1st International Symposium: Awe, Wonder and Passion: Music and the Creation of Meaning

1st International Symposium:
Awe, Wonder and Passion: Music and the Creation
of Meaning

Part of the Research Program on:
Aesthetic Lives, Artistic Selves

International Network for Alternative Academia
(Extends a general invitation to participate)

Saturday 10th to Monday 12th of November, 2012
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Call for Papers

This trans-disciplinary project seeks to
understand the value and meaning music has in
our lives, as well as the multiple ways music
structures and informs our relationships, sense
of place and self across historical periods and
within cultural, political and social contexts.
Exploring how music is created, received,
consumed and appropriated, this symposium offers
an opportunity to consider the ways in which
music is interweaved with social and cultural
processes of the construction of self,
membership and community, and conversely with
the generation of otherness, exclusion and
isolation.

We invite colleagues from all disciplines and
professions interested in sharing these
explorations in a collective, deliberative and
dialogical environment to send presentation
proposals that address these general questions
or the following themes:

1. Speak to Me: The Language of Musical Creation

- Can music be theorized?
- Is music analogous to language? How to
understand a musical phrase, as a spoken or
written sentence? What is the grammar of music?
- Are spaces between notes similar to pauses
between words? What is the place of silence and
pause in music? Can we conceive of the force and
power of silence?
- Who do we hear speaking when we listen to
music? What do we hear?
- Can there be neutrality in musical creation?
Must music have an inherent meaning? Must it be
created with intent?
- Can a novel be transformed into a piece of
music? Can a piece of music be transformed into
a painting? What are the challenges of ekphrasis?

2. Phenomenology of the Musical Realm: Emotions
and Meaning

- What questions does music allow us to ask?
What answers does it facilitate us finding?
- Can we conceive of music as a mode of enquiry?
What would it require?
- How do context, culture and time link music
and meaning?
- Is music love by another means?
- How is it that music taps into our emotions
giving rise to great passion and great pain?
- What is the transformative value of music?
- How can we tell the story of the lived
experience of ever present appreciation, yet
ever changing meaning of music?
- What would a life devoid of music feel like?
What would it sound like?

3. Creativity and Critique

- What metaphors can be most aptly employed to
capture the process of musical creation?
- What is it about music and the musical
experience that seems to invade and take over
all senses, to overwhelm life-worlds?
- How does musical creation pay homage to the
past? How does it allow for the re-envisioning
of the future? What about the link to the
present?
- Can the creative process be articulated? Can
it be mapped? Can it be captured by discourse?
- How can we account for the awesome capacity
that music has for breaking frontiers, shifting
boundaries, inventing new forms of expression,
redefining terrains, envisioning new horizons?
- How does music subtlety confront, contest and
overturn even its own language and metaphors?

4. Roots of Music: Grounding, Context and
Politics

- How is music and musical taste culturally and
socially constructed?
- Given its roots in whorehouses and backrooms
to its performance in music halls, how is music
legitimized and sanctified?
- Is music politics by another means? What is
the role of music during times of social,
economic and/or cultural crisis?
- What is the interstitial value of music? Does
it dissolve or re-instill binary oppositions
created based upon race, ethnicity, gender, sex,
geography and class? Does music challenge or
reinforce such divisions as those made between
center and periphery, self and other; and, the
western and the non-western?
- How does improvisation encourage and inform
challenges to the meanings and messages found in
and through music?
- How are new technologies affecting the
production, dissemination and appreciation of
music?

5. Everyone's a Critic?

- Do we need special translators to appreciate
music?
- Is there a need for music critics? How is the
role of the critic being re-configured in the
new media?
- Who gets to define the value of music, to
dictate what constitutes musical "taste"?
- Who is talking back to critics? Are there
efforts in sidestepping the place that critics
have in the institutionalized visions of music
evaluation?
- Is there space for debate about quality and
creation of music?
- What can we learn from musicology and ethno-
musicology?

6. Productive Forces/Instructive Bonds

- What institutions constrict and confine
musical creation? What institutions expand it?
- Are new technologies and new modes of funding
challenging traditional models?
- What factors -social, political and artistic-
are informing the recent trend towards remakes,
remixes and replays?
- What is alternative in alternative music?
- Why is there a need for music? What does it
add and what does it subtract from our lives?
Why does music persist?
- What does the investigation into the
neurological foundations of music add to our
understanding of music? What does it take away?
- Who is defending and protecting the dreams and
fantasies made by music and the musical
experience?

If you are interested in participating in this
Annual Symposium, submit a 400 to 500 word
abstract by Friday 8th of June, 2012.  Please
use the following template for your submission:

First: Author(s);
Second: Affiliation, if any;
Third: Email Address;
Fourth: Title of Abstract and Proposal;
Fifth: The 400 to 500 Word Abstract.

To facilitate the processing of abstracts, we
ask that you use Word, WordPerfect or RTF
formats, only and that you use plain text,
resisting the temptation of using special
formatting, such as bold, italics or underline.

Please send emails with your proposals to the
Annual Symposium Coordination address (mcm-
[email protected]) with the following
subject line: Music & the Creation of Meaning
Abstract Proposal.

For every abstract proposal sent, we acknowledge
receipt. If you do not receive a reply from us
within one week you should assume we did not
receive it. Please resend from your account and
from an alternative one, to make sure your
proposal does get to us.

All presentation and paper proposals which
address these questions and issues will be fully
considered and evaluated. Accepted abstracts
will require a full draft paper by Friday 31st
of August, 2012. Papers presented at the
symposium are eligible for publication as part
of a digital or paperback book.

We invite colleagues and people interested in
participating to disseminate this call for
papers. Thank you for sharing and cross-listing
where and whenever appropriate.

Hope to meet you in Montreal!

Symposium Coordinators:

Cheryl Sim
Commissaire Associée
DHC/ART Fondation pour l'art contemporain
Montréal, Québec, Canada
Email: [email protected]

Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
General Coordinator
International Network for Alternative Academia
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Email: [email protected]

*****

Informational Note:

Alternative Academia is an international network
of intellectuals, academics, independent
scholars and practitioners committed to creating
spaces, both within and beyond traditional
academe, for creative, trans-disciplinary and
critical thinking on key themes. We offer annual
and biannual symposiums at sites around the
world, providing forums that foster the
development of new frames of reference and
innovative structures for the production and
expansion of knowledge and theory. Dialogue,
discussion and deliberation define both the
methods employed and the values upheld by this
network.

Visit our website at: www.alternative-academia.net