Making Time in Music: an international conference
12-13 September 2016
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford
Call for Papers
The capacity to be in time together lies at the heart of all
music-making and is one of the most profound of human capabilities;
being in time together is implicated in social bonding, altered
states, and foundational pleasures associated with music. The ways in
which we play in time together, also mark out difference-between
genres and between instruments (and instrumentalists), between studio
and live performance, between the virtuoso and the beginner.
Two assertions about the temporal in music are the starting point for
our call for papers: David Epstein's comment in his seminal book,
Shaping Time, that time is 'the critical element in performance', and
Lefebvre's lament that rhythm has been music's neglected component.
These comments underscore the aim of this conference, which is to
bring time and timing to the fore in our thinking about musical
experience, and in particular, its production.
The conference committee encourages submissions from scholars
representing diverse disciplines whose interests lie in time, timing
and timekeeping, and their construction by musicians. We welcome
papers that address the subject from the following broad perspectives:
the psychological/cognitive foundations of this human achievement,
time and timing as part of specific cultural praxis, critical
approaches to time and technology, the aesthetics of timing, and
musical time's relationship to social being.
The following list of questions indicates some broad concerns of the
conference but is suggestive rather than prescriptive.
- How is the time of music implicated in social being and sociability?
In what ways does the social penetrate the temporality of music?
- Can we speak of cultures of time in music? How does the relatively
tacit feel for time amongst musicians connect with the discursive?
- What is the relationship between the relatively automatic capacity
to be in time together and timekeeping as intentional and expressive?
- In what ways have technologies changed our relationship to time in
music? Is temporality changed through developments in recording and
digital technologies?
- What are the politics of musical time?
- What methods are available to us to address questions of
temporality, music, the social and the psychological?
- How do we teach and learn about time in music?
Proposals of 250-300 words are invited for spoken papers of 20
minutes. These should be sent as a Word attachment to
makingtime@music.ox.ac.uk and must include the following: Title,
author(s), affiliation(s), email address for contact. The deadline for
proposals is Friday 15 April 2016 at midday. Decisions on proposals
will be communicated by Monday 9 May 2016.
Registration will open on Tuesday 10 May. Information about the
conference-accommodation, travel information, draft programme and so
on will be available on our website:
http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/makingtimeinmusic
It is hoped that some papers from the conference will contribute to a
volume, Making Time in Music, edited by Mark Doffman.
The conference committee is: Dr Mark Doffman, Dr Jonna Vuoskoski, and
Dr Toby Young (all University of Oxford), and Dr Emily Payne
(University of Leeds).
Dr Emily Payne
Postdoctoral Research Assistant, John Cage and the Concert for Piano
and Orchestra Project
School of Music, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
Tel. +44 (0)113 343 8209 / +44 (0)7816 401211
Email: E.L.Payne@leeds.ac.uk
https://leeds.academia.edu/EmilyPayne
