PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME
Provisional programme
FIRST CIRCULAR
It is our pleasure to invite you to Munich for the Thirteenth International Conference of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The local organizer is Frieder von Ammon of the Department of German Philology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). The conference is hosted by this department. A total of 32 speakers from around the world will participate during the four days of the conference, and we are confident that the forthcoming conference, like its forerunners, will be a significant event in the field.
The opening of the conference will take place in the ‘Philologicum’ (Ludwigstraße 25, 80539 München); it is just around the corner of the university’s main building (Geschwister Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 München). The rest of the conference will be held at the ‘Seidlvilla’ in Munich-Schwabing (Nikolaiplatz 1B, 80802 München, https://www.seidlvilla.de/), about 15 minutes of walking distance away from the university. The university area is located near to the city centre and easily accessible by U-Bahn (stop: ‘Universität’) from the central station. The stop closest to Seidlvilla is ‘Giselastraße’.
We are looking forward to receiving your abstracts and hope to be able to welcome you in Munich in June 2023. For general information on the WMA, please consult our web page, www.wordmusicstudies.net.
There are plenty of hotels at all price levels in Munich, but they fill up quickly during the conference period, so participants will be wise to make reservations without undue delay. Here are some suggestions:
http://www.siegestor.de/
http://www.carlton-astoria.de/start.htm
https://www.antares-muenchen.de/
https://www.leonardo-hotels.de/munich/leonardo-boutique-hotel-munich
The conference will open on Wednesday, June 28, with a welcoming reception at 18:30 h, followed by a performance of the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters (illustrating the conference topic Repetition/Variation). On Saturday, July 1, we are organizing an excursion to ‘Kloster Schäftlarn’, a Baroque monastery in the attractive ‘Isartal’ near Munich, which will provide occasion for informal discussions during the trip. The General Assembly, which is open to all members of the association, will take place in a separate room of the monastery’s inn (‘Klosterbräustüberl’), followed by a convivial lunch. The conference will end no later than at 14:00 h.
During our conference, the ‘Münchner Opernfestspiele’ take place at the Bavarian State Opera. You might want to consult the program:
https://www.staatsoper.de/festspiele/
On Saturday, July 1, a performance will be given of Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet, which might be of a special interest for you since our president, Michael Halliwell, is going to give a paper on this work.
Munich is served by Franz Joseph Strauss Airport. The fastest way to get from there to the city is by taxi (≈ € 90). Another option is using public transport. From the airport to the city centre you can use the suburban train line S1 or S8 (≈ € 16).
For timetable enquiries the app "MVG" available from Google Play and App Store is highly recommendable. After entering the preferred final destination, the application provides the shortest/fastest connection at any time of the day. Prices: An hourly ticket costs € 3,70 to 5,60, a twenty-four-hour ticket is up to € 16,00. These tickets are also valid for the train to the airport. Buses and U-Bahn run between the Ludwig Maximilian University and the city centre every 5 to 10 minutes.
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 at www.wordmusicstudies.net.
CALL FOR PAPERS
The 13th Conference on Word and Music Studies, organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) and hosted by Ludwig Maximilians-University of Munich, is scheduled for June 28 to July 1st, 2023. The conveners hereby invite papers on the following topics:
The creation of meaningful and beautiful similarities as part of a pattern or structure is among the most important means humankind has developed in order to create, or respond to, order in various contexts and for various purposes. In the arts, similarity is among the most general aesthetic features which have informed all levels of works of art across cultures and times. It may range from all but zero difference between individual occurrences of a phenomenon (‘repetition’) to recognizable ‘variations’ of the same. The forthcoming conference will focus on the manifold forms and functions which repetition and variation can have in both literature and music. Possible tandem explorations of this phenomenon may range from the comparative discussion of macrostructural forms such as the refrain in poetry and the form of theme with variations in music to microstructural recurrences of motifs, themes and other devices, as well as to the creation of patterns as a general background for foregrounded deviations.
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, Professor Dr Frieder von Ammon by January 1st, 2023 (frieder.vonammon@germanistik.uni-muenchen.de). 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); 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 repetition/variation in literature and music as a major trend in cultural history as well as to Word and Music Studies in general.
Frieder von Ammonchief conference convener,on behalf of the conference team
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I hope everyone is well and that all have come through the last couple of very frustrating years in good shape and good heart. As you can see from the Call for Papers, the conference venue has changed from Leipzig to Munich. The main reason for this is that our Leipzig convenor, Professor Dr Frieder von Ammon, has moved universities and has agreed to host our conference in Munich, for which we are immensely grateful. I’m sure you will agree that Munich is a very worthy substitute for Leipzig!
The dates for the conference: 28 June - 1 July, 2023, have been chosen to coincide with the Munich Opera Festival, which opens on June 26 (Brett Dean’s Hamlet). More details concerning the conference and related activities will be contained in a circular at a later stage, but there is still the hope that we will open the conference with a concert, as in the past, in the evening of Wednesday, 28 June.
Michael Halliwell, 12 October, 2022
