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Program

For an overview of the program (as of April 18, continuously updated), click here:

Conference Program

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Keynote Lectures

Keynote Lecture 1: Nina Sun Eidsheim

Thursday, May 23, 2024
5:45–7:15 PM | PFL, Großer Saal

Worldmaking: Performing, Reading, and Listening to Wadada Leo Smith’s Ankhrasmation

Ankhrasmation—an original compositional language invented by composer, trumpet player, and music theorist/philosopher Wadada Leo Smith (1941-)—has often been misunderstood as graphical notation. Considering and reevaluating the cultural implications of this narrowly framed Eurological interpretation, I seek to offer a different source and an alternative context for Smith’s singular contribution to American music. Building on work in Black studies, American music, and sound studies (Brooks, forthcoming; Brown, 2010; Eshun, 1998; Crawley, 2016; Kelley, 2009; Kun, 2005; Moten, 2003, Radano, 1995; Redmond, 2020), I use a multimodal (archival, ethnographic, and practice-based) methodological approach to offer three related contributions. First, following scholars including Lewis (2008), Piekut (2011), Southern (1997), and Radano (1993), I amplify and extend activism and scholarship that takes African American musicians seriously as composers. Second, through documenting and closely analyzing Smith’s unique notational and compositional strategies within the context of American composers generally, and contemporaneous (1960s-) composers experimenting with notation specifically, this research calls attention to the “exclusionary effects” of listening practices (DGfA 2024 call), and foregrounds an often overlooked dimension to the established story of twentieth century American composers and their practices (including Sitsky, 2002, Duckworth, 1995). And third, this project seeks to map Smith’s legacy—his indelible contribution to the American soundscape—by offering the practice of world making through writing, performing, reading, and listening to Ankhrasmation.

Nina Sun Eidsheim writes about voice, race, and materiality, including the books Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. She is Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles and Associate Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center. She is also a vocalist and the founder and director of the UCLA Practice-based Experimental Epistemology Research (PEER) Lab, an experimental research Lab dedicated to decolonializing data, methodology, and analysis, in and through multisensory creative practices.

Keynote Lecture 2: Nassim Winnie Balestrini

Friday, May 24, 2024
9:00–10:30 AM | A14, Hörsaal 2

Sound Arguments: Reflections on the Sonic in Climate Change Drama

Dramatic works that address climate change frequently have an argumentative bent expressed through verbal discourse that highlights specific outlooks. While the semantic contents of such utterances have been discussed by scholars, the sonic features attached to verbal exchanges and their relatedness to other sounds have been neglected. This paper will discuss works whose use of sonic features go beyond exerting an aesthetic, decorative, or atmospheric impact in order to become part of the discursive structure of a play. This inquiry will be contextualized within theater-artists’ endeavors to overcome the anthropocentrism of Western traditions. Thus, the discussion of dramatic soundscapes will include sounds from the more-than-human realm, ranging from creaking ice and howling wind to flora and fauna. By approaching the sonic as a variegated repertoire of dramatic signifiers, this talk will offer reflections on stage-related soundscapes that are designed to develop argumentative prowess within the theatrical representation of climate change debates. Sensory historian Mark M. Smith exhorts scholars “to listen historically” (A Sensory History Manifesto [2021] 32) and to research the nexus between changing sensory habits and new social realities (62). As the analysis of several plays intends to show, climate change theater challenges us to listen not simply habitually but rather with ears attuned to planetarity, cross-species connectedness, the elements, deep time, and human limitations. Ultimately, this keynote hopes to forge a path towards defining a sonic ecology of climate change drama.

Nassim Winnie Balestrini is professor of American Studies and Intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria, where she also directs the Centre for Intermediality Studies. Previously, she taught in Germany and the United States. Her publications include monographs on Vladimir Nabokov (in English and German) and on opera adaptations of nineteenth-century American fiction, edited/co-edited collections (most recently, Aging Studies and Ecocriticism, 2023), articles on hip hop (e.g., in Popular Music and Society, the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies, and Ecozon@), and on intermediality theory and practice (e.g., a special issue on “Depicting Destitution Across Media” for the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings), on contemporary American poetry (e.g., in Amerikastudien/American Studies), and on climate change drama (e.g., in JCDE and Nordic Theatre Studies).

Keynote Lecture 3: Jonathan Rosenberg

Saturday, May 25, 2024
11:30 AM–1:00 PM | A14, Hörsaal 2

Composers, Maestros, and Pianists: Considerations on Classical Music and World Politics in Postwar America

Over the course of the twentieth century, the classical music community in the United States was drawn into the maelstrom of world politics, a development that supplied classical music with a degree of political significance that is now difficult to comprehend. International affairs, including the emergence of totalitarian regimes and the two world wars, had a profound impact on the activities of instrumentalists, singers, conductors, and composers in the United States, and also on the work of American symphony orchestras and opera companies. Beyond this, world politics shaped how listeners, music critics, journalists, and even those with little affection for classical music responded to and interacted with the music and with those who performed and composed it.
In focusing on the post-1945 era, the talk will explore how world politics touched the creative lives of artists such as Shostakovich, Copland, Bernstein, Furtwangler, Cliburn, and Gieseking. Whether on American soil or in Europe, the activities of such figures became enmeshed in the Cold War and in the heated controversies surrounding Nazism, which continued to roil the American public in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
As will be seen, the world of classical music in the United States helped the American people decide what was worth fighting for; it illuminated the meaning of democracy, freedom, and patriotism; and it supplied insight into the way Americans understood the nature of tyranny and oppression. Finally, classical music and the work of classical musicians helped the American people reflect on the role of the United States in the world and enhanced their understanding of the country’s purpose in the postwar era.

Jonathan Rosenberg is a professor of twentieth-century U.S. history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research focuses on the history of the United States in a global context. His books include Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War (W.W. Norton, 2020); How Far the Promised Land?: World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 2006); co-author, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (W.W. Norton, 2003); co-editor, Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1999). His current project is The Jazz Expats: How American Jazz Musicians Left Their Country and Changed the World. Before becoming a historian, Rosenberg worked as a musician.

Panels

(1) Indigenous Sonic Sovereignty in Literature and Culture

A01, Room 0-005

Panel Organizers:
Stefan Benz (Bonn) & Sabine N. Meyer (Bonn)

Presentations:

Sonic Sovereignty in Native Oratory
Angela Benkhadda (Bonn)

Sovereign Voices and Intimate Relations: Indigenous Podcasts in the 21st Century Mediascape
René Dietrich (Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)

Sounding the Territory and Storying the Land (Back): Talking Totems and Talking Trees in Contemporary Indigenous Art and Storytelling
Sabine Kim (Mainz)

Reclaiming the Body, Reclaiming the Voice: Tanya Tagaq's Inuk Throat Singing
Doro Wiese (Nijmegen)