CALL FOR PAPERS
The 11th Conference on Word and Music Studies, organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) and hosted by the Department of English and the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG) of the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, is scheduled for May 30 to June 1st 2019. The conveners hereby invite papers on the following topics:
The history of literature, music and other arts and media may be conceived of as a constant 'make it new' or flow to which the Heraclitean principle of never being able to step into the same flowing water applies. However, there are sometimes stumbling blocks that cause eddies which do make the water flow backwards. The forthcoming conference will deal with such ‘retro’-phenomena, which seem to follow the maxim ‘make it old’, with reference to the development of literature and (Western) music. The main focus will be on retro forms and styles (rather than contents) in creative practice and theoretical (musicological or poetological) reflections, as well as on the manifold parallels and divergences observable in this field in the history of both arts.
In this history, the period from the late 18th century is especially fertile for the investigation of retro-tendencies, since it is from this time on that literature and music have both produced retro forms of some importance. Before the 1750s, such retro forms were common mainly in literature under the auspices of neoclassical aesthetics, but – except for the occasional use of stile antico in sacred music – were all but absent in music history. Particular attention will certainly be given to the past few decades, which may be said to be characterized by a remarkable ‘retro-mania’ in Western culture. This does not only show in literary postmodernism and its typical tendency to ‘recycle’ old writing styles or in the trends of neo-modernism and neo-Victorianism, but also in a group of compositions for which the restoration of the classical piano concerto in Friedrich Gulda’s Concerto for Myself or retro styles in pop music may merit mention as well as the recent compositions in an early 19th-century style by the now 12-year-old child prodigy Alma Deutscher.
In the light of these few remarks we invite contributions which deal with any of these and related aspects of retro forms and styles, preferably from an intermedial, tandem perspective on both literature/words and music, although contributions dealing with one art only are also possible. Special attention should be given to a functional perspective which is apt to shed light on the retro-phenomena discussed from a cultural-historical point of view.
As at former conferences, a "Surveying the Field" section will feature papers airing general theoretical and methodological questions intrinsic to the scholarly field of Word and Music Studies. Overviews of recent developments and new directions are welcome; however, papers in this area should not address specialised topics.
For some time, the biannual WMA conferences have provided a platform for emerging researchers to present their work in progress in Word and Music Studies. This tradition will be continued in the forthcoming conference. We therefore also welcome shorter talks of 15 minutes dedicated to presenting current research by younger scholars in the field.
Please send abstracts of c. 300 – 400 words and a short bio-bibliographical note via email to the conference convener by October 1st, 2018 (email address: werner.wolf@uni-graz.at). You will be notified about whether your offer will be accepted as soon as possible. Accepted full papers will have a presentation length of 30 minutes (followed by 15 minutes’ discussion). Subsequent to a peer-review process they may be published in the conference proceedings, which will appear in the book series Word and Music Studies (WMS, published by Brill/Rodopi); shorter papers may be published on the WMA website.
We are confident that the papers emerging from this conference will form valuable contributions to the analysis of retro forms and styles as a major trend in contemporary cultural history as well as to Word and Music Studies in general.
The conference city Graz is the capital of Styria and second largest city in Austria. It is a lively university city (housing three universities, one of which, the venerable Karl-Franzens-Universität, will be the conference venue) with a large and well-known historical town centre, some remarkable modern architecture and lovely surroundings, including the celebrated wine-growing area of Southern Styria.
We are looking forward to receiving your abstracts and hope to be able to welcome you in Graz in May/June 2019. For general information on the WMA, please consult our web page, www.wordmusicstudies.net.
Werner Wolfchief conference convener,on behalf of the conference team
David Francis Urrows, WMA Secretary, was fêted with a concert marking his 60th birthday at the Music Department of Hong Kong Baptist University, where he has taught music history and composition for over 20 years. Over 35 performers took part in a recital of chamber and vocal music. All of this was composed by Prof. Urrows over the past 43 years, with the exception of the "Theme and Variations in B Minor" by the German-American composer, Otto Dresel (1826–1890), whose collected works Urrows has edited and published in a critical edition. WMA Vice-President Michael Halliwell sang two works, one of which came from Fünf Eichendorff Gesänge performed at the 2017 WMA conference held in Stockholm, and the other from Paroles pour musique (peut-être), first performed at the 2013 London conference of WMA. A DVD of the concert will eventually be made available.
It is our pleasure to welcome you to Stockholm for the Eleventh International Conference of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), which also marks the association’s 20-year anniversary. The local organizers are Axel Englund and Hannah Hinz of the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, and the conference is held in association with the Foundation of Knut and Alice Wallenberg. We are confident that the Stockholm conference, like its forerunners, will be a significant event in the field!
The conference will be held at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, which is home not only to Musicology and Literature, but also Art History, History of Ideas and Theatre and Performance Studies. Once you arrive at the University, the building is easy to find – directions here, or look at the map on the last page of this circular.
The conference rooms are equally easy to find – the auditorium (215) is located straight ahead once you are inside the main entrance of the building (marked 24E), and the library (300) is located just upstairs from there. There will also be both signs and people to help you out in case doubts arise.
The university area is located north of the city centre and easily accessible by the subway. The subway is the red line (14) to Mörby Centrum, and Stockholm University (Universitetet) is less than a 10-minute ride away from the Central station (T-Centralen). A map of the subway system can be found here. You can buy tickets in the form of an SL Access Card at any station, which is available for 72 hours or 1 week.
Lunches on Thursday and Friday, which will be paid for by the participants, will take place at the restaurant of the Museum of Natural History (Fossilen), which is a 5-minute walk from the Department of Culture and Aesthetics. We can of course walk there together, but if you get lost or walk on your own, Fossilen is marked on the map on the last page of this circular.
The conference dinner will take place at Drottningholm, during the Friday excursion. The threecourse menu is 385 SEK (≈ €39), not including drinks, but you can also order just an entrée.
The Saturday lunch, which closes the conference, will take place at Stora Skuggans Wärdshus, which is located in a nice, green area a short walk from the university.
The conference will open on Wednesday 9 August with a reception at 18.45, followed by an opening concert featuring music and music-making by WMA members, as well as invited musicians.
On Friday 11 August, we are organizing a trip to Drottningholm and the Palace Theatre located there. This baroque theatre, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, is one of the rare instances of an 18th-century opera house with its original machinery still in use (as well as the venue where Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 version of The Magic Flute was shot). The conference sessions will end a bit earlier on this afternoon, and a bus will take us from the University to Drottningholm. There, we will get a private guided tour of the theatre, after which the conference dinner will take place at Drottningholms Slottscafé. At 19.30, there will be a performance of W. A. Mozart’s Così fan tutte, and afterwards we will go back to Stockholm by bus. The transportation and the guided tour will be free of charge, while the participants will need to pay for their dinner and opera tickets individually.
For those who are interested, but have not yet booked their tickets, there are still some available here.
More information about the theatre can be found here.
Stockholm is served by Arlanda International Airport. The fastest way to get from there to the city is the Arlanda Express train, which takes you to the Central Station in 20 minutes, and costs c. 250 SEK (≈ €25). Another option is the airport coach (Flygbussarna), which takes about 45-50 minutes to the Central Station and costs c. 100 SEK (≈ €10). Most taxi companies have flat rates to/from Arlanda, which are typically around 500 SEK (≈ €50).
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Axel Englund or Hannah Hinz at axel.englund@littvet.su.se and hannah.hinz@littvet.su.se, respectively.
August 9–12, 2017Stockholm, Sweden
It is our pleasure to invite you to Stockholm for the Eleventh International Conference of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), which also marks the association´s 20-year anniversary. The local organizer is Axel Englund of the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, and the conference is held in association with the Foundation of Knut and Alice Wallenberg. A total of thirty-five speakers from around the world will participate during the four days of the conference, and we are confident that the Stockholm conference, like its forerunners, will be a significant event in the field.
The conference will be held at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, which is home not only to Musicology and Literature, but also Art History, History of Ideas and Theatre and Performance Studies. Once you arrive at the University, the building is easy to find – directions here.
The university area is located north of the city centre and easily accessible by the subway. The subway is the red line (14) to Mörby Centrum, and Stockholm University (Universitetet) is less than a 10-minute ride away from the Central station (T-Centralen). A map of the subway system can be found here.
There are plenty of hotels at all price levels in Stockholm, but they fill up quickly during the summer, so participants will be wise to make reservations without undue delay.
When looking for a place with convenient communications to the conference venue, it is worth remembering that Stockholm University is located on the red line (14) of the subway system. The link below shows the most centrally located stations on that line, all of which thus provide direct connections to the university. T-Centralen is no. 1 on the map, and Universitetet is no. 5.
The conference will open on Wednesday 9 August with a welcoming reception at 18.30, followed by an inaugural concert featuring music and music-making by WMA members.
On Friday 11 August, we are organizing a trip to Drottningholm and the Palace Theatre located there. This baroque theatre, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, is one of the rare instances of an 18th-century opera house with its original machinery still in use (as well as the venue where Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 version of The Magic Flute was shot). The conference sessions will end a bit earlier on this afternoon, and a bus will take us from the University to Drottningholm. There, we will get a private guided tour of the theatre, after which the conference dinner will take place at Drottningholms Slottscafé. At 19.30, there will be a performance of W.A. Mozart´s Così fan tutte, and afterwards we will go back to Stockholm by bus. The transportation and the guided tour will be free of charge, while the participants will need to pay for their dinner and opera tickets individually. The three-course menu is 385 SEK (≈ €39), not including drinks, but you can also order just an entrée. Opera tickets are 295–1250 SEK (≈ €30–125). For those who do not wish to attend the opera, public transport is of course available after dinner.
The conference will end in the afternoon of Saturday 12 August, and the schedule for this day will include plenary sessions as well as the General Assembly of the WMA, which is open to all members. To conclude the conference, a coffee reception will be organized in the afternoon, which is expected to be finished no later than 16.00.
Those interested in attending the opera are advised to buy their tickets at their first convenience. So far, there are plenty of seats available, but they do tend to sell out quickly. Tickets can be bought here.
Stockholm is served by Arlanda International Airport. The fastest way to get from there to the city is the Arlanda Express train, which takes you to the Central Station in 20 minutes, and costs c. 250 SEK (≈ €25). Another option is the airport coach (Flygbussarna), which takes about 45- 50 minutes to the Central Station and costs c. 100 SEK (≈ €10).
Other possible options are Nyköping International Airport, which is a 90-minute bus ride away from the city, and Bromma Airport, which is very close to the city centre, but mainly serves flights within Scandinavia and domestic flights.
There is no conference fee, but all speakers at the conference are required to become WMA members (and other participants are strongly encouraged to join the organization, too). As a member of the WMA, your annual membership subscription includes the volume of Word and Music Studies in which a selection of the conference papers will be published. For details, please see our website.
Ammon, Frieder von (Leipzig)"Arts of Completion: On the Differing Practices of Completing Incomplete Pieces in Music and Literature"
Bernhart, Walter (Graz)"‘decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse’: Gain and Loss of Second Thoughts"
da Sousa Correa, Delia (Milton Keynes)"Katherine Mansfield’s Fragments of a Musical Novel"
Dayan, Peter (Edinburgh)"Drumming out Incompletion: Nielsen, Huelsenbeck, and Improvised Disturbance"
Delazari, Ivan (Hong Kong)"Skizzen’s Sketches, Els’s Tweets: Streams of Incompletion in Two Musicalized Novels"
Fillerup, Jessie (Richmond, VA)"Ravel, Mallarmé, and the Poetics of (In)completion"
Gurke, Thomas (Düsseldorf)"From Fragmented Language to a Poetics of Musical Affectivity – James Joyce’s Revisions of the ‘Sirens’ Manuscript"
Halliwell, Michael (Sydney, NSW)"Operatic Fragments in Fiction and Film"
Hardy, Stephen (Saskatoon, SK)"Music as Biological Process in Richard Powers’ Orfeo"
Hart, Heidi (Logan, UT)"Fossil Opera: Persephone in the Late Anthropocene"
Heck, Adeline (Princeton, NJ)"‘A kind of symphony in full stops and commas’: Leitmotifs as Representation of Fragmented Consciousness in Les Lauriers sont coupés / The Bays Are Sere by Edouard Dujardin"
Hoene, Christin (Canterbury)"A Fragment of the Whole: Musical and Literary Incompletion in Kirsty Gunn’s Novel The Big Music"
Issler, Dani (Princeton, NJ)"Re-reading Goliath, a Forgotten Biblical Grand Opera Fragment by Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht"
Jacobs, Ruth (Edinburgh)"Infinity in an Instant: the Paradox of Timeless Fragments in the Work of György Kurtág"
Kramer, Lawrence (New York, NY)"Philosophizing Musically: Nietzsche’s Music Box"
Kuhn, Bernhard (Lewisburg, PA)"The Challenges of Completing a Plurimedial Fragment: Text, Music, and Scene in Berio/Pountney’s Ending of the Opera Turandot"
Laws, Catherine (York)"(Nearly) Abandoned Work: Samuel Beckett and György Kurtág"
Miner, Margaret (Chicago, IL)"The Fragmentary and the Musical: Baudelaire’s Bits and Pieces"
Nehrfors, Mårten (Stockholm)"Translation, Revision, Appropriation: Johann Friedrich Reichardt Annexing History with the Opera Brennus"
Petermann, Emily (Konstanz)"Riddled with Gaps: The Reader’s Attempt to Complete Nonsense on the Page and in Performance"
Reznik, Alexandra (Pittsburgh, PA)"Composing European & Operatic Fragments in Godey’s Lady’s Book"
Schirrmacher, Beate (Växjö)"Sticky Music and Virtual Soundtracks – Incomplete Song Lyric Quotations in Literature"
Smith, Hazel (Parramatta, NSW)"Experimental Poetic Biography in Jessica L. Wilkinson’s Suite for Percy Grainger: A Biography"
Teopini Terzetti Casagrande, Francesco (Hong Kong)"Referencing ‘Artificial Fragments’: Paratexts in Giuliani’s Le Rossiniane Opp. 119–124"
Urrows, David Francis (Hong Kong)"Otto Dresel’s ‘Loose the sail, rest the oar’: a Study (In)completion"
Vattano, Laura (Edinburgh)"Russolo’s ‘Awakening of a City’: a Fragment for an Aesthetics of Noise"
Wahlfors, Laura (Helsinki)"Art of Incompletion à la Barthes and Piano Practice as a Queer Art of Failure"
Wallrup, Erik (Stockholm)"Fragment and Flow: On Wolfgang Rihm’s Dionysus Opera"
Wojda, Aleksandra (Nancy)"The Method of Romantic Fragmentation and Dialectics of Cyclical Constellations: F. Schubert and R. Schumann in Social and Media Culture Areas of the Biedermeier Period"
Goebel, Rolf J. (Huntsville, AL)"Word and Music Studies vs. Sound Studies: Bridging the Interdisciplinary Gap"
Wolf, Werner (Graz)"‘Make It Old’: Retro-forms in Literature and Music since the 18th Century"
Milian, Patrick (Seattle, WA)"Art/Artifact: Steve Reich and the Prosodic Fragment"
Trajanoska, Ivana (Skopje)"Musical Accompaniment in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage"
The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) takes pleasure in announcing its Eleventh International Conference to be held in Stockholm on August 9–12, 2017. The conference will take place at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University.
Previous conferences of the association have been held in Graz, Ann Arbor, Sydney, Berlin, Santa Barbara, Edinburgh, Vienna, Santa Fe, London, and New York, with conference proceedings published in the Association’s book series, Word and Music Studies (WMS).
Papers from members of the WMA will be considered for inclusion in a further volume in the same series.
Incompletion is an essential condition of cultural history, framing it at both ends: the oldest extant aesthetic products have been partially erased by time, and the most recent ones have always yet to be finished. In between those moments, the idea of the fragment has continued to appeal to those who resist classicist ideals of completeness: it played a vital part in the imagination of the romantics, and became even more fundamental to the various strands of modernist aesthetics, including its post- and late stages. In recent years, fragmentation and incompletion have been the focus of much critical attention, not least because the boundaries and very idea of the ‘work’ have undergone much rethinking. This conference invites papers that reexamine both the boundaries and the idea through the lens of what would once have been treated as secondary matter: drafts, sketches, works-in-progress, words or music supposedly supplanted by revision, left unfinished or partially effaced by the passing of time – discarded fragments, involuntary fragments, the fragment as a genre unto itself.
How do the conditions of incompleteness differ between words and music, in their various mediations as print, performance or digital code? How are practices of reading and listening influenced by the fact of incompleteness? What can we learn about the fragment from the many unfinished works that have entered the music-and-literature canon, from Mozart’s Requiem to Berg’s Lulu and beyond? What happens when hermeneutics faces the challenge of parts that cannot form a whole? How can aesthetic practices that involve various degrees of on-the-spot creation – from the rhapsodes of antiquity via virtuoso coloratura improvisation to jazz, poetry slam and live rap battling – be rethought through concepts of the unfinished? This list, of course, is incomplete. We especially welcome papers that go beyond incomplete subject matter to raise larger cultural, historical, or philosophical issues in the area of word and music studies.
As at former conferences, the "Surveying the Field" section will feature papers airing general theoretical and methodological questions intrinsic to the scholarly field of Word and Music Studies. Overviews of recent developments and new directions are welcome; however, papers in this area should not address specialised topics.
Papers addressing the conference theme and "Surveying the Field" should be 30 minutes in length. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words via email to Walter Bernhart (walter.bernhart@uni-graz.at) by 31 October 2016.
150-word abstracts of shorter papers (15 minutes) from early-career researchers on relevant topics of their own choosing will also be considered for one or two sessions.
All abstracts should indicate your present location and academic affiliation and the category (longer or shorter) under which you would like to be considered.
Members of the Programme Committee are Walter Bernhart, Axel Englund, and Lawrence Kramer. The local organizer in Stockholm is Axel Englund (Department of Culture and Aesthetics), axel.englund@littvet.su.se.
Events planned for the conference include an opening reception and concert on the Wednesday evening, as well as an excursion to Drottningholm, a UNESCO World Heritage site, with an intact baroque theatre with its 18th-century stage machinery still in use. The conference is timed to coincide with the summer season of the Drottningholm Court Theatre, which in 2017 will be featuring a new production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Further details will be given in the First Circular.
For further information on the WMA, its members and activities, please visit WMA website.
