“Narrative Walks through Music” is a reinterpretation of the title of Umberto Eco’s books, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. The woods serve as a metaphor for the narrative text. Eco suggests that the reader is the one who determines the pace of movement through a literary text and the speed of events within it. The conference title specifically calls on analysts to treat music as Eco’s woods and to provide their own insights as participants regarding possible questions related to the phenomenon of musical narrativity. Possible themes include:
General
Narrative about music vs. narrative in music; musical narrativity as a distinct field in the science of music – yes or no; can music tell a story, and does it exhibit a narrative tendency; musical narrativity – properties, nature, and scope of research; musical theory/literary theory – literary theory/musical theory; at what point could we speak about the demarcation line between music and literature, and what distinguishes literary and musical signification.
Analysis
Possible analytical phases – surface and depth levels of analysis; modalities of narrative analysis; actors, gestures, signs, elements, patterns, topics, themes, styles, cultural units, discursive connections through musical time and space, discourse, and meaning; recognizing musical narrative – levels of meaning, their hierarchical differences, and awareness of their existence; is musical narrative derivative or part of grammar; relationships between individual narrative elements and ways they merge into a whole; cultural significance differences within musical narrative and their transvaluation; the role of narrative archetypes in genre creation; the course of ‘events’ in music and its discursive power – analogies with natural language.
Interpretation – Listener, Analyst, Critic
Is there a risk of ‘overinterpretative’ musical narrative, and where do the boundaries of interpretation lie; semantic contexts that involve a narrator in a musical work; narrative comments as part of grammar, the role of interpreters in interpreting and adding narrative comments; the importance of recognizing narrative fields in musical criticism; application of achievements in musical narrativity in contemporary performance practice; contradictions and conflicts in musical narrative – their reconfiguration through musical time in the listener’s consciousness; ‘exemplary’ analyst vs. ‘empirical’ analyst – the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in interpreting musical narrative.
And so on...
Submission deadline for proposals:April 15, 2024 Notification of acceptance: by the end of May 2024
Proposal categories:
Papers (20 minutes maximum, with 10 minutes for discussion)
Panel discussion for 4 to 6 participants (15 minutes for each paper plus 30-minute discussion afterwards)
Proposal guidelines
For individual papers:
The author’s name and affiliation
E-mail address
The title of the paper
An abstract (up to 300 words)
Keywords (up to 5)
A short biography (the education and research field, up to 150 words plus 5 representative publications)
Equipment Request
For panel discussion:
A title of a panel discussion
An abstract of a panel discussion (up to 500 words)
Keywords of a panel discussion (up to 7)
For each of the panel discussion participants: see the submission guidelines for the proposal of spoken papers
Equipment Request
Further information for applicants
·Proposals should be sent as a single MS Word document and should be suitable for publication in the conference book of abstracts. Please send your proposal (in Word format, not PDF) to the following e-mail address: [email protected]
The official language of the Conference is English.
The format of the conference would be twofold: online and in person, as a hybrid event. Conference fee: 80 €, 40 € online