IMS 2002 SYMPOSIA

      In view of the increasing range and variety of scholarship on
music, the 17th Congress of the International Musicological Society, to
be held 1-7 August 2002, in Leuven, Belgium, will present eight
symposia on broad themes introduced below. The symposia will replace
the single theme and related round-tables that have characterized
recent congresses. The program committee has sent out a call for
proposals for complete sessions, individual papers, and poster
presentations related to the eight themes, from which the symposia will
be composed. (For this call, see <http://www.ims-online.ch/>.) The
number of sessions to be held within each symposium is not fixed, nor
must the content of a session, paper, or poster presentation reflect
the themes only as represented here, which are intended as points of
departure.

           Symposium 1     Hearing - Performing - Writing

      How we create music in our minds (as we hear), in the minds of
others (as we perform), or in written or non-written representations of
music (notation, chieronomy) are processes addressed by systematic and
historical musicology, along with many other disciplines outside
musicology that examine communication and cognition. This symposium
encourages research into listening as well as hearing, interpretation
and performance, and the reading and invention of music writing, as
these activities involve repertories, listeners, and executants from a
wide range of times and places.

           Symposium 2      The Dynamics of Change in Music

      Change and continuity are constants in human culture. Discussions
and explanations of change may evoke the chronological (style periods,
stages in composers' or performers' careers), 'geographical'
(influence, acculturation, alienation), philological (syncretism,
contamination), teleological (notions of progress or of cause and
effect), biological (growth or decay), or hierarchical (the coexistence
of different rates of change and strata of change at one time). In
recognition of the complexity of our evolving musical world, this
symposium solicits contributions addressing the epistemology of change.

           Symposium 3       Who Owns Music?

      The lives and careers of musicians suppose a reification of
musical phenomena as is attested by concepts of authorship, patronage,
copyright, and other, still broader aspects of the place of music in
the human economy. Here we examine how and for what purpose people and
institutions commission, acquire, inherit and discard music, and
maintain, control, legislate, or exchange it.

           Symposium 4       Musica Belgica

      A meeting place of European cultures, the area that is now Belgium
has always been a site of musical exchange and creativity. If it seems
impossible to define a Belgian musical identity, it is no less true
that traditions, privileged moments, and periods of uncertainty have
exited. The histories of medieval music theory and of Renaissance
polyphony in the region are best known, but the many manuscript and
local archival studies now require complementary research situating
their histories in a European context and in the broader history of
culture. The examination of issues in modern history, such as the
history of opera, the historiography of music in the 19th century, and
contemporary composition and performance can benefit from a dialogue
between musicologists and historians of diverse disciplines and
methodological interests.

           Symposium 5       Musical Migrations

      Music is movement, musicians are rarely sedentary, and musical
objects (scores, instruments, repertories) often move with them. These
migratory movements cause superficial and radical transformations: the
symbolic dimension of the musical event is more fully revealed, while
the materiality of musical entities and objects is correspondingly
reinforced. Complex values may inform judgements such as "fruitful
synthesis," "stylistic corruption," or even "cultural annihilation."

           Symposium 6       Form and Invention

      "Form and invention" is a binary concept that represents many
varieties of opposition and reciprocity. Although it derives from
western classical rhetoric, it may profitably illuminate a wide range
of music and in turn be enriched by its application. For Renaissance
and Baroque music, it signified the choice and elaboration (inventio)
of common figures (topoi) and their arrangement (dispositio) in
persuasive oratory. Later writers reduced the processes of invention to
the working out of a formal idea, while to composers and the public,
"invention" came to suggest original creation, 'ex nihilo,' as it were.
Such competing meanings of the terms still inform the "neo-classical"
repertory of the last century. The symposium invites investigation of
the presence of "form and invention" across a multiplicity of
repertories and traditions and among a wealth of more recent paradigms
for composition, listening, analysis, and improvisation.

           Symposium 7       Instruments of Music: From Archeology
                             to New Technologies

      Musical instruments range from clapping hands to computers running
on interactive software, from imaginative fancies to mass-produced
souvenirs or pint-sized violins. This symposium seeks new contributions
to organology, particularly encouraging explorations of phenomena that
cross cultural and stylistic boundaries, such as the need for
instruments that extend the abilities of the human musical body, or the
accordance of spiritual or secular meanings to instruments of music and
the sounds they produce. This forum might also investigate how
instruments are valued and interpreted in different cultures, places,
times, or functions, and why some instruments fail, but others are
adopted and succeed.

           Symposium 8       Sources

      The study of sources, whether written, oral, or virtual, ensures
the link between our generations and the past and its achievements. We
continue to develop the presentation of sources in scores, recordings,
and edited documents that range in format from print to digitized
multimedia. Technology now pretends and aspires to make everything from
the past instantly available on screen and through loudspeakers, yet
substitutes for primary sources inevitably distort them in some way.
This prompts us to examine how all of the tools and media involved in
the collection, transmission, and retrieval of musical knowledge
(catalogues raisonnes, critical editions, composers' homepages on the
World Wide Web, and others) influence our relationship to our sources
and to the ways in which we use them.



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