Call for Papers
Web Conference: Locating the “Avant-Garde”: (Post)Modern Music at the Boundaries in the 20th & 21st Centuries
Conference Dates: April 14-15, 21-22, 28-29, 2018
Proposal Deadline: 1 January 2018
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the term “avant-garde” has been used to describe myriad artists, genres, styles, and compositions, demonstrating that this term has had wide-ranging and yet socio-culturally specific significance. One of the goals of the recently founded Musical Avant-Gardes Project (MAG Project) is to interrogate what it means to be “avant-garde” as well as what performing the “avant-garde” means, has meant, and might continue to mean for those involved in musical histories and performances of avant-gardism throughout the world. To this end, the MAG Project is holding its first web-based conference. Through a combination of live-streamed musical and sonic events, as well as talks and interactive panel sessions involving sound artists, composers, music scholars, historians, teachers, and performers, this conference brings together those working on or practicing avant-gardism in all of its various contexts and forms to address the multivalence of “avant-garde,” while encouraging dialogue across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.
Possible topics include:
Teaching, composing, practicing and performing avant-garde music
Limitations of “avant-garde” as analytical category
Avant-garde music histories
Avant-gardism and globalisation
Avant-gardism in popular music/media
Avant-garde music and theorizations of gender, race, sexuality, class, or disability
Avant-gardism and sound studies
Avant-garde music archives
Relationships between avant-garde music, art, and literature
Avant-gardism as revolutionary praxis
Technology and avant-garde music
Please send 150-word presenter biographies and 300-word proposals for papers or presentations (20 minutes); panels or round tables (60 or 90 minutes); and performances (15, 30, or 60 minutes) to musicalavantgardesproject@gmail.com. Although in the future we will accommodate presentations in multiple languages, for this conference we are accepting presentations in English. Please submit proposals as .doc or .pdf files as follows: Last Name.First Name.Project Title.Type of Event. Be sure to include your preferred format (i.e. length of time) in your proposal.
Please direct questions to the above address, or contact Jill Rogers (jillian.rogers@ucc.ie) or Matt Friedman (m.w.friedman@gmail.com). For additional information on the MAG Project, visit our website: http://magproject.org/.