Faculty members at the American Musicological Society annual meeting

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241111 ams conference

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

 

Professor Naomi Waltham Smith

In concert: how shared wonder opens our minds

How can shared experiences of music, art and natural beauty expand our imagination and help us better understand each other? Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith explores how moments of shared aesthetic attention can amplify our sense of curiosity and wonder, bringing our imaginative lives into our relationships with others.
Professor Peter Asimov

Professor Peter Asimov awarded SMT Emerging Scholar Award

Professor Asimov's article 'The Melakartas and the ‘République Modale’: Naturalizing Indian Scales in French Musical Modernism' wins the Emerging Scholar Award at this year's Society for Music Theory annual meeting.
Professor Nomi Dave

Listening to the Law research network

Professor Nomi Dave is co-directing a new research network, with Professor Nicole Stremlau (Faculty of Law) and Dr Tareeq Jalloh (Faculty of Philosophy). The network, Listening to the Law, is funded through TORCH for three years. It brings together academics, students, legal practitioners, artists, and others working on questions of sound and the law. To join the network or attend events, please email listening.law@torch.ox.ac.uk