symbolically central to their musical work; yet simultaneously, it is critical that that work, being “serious” (Kieran, 9) and “proper” (Reuben, 12), not be understood as simply “children’s” work and that “chorister-choristers” (Ava, 11) not be understood as simply a children’s choir. This paper therefore considers the tensions that can arise when institutional desires for children’s voices confront the limits of children’s bodies. Throughout, it foregrounds choristers’ own accounts and critiques of their imbricated performances of music and of childhood. Re-Doing Opera Through the Ears of Babes: NOOMA (2019) and BambinO (2017) In recent years, opera companies have produced and performed “baby operas,” which they have marketed as multimodal and multisensory operatic experiences curated for infants and small children. Two outstanding examples of these operas include the Scottish Opera’s BambinO (2017), which both The Met and LA Opera have performed, and Carnegie Hall’s NOOMA (2019), which has occurred at the San Francisco Opera and Minnesota Opera. Both BambinO and NOOMA demonstrate how opera companies both uphold and break down the operatic practice when bearing responsibility in solidifying social and cultural listening habits for infants-as-audience; in the meantime, opera companies market these musical performances as “socially beneficial” to young infants. In this paper, I reveal a hidden goal for these baby operas: that adults might experience both deconstructed opera and what Custodero theorizes as the “wonder” (2024) of watching a baby’s ostensibly vulnerable body (Christensen 2000) attune to standard operatic practice. Agency as/against Performance: Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye at the Société musicale indépendante, 1910 The early history of Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye, subtitled “five children’s pieces”, encapsulates the | |