Announcement title

University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz (Kunstuniversität Graz)

Call for Papers: Imperfection as an Aesthetic Idea in Music: Perspectives from Musicology and Artistic Research

Venue: University for Music and the Performing Arts, Graz, Austria (Kunstuniversität Graz)

Dates: May 6 and 7th, 2020

Submission Deadline: 15 October 2019

Languages: English and German

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Seth Brodsky (University of Chicago)

Web address: https://musikaesthetik.kug.ac.at/institut-14-musikaesthetik/symposien/imperfection-as-an-aesthetic-idea-in-music.html

 

When we look to music, are we looking for perfection?  Or does imperfection ultimately have more aesthetic value for us as practitioners and researchers? Historically, perfection has been treated with suspicion as an aesthetic idea in general.  Already in the 1757 On the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke mused that “beauty in distress is the most affecting beauty”; Heinrich Kleist, in his 1810 On the Marionette Theater, further suggested that perfection in art only resided beyond the domain of the properly human.  In recent discussions of aesthetics in the more specific realm of music, however, the issue of imperfection has most often been discussed with primary reference to musical improvisation, although additional topics have sometimes been part of the discourse in musicology and artistic research.

 

Coming from the dual perspectives of artistic research and musicology, this conference aims to broaden our perspectives on how imperfection can inform our aesthetic understanding of music, historically and in current practice.  We are especially interested in the aesthetic implications of musical imperfection from two contrasting points of view: 1) imperfection as a manifest goal of music and musical practice, and 2) imperfection that occurs primarily by accident, but nevertheless has aesthetic significance.  Some possible themes include, but are not at all limited to:

 

  • Imperfection as a compositional goal or effect
  • Imperfection as a goal or effect of improvisation
  • Imperfection as a goal or effect of performance
  • Imperfection as an aesthetic attitude or ideology
  • Imperfection in amateur musical practice (composing, performing, listening)
  • Imperfection and corporeal aspects of music and music-making (i.e., voices and approaches to instruments)
  • Imperfection in recorded music, electronic music, and electroacoustic music
  • Imperfection and chance
  • Imperfection and the glitch
  • Critiques of an aesthetic of imperfection (gender studies approaches, disability studies, posthumanist approaches, etc.)

 

Prof. Seth Brodsky (University of Chicago, USA), will open the conference as keynote speaker.

 

The languages of the conference are English and German; artistic research presentations will be granted a total of thirty minutes, and more strictly musicological papers will be twenty minutes in length.

 

Application Instructions:

The deadline for the receipt of applications is 15 October 2019.  We will communicate the results of the application process by 15 November 2019.  Please submit all materials to Maria Klinger: maria.klinger@kug.ac.at.

 

To be considered as a contributor in musicology or related disciplines:

Please send an application email including your personal contact information and the title of your paper.  To this email please attach an abstract of no more than 350 words (using the title but no personal information).

 

To be considered as a contributor in artistic research:

Please submit concise materials that best present the nature of your contribution while preserving your anonymity.  To do so, please send an application email containing your personal contact information and the title of your contribution; please then attach application materials to this email that reference the title of your presentation only.  These materials must include a short written description of your contribution. These may also include audio or video files of up to seven minutes each, or appropriate weblinks, so long as they and their contents preserve anonymity.  To send audio or audio-visual materials that have a large file size, please do one of the following: 1) share these with Maria Klinger using your own dropbox, file transferring service, or other accessible weblink or 2) request a filesender invitation from Maria Klinger in your application email.  If sending a file, please confine audio or video file types to MP3 (for audio) or MP4 (for audio or video).  Please note that response times for filesender invitations from Maria Klinger may be slow between 27 July 2019 and 18 August 2019.  

 

We look forward to your submissions.

 

The Program Committee

Dr. Jennifer Ronyak; Prof. Dr. Andreas Dorschel; Márcio André Silva Steuernagel



contact: jennifer.ronyak@kug.ac.at

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