The organizers of “Musicology’s Modernist Moment, 1918–1933” invite proposals for papers and presentations for an international symposium at the University of Vienna on November 28–29, 2024. The symposium itself will take place in Vienna on the University of Vienna campus. Most symposium events will be in-person, though there will also be opportunities for hybrid and virtual presentations and participation. Both German and English will serve as symposium languages, and proposals are welcome in either language. Proposals should contain an abstract of no more than 250 words, and they too may be in English or German. Potential presenters should identify whether they would attend in-person in Vienna or would be joining the symposium virtually. We particularly encourage proposal submissions from young scholars at the early stages of their careers. Please submit the proposals in either English or German via email to Prof. Dr. Philip Bohlman (boh6@uchicago.edu), Prof. Dr. Julio Mendívil (julio.mendivil@univie.ac.at), or Melani Shahin (shahin@uchicago.edu). The deadline for proposals is: October 21, 2024.
The Symposium Theme
In the years following the First World War modern music scholarship emerged from a moment of intellectual foment, scientific revolution, and social crisis, together converging to generate multiple movements of modernism in the arts. It is the goal of this symposium to bring together diverse approaches to the intellectual history of music scholarship. From the first model proposed by Guido Adler in 1885 to an international field of collaboration across the humanities and sciences, the early twentieth century—especially the interwar period—was critical for the transformation of music scholarship in Central Europe. The modernist turn in the arts, for example the aesthetic realignments presaged by the Wiener Moderne in the early decades of the twentieth century, intersected with technological paradigm shifts, for example, the emergence of the electronic microphone in ca. 1925. Vienna played a particularly vital role in the new modernist formations during the interwar period, notably also because of the emigration of scholars and schools of musical thought to the United States. Among the wide range of approaches to the symposium theme are the following:
• Musicology’s Modernist Moment was one of mobility, encounter, and increasingly radical experimentation.
• Musicology, as a field with diverse disciplines, will be considered in the broadest sense for the symposium:
• Historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory and analysis, systematic musicology, sociology of music, psychology of music, aesthetics, Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, and Volksmusikforschung.
• Critical to the modernist transformation of music’s disciplines during the interwar period were the increasingly intensive exchanges with other disciplines undergoing radical change, among them:
• Psychoanalysis, physics, mathematics, philosophy, and anthropology.
• National and cultural politics left their impact on university musicology programs and the
preservation of local and global musics in archives, such as those in Vienna, Berlin, and Washington.
• Musicological thought also emerged globally during this period—in the Americas, the Global South, Africa, Asia—and we welcome proposals for papers that examine modernism beyond Europe
We are hopeful, therefore, that presentations at the symposium can capture the modernist spirit of such intellectual and artistic exchange in its complex fullness.
Symposium Organizers
Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago)
Julio Mendívil (Vienna)
Martin Ringsmut (Vienna)
Melani Shahin (Chicago)
Florian Walch (Chicago)