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).
Submitted by: Emily Payne