Crossing Boundaries in Music Postgrad Conference, and Music and Philosophy Seminar

There are two sessions for special events.  

Crossing Boundaries in Music Postgraduate Conference is convened by Dr Sally Macarthur and Ian Stevenson, with Keynote Speakers Professor Susan McClary and Professor Robert Walser from Case Western Reserve University. 5 June 2013, O.1.62. at UWS Kingswood.

Music research is teeming with boundaries. These boundaries serve to reduce music to hierarchical relationships and divide it into over-coded, rigid categories. Some typical examples include the divisions between theory and practice, analysis and composition, performing and listening, digital and acoustic music, popular and ‘serious’ music, the social context and the music itself, and music and other art forms. Once these boundaries become fixed, they are difficult to shift or dismantle. Yet, as new boundaries emerge and mark out new territories, music by necessity redefines itself and our approaches to studying it are challenged. The broad idea of the conference is to provoke thinking about the form and role of boundaries in music, and the role of research in crossing these boundaries.

An Immanent Future: Music and Philosophy Sydney Seminar is being held on 6 June, from 2 to 4pm Speakers Professor Susan McClary Professor Robert Walser Professor Catherine Stevens Professor Roger Dean Chair: Dr Sally Macarthur

Inspired by recent innovative responses in philosophy to our rapidly changing, interconnected worlds, this seminar will open up a conversation about music beyond the past and present. There is a strain of conservative resistance in the way music is discussed in the academy. Without new critical languages and conceptual templates our work in music will languish in old epistemologies, doomed to trail behind those bold enough to reimagine the boundaries of disciplinary fields. What new critical languages and conceptual templates will function for music in the face of our rapidly changing musical realities? How do we proceed beyond anthropomorphic representation in our musical languages? Is the question ‘what is music?’ still relevant? Or, as proponents of the new materialist philosophy would want to suggest, is it more productive to consider what music does rather than what music means? Building on the Music and Philosophy Symposium held in 2012, this seminar will address these questions and more. It is envisaged that the fruits of this conversation will find their way into the book An Immanent Future: Music Beyond Past and Present (co-editors, Sally Macarthur, Judy Lochhead and Jennie Shaw.