Related organisations, including scholarly societies, study groups and institutional departments, are warmly invited to host a session at the conference. The topic and organisation of such sessions is left to the host: sessions may feature invited speakers. All formats will be considered.

If you would like to be involved in this way, please upload your session abstract and the abstracts of and information about all contributors to the Associates Sessions form by 15 December 2018:

Submitted paper abstracts may be up to 350 words (if an individual paper of 20 minutes), up to 500 words (if a collaborative paper of 30 minutes), and abstracts outlining the rationale for the session may be up to 350 words.

We invite submissions for papers on any topic relating to music and philosophy. The conference presumes inclusive definitions of both music and philosophy. We take music to include all forms and genres of music, art music and popular, secular and sacred, from any and all historical and geographical locales. We take philosophy to include analytic, continental, classical, and non-Western thought, as well as critical theory. Regardless of disciplinary affiliation, the committee seeks conceptually rigorous and clearly articulated research that presents a novel argument and advances understanding of its topic.

Collaboration between persons from different disciplines (including music studies, philosophy, performance, composition, psychology, history, literary studies, art history, anthropology, and others) would be especially welcomed.

Proposals are invited for:

• individual papers (20 minutes) – up to 350 words
• collaborative papers (30 minutes) – up to 500 words
• lecture recitals (30 minutes) – up to 350 words

Please submit proposals by 15 December 2018 using the Free Sessions form.

Convenors
Dr Simon Høffding (University of Oslo)
Dr Nanette Nielsen (University of Oslo)

For recent “4E” approaches within cognitive science the mind is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended, and cognition is shaped by dynamic interactions between the brain, the body, and physical and social environments. Part of this shaping occurs by a process of “mental offloading”: once we “scaffold” know-how into our physical surroundings we engage in such offloading. Examples include tilting our heads to perceive a rotated image, or storing knowledge into our memory-supporting smartphone such that we receive a reminder of an upcoming event. In accounting for the materiality of musical encounters, Joel Krueger (2017) argues that music can serve as a tool for offloading in a similar way as other tools and technologies. Via this offloading, “music can (at least potentially) scaffold access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour” (Krueger 2017, 2).

Considering musical engagement and experience as fundamentally embodied allows us to ask the question of what possible mental transformation can occur through listening and/or performing. For instance, Krueger’s work shows how people listen to music to regulate their emotions and open new spheres of emotion (2014). Further, music performance at expert levels seems to enable new forms of reflection, in which reflective and pre-reflective modes of self-awareness combine in unusual ways (McGuiness 2014) or in which one develops a simultaneous multiplicity of first-personal perspectives (Hurlburt 2011). Tout court, expert musical performance seems to scaffold new forms of consciousness (Høffding 2019). For this session we seek to foster further music-philosophical dialogue about these recent approaches and invite papers from musicologists and/or philosophers that interrogate and discuss how musical offloading – as listening and/or performing – might enable new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour.

Abstracts of up to 350 words (or 500 for collaborative papers) should be sent to Simon Høffding: simon.hoffding@imv.uio.no by 21 December 2018 with the subject “A Musical Matter of Mind.”

Works cited:

Hurlburt, Russell T (2011). Investigating Pristine Inner Experience: Moments of Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Høffding, Simon (2019). A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Krueger, Joel (2014). “Musical Manipulations and the Emotionally Extended Mind.” Empirical Musicology Review 9 (3).

Krueger, Joel (2017). “Music as Affective Scaffolding” in David Clarke, Ruth Herbert & Eric Clarke (eds.), Music and Consciousness II. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming)

McGuiness, Andy (2013). “Self-Consciousness in Musical Performance.” In Experience and Meaning in Music Performance, edited by Martin Clayton, Byron Dueck, and Laura Leante, 108–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Convenor
Max Erwin (University of Leeds)

Since its advent in the early 20th century and its international institutionalisation after World War II, New Music has often served as a proving ground for philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and ideological theorising. Recently, through a renewed focus on curatorial practices, New Music has come under scrutiny from post-colonial, feminist, and post-Deleuzian “hyperaffirmative” theorists (George Lewis, Georgina Born, and Patrick Frank, respectively). At the same time, the work of Seth Brodsky has deployed a reinvigorated Lacanian psychoanalysis to wrest deep-structural insights from both the work of Wolfgang Rihm in particular and Western culture since 1989 in general. The category of “avant-garde” itself has undergone philosophical re-evaluation – Martin Iddon has proposed that New Music now exists as a “subculture”, while Lauren Redhead instead terms it an “exform”, and Benjamin Piekut has identified a “vernacular avant-garde” which has eschewed received formal categories while enjoying institutional patronage. In response to these and many more developments, this session aims to serve as an impetus to explore the intersections of philosophy and the practices and discourses within and marginal to New Music as manifested since 1945. Potential departure points might include:

• How do philosophical concerns—stated or otherwise—inform practitioners within the avant-garde art music tradition?
• Which philosophies serve to legitimate certain practices—as “avant-garde,” “progressive,” “inclusive,” or otherwise—and by whom are they deployed?
• How has the ontological status of the musical “work” changed (or not) since the post-war period?
• How do “avant-garde” and “New Music” function as aesthetic categories today?

Abstracts of up to 350 words (or 500 for collaborative papers) should be sent to Max Erwin by 21 December 2018 with the subject “From 1945: Philosophy and New Music.”

Convenor
Nicholas Ball (University of Cambridge)

Premodern and early-modern uses of the term ‘musica’ encompass a broad range of meanings, which include some things that we might today be happy to call music and others that we might rather call philosophy. We can turn for instance to Boethius’ famous division of musica into cosmic music, human music, and music which rests in certain instruments (Bower 1989). Indeed the influence of musica extends far into medieval natural philosophy, in which it was fundamental to the development of cosmological models (Hicks 2017). But musica was only one interface between the musical and the philosophical; in the course of a long middle ages many other disciplinary perspectives were brought to bear to differently negotiate the relationship between music and ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language (for example Leach 2007).

Scholars working on music and philosophy in later centuries have made use of a capacious definition of philosophy to draw out a complex and changing set of interactions, overlaps, and relations between the musical and the philosophical. The many medieval negotiations of music and philosophy offer an opportunity to reflect upon the ‘prehistories’ of ideas more usually discussed under that subdisciplinary heading, and to occasion a productive dialogue between medievalists and scholars of later centuries about the commonalities and shared concerns as well as areas of productive difference in their work.

Papers are welcome on any aspect of music and philosophy in a long middle ages with reference to Latin, Arabic, or any other musical or philosophical tradition.

Abstracts of up to 350 words (or 500 for collaborative papers) should be sent to Nicholas David Yardley Ball by 21 December 2018 with the subject “Is there a Medieval ‘Music and Philosophy’?”

Convenors
Frankie Perry (Royal Holloway)
Peter Asimov (University of Cambridge)

Musical transcriptions and arrangements have been the subject of much philosophizing and theorizing. Within analytic philosophy, for instance, they have sparked ontological debate (for instance, Davies 1988; Goehr 1992; Kivy 1993; Thom 2007). Elsewhere Peter Szendy’s conception of arrangement as written-down listening fosters further plastic, ecological, and hermeneutic approaches. Within musicology, Liszt’s oeuvre of transcriptions have been explored through historical theories of translation (Kregor 2010); queer-theoretical models have been used to dissect the cultural workings of cover songs (Peraino; Halberstam 2007); considerations of the ethics of ethnographic transcription have spanned over half a century (see Stanyek 2014); and recently Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has provocatively argued that ‘there are no arrangements’. Arrangement studies is gaining momentum, with recent conferences and volumes forthcoming, while outside the academy, musically adaptive practices continue to be ubiquitous.

We invite speakers to reignite philosophical and theoretical discussions raised by all manner of musical reimaginings. Possible topics include – but are not limited to – the following prompts: How can arrangements complicate notions of the musical work: do they reinforce, or threaten, it? Can ontological debates be sidestepped (or re-energised) by turning to concepts from performance or adaptation studies? How should we approach the abundant repertoire of contemporary compositions that re-imagine the music of the past or of different traditions, and how do issues of ownership and copyright intersect with these approaches? What are the relationships between arrangement, understandings of style, and perceptions of musical or historical time? Can new perspectives be brought to the various historical, economic, and cultural circulations and mediations of arrangements?

This session is convened by the study group ‘TAROT’ (‘Transcription, Arrangement/adaptation, Reworking, Orchestration, and Translation’). Building on conference sessions on “Arrangements since 1900” (ICMSN, 2017) and on “Reimagining Musical Reimaginings” (RMA, 2018), as well as a conference “Rethinking musical transcription and arrangement” (Cambridge, 2018), we hope to provoke here a philosophical and interdisciplinary discussion of these transformative musical practices.

Abstracts of up to 350 words (or 500 for collaborative papers) should be sent to Frankie Perry and Peter Asimov at tarotmusicology@gmail.com by 21 December 2018 with the subject “Philosophies and Theories of Musical Transcription and Arrangement.”

Convenors
Clément Canonne (IRCAM-CNRS)
Nicolas Donin (IRCAM-CNRS)
Pierre Saint-Germier (IRCAM-CNRS)

Notation arguably plays a central role in a great number of musical practices. By bringing philosophers and musicologists together in this themed session, we seek to bring theoretical resources from various approaches (e.g. material culture, relevance theory, embodied cognition, etc.) to enable a comprehensive theorizing of music notation.

Potential topics of discussion include, but are not limited to the following:

Uses of musical notations

What types of notations are used by which practitioners for what purposes? There are many cases for which notation seems to fall outside of the prescription/description dichotomy (i.e., Cardew’s Treatise), so that a widening of the repertoire of possible functions might be called for, as well as a reconceptualization of the more familiar functions.

Beyond the code

There is a tendency, inherited from Nelson Goodman, to see notations as encoding musical properties. However, the code-model of communication has been severely criticized for neglecting the role of intention and inference in communication. Stressing communication’s inferential aspects opens new avenues to discuss the traditional issues of notation’s interpretation, disambiguation, incompleteness and context-dependency.

Musical ontology and musical notation

On some views of the ontology of musical works, notation is decisive, fixing the identity conditions of works and the extension of the relation of execution between a work and a performance. But this sort of view is usually based on an idealized view of musical notations and seems to deflate music’s sonic nature. Closer attention to the details of the interface between notations and performances should therefore have an impact of the way to conceive the ontology of musical works.

Alternative notations

Proposals for reforming the standard western notation are frequently offered. This raises questions about the reasons for this growing diversification and the various criteria (cultural, cognitive, pedagogical, aesthetic, etc.) that are used or could be used to guide the choice, by particular agents, for one notational system over another.

The ear, the eye and the body

Musical notations create an interface between the ears, eyes and bodies. This suggests a reconceptualisation of such notations as cognitive artefacts, extending the processing of musical information and control of movement outside the body of the musician. How far can the currently fashionable theories of embodied and extended cognition shed light on musical notation?

Abstracts of up to 350 words (or 500 for collaborative papers) should be sent to Pierre Saint-Germier by 21 December 2018 with the subject “Reconceiving Musical Notation.”