[MEI-L] CfP

[Beate Kutschke]

Dear MEI-L,

Apologies for cross-posting. Please feel free to forward this CfP to
interested parties:

Call for Papers and Poster Presentations
Paris Lodron University Salzburg, 3 to 4 April 020
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 September 2019

Life-World and Musical Form – Concepts, Models, and Analogies

“It is by no means certain what form in music is, and any attempt to
formulate rules would provoke nothing but derision”. Despite Dahlhaus’
habitually pessimistic insight, music scholars and musicians have
developed manifold concepts of form that were usually applied to more
than one musical work. In doing so, they were influenced by life-world
[lebensweltlich] concepts, models and analogies: in the musical
rhetorical tradition, Mattheson understood musical form as the sequence
of sentences (principal and subordinate clauses). Marx established an
architectural model encoding the individual modules with letters. Around
the turn of the 20th century Schenker and Kurth implicitly drew on
evolutionary theory and theories from the field of thermodynamics for
their models of musical form. In the late 20th century, after the
scholarly community had come to terms with the hyper-individuality of
contemporary and especially avant-garde music, Caplin initiated a new
trend in musical-form analysis, which shifted the priority from the
composition’s wholeness to its elements. While his approach was
functional and taxonomic, Hepokoski and Darcy proposed the established
dichotomy between ‘general/normative’ vs.
‘particular/deviant/innovative’ to musical form. Most recently,
Greenberg, Diergarten and Neuwirth described form of the classical era
as an effect of the type case or toy block principle according to which
the composers combined modules more or less freely. In sum, the history
of music theory points to the constitutive role that life-world
experiences, visualizations and metaphors have played in the development
of diverse concepts of musical form.

This workshop aims to better understand musical form in light of current
theories and models by focusing on two aspects:
1. It will reconstruct the diverse life-world models, tropes and
theories that have stimulated music theorists and musicians in the past
twenty years.
2. It will bring together scholars who have recently developed new
approaches to musical form and like to discuss the models, tropes and
theories that inspired them.

We invite papers and poster presentations of approximately 20 minutes,
especially by young scholars and/or from the ‘digital field’. Please
send abstracts of 250 words in English to beateruth.kutschke at sgb.ac.at.

For updates:
http://historiography-of-musical-form-through-mir.sbg.ac.at/cfp/