Organised by
Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Lucca
IAM – Italian Institue for Applied Musicology
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International Virtual Conference
6-8 June 2025
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini and the Italian Institute for Applied Musicology are pleased to invite submissions of proposals for the virtual conference «Musical Modernism and its Art Worlds», to be held from 6 to 8 June 2025.
In recent decades, scholarly attention to twentieth-century musical modernism has undergone a notable shift: in contrast to a longstanding focus on compositional philosophies and formal analysis, researchers have increasingly begun turning their attention toward modernism’s entanglements with institutional structures, social (including economic) mediations, and scientific and technological developments.
Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from the sociology of art, science and technology studies, performance studies, and related fields, this historiographical reorientation prompts a reevaluation of tenacious modernist discourses of musical autonomy. This resulting scholarship complements discussions of aesthetic value with attention to the multifaceted “art worlds”—networks of production, dissemination, and reception—that have given rise to and sustained modernist ideals and praxis amid shifting tastes, market forces, and postmodern critique.
It productively challenges the narrative paradigms of modernism and expands its cast of characters, beyond the mythologies and great composer-intellectuals that have long prevailed.
The organizers of this conference hope to respond to research in this vein (see Suggestive Bibliography below), by consolidating existing trends while extending these discussions by drawing comparisons and connections across geographic and temporal contexts. It seeks to enrich our understanding of modernist musical practices by situating them within their broader cultural entanglements, drawing connections between modernism’s aesthetic products and its social processes, broadly conceived.
- Patronage networks (public, private) and economic structures of modernism
- The role of institutions (festivals, schools, professional organizations) in supporting, promoting, or undermining modernist practices and aesthetics
- Mediating modernism (modernist music on print, on the radio, on television…)
- Modernism’s critics; advocates, exegetes, detractors
- The role of pedagogues and performers in shaping modernism and its cultures
- Entanglements between musical modernism and the science and technology industries
- Cultural policy, ideology, and musical modernism
- The dynamics of broader social mediations (e.g., race, gender, class, caste) in musical modernism
- The transnational/global dissemination of musical modernism/modernist music, the idea of “multiple modernisms”
Programme committee:
- Peter Asimov (University of Cambridge)
- Roberto Illiano (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini)
- Massimiliano Locanto (Università degli Studi di Salerno)
- Fulvia Morabito (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini)
- Massimiliano Sala (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini)
Keynote speakers:
- Martin Iddon (University of Leeds)
- Sarah Collins (The University of Western Australia)
The official languages of the conference are English, French, Italian. Papers selected at the conference will be published in a miscellaneous volume.
Papers are limited to 20 minutes in length, allowing time for questions and discussion. Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words. We also welcome proposals for pre-recorded recitals or lecture-recitals of 20-30 minutes in length.
All proposals should be submitted by email no later than ***16 March 2025*** to <conferences@luigiboccherini.org>. Alongside your proposal, please include your name, contact details (postal address, email, and telephone number), and your institutional affiliation (if applicable).
The committee will make its final decision on the abstracts by the end of March 2025, and contributors will be informed immediately thereafter. Further information about the programme and registration will be announced after that date.
For any additional information, please contact:
Dr. Massimiliano Sala
conferences@luigiboccherini.org
www.luigiboccherini.org
Suggestive bibliography:
- Beal, Amy C. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006.
- Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982.
- Born, Georgina, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995.
- Fryberger, Annelies, Juger le singulier. L’évaluation de la musique contemporaine en France et aux États-Unis, Lyon, Symétrie, 2023.
- Goldman, Jonathan. Avant-Garde on Record: Musical Responses to Stereos, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
- Iddon, Martin. New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- Iverson, Jennifer. Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Lewis, George. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008.
- Menger, Pierre-Michel. Le Paradoxe du musicien. Le compositeur, le mélomane et l’État dans la société contemporaine, Paris, Flammarion, 1983.
- Niebur, Louis. Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Piekut, Benjamin. ‘Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques’, in: Twentieth-Century Music, xi/2 (2014), pp. 191-215.
- Quevedo, Marysol. ‘Exchange: Modernist Approaches across Oceans and Borders’, in: A Cultural History of Western Music in the Modern Age, edited by William Cheng and Danielle Fosler-Lussier, London,Bloomsbury, 2023, pp. 105-132.
- Revisiting the Historiography of Postwar Avant-Garde Music, edited by Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet and Christopher Brent Murray, Abingdon-New York, Routledge, 2022.
- Ritchey, Marianna. Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2019.
- The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, edited by Björn Heile and Charles Wilson, Abingdon-New York, Routledge, 2019.
- Tunbridge, Laura, et al. ‘Roundtable: Modernism and its Others’, in: Journal of the Royal Musical Association, cxxxix/1 (2014), pp. 177-204.
