Faculty members at the American Musicological Society annual meeting

The 90th annual meeting for the American Musicological Society (AMS) takes place in Chicago, Illinois this week. The meeting is a forum for the exploration of music and musicology, and the breadth of topics is evident from the papers submitted by three of our Faculty members. Professors Laura Tunbridge, Naomi Waltham-Smith and Daniel Grimley will all be in attendance, presenting their recent work.

Speaking on Thursday, Professor Grimley will chair a roundtable on 'Bordering Modernisms', in which the presenters will discuss the possibilities and limits of borders in the schemes of global modernism. Daniel's own work attends to the idea of border crossing in Antarctica, particularly how sound reflects crossings between human and non-human agencies, and set within the context of ecological catastrophe. 

The following day Professor Tunbridge explores contrasting interpretations of Bartók string quartets, listening to post-war recordings from Hungary and America. As part of the session 'Sounding "Real": Identity and Authentic Performance', Laura's presentation 'Sounding’ Bartók c.1950' looks at the impact of Bartók's music to establish identity at a time when national styles were losing definition.

Professor Waltham-Smith delivers her paper 'Ec(h)ologies and Worldmaking' on Sunday as part of the session 'Listening, Climate Catastrophe, and Colonial Extraction'. The paper explores how pressure might be put on structural listening as a form of worldmaking that reduces the environment’s diversity, and examines how echolocation allows us to think about aurality’s worldmaking capacities.

Read more about the conference at chicago2024.ams-net.org