CfP: Meaning and Music (Poznań)

Call for Papers
Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology CIM18

Meaning and Music

Poznań, Poland, 17-20 October 2018

Submission Deadline: 23:59 GMT 15 April 2018

Institute of Musicology, Faculty of History

Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland

Meaning is a crucial component of culture. It is subject to continuous processes of interpretation that depend on many contextual factors. Moreover, every culture is constantly creating new meanings in the process of social interaction.

Music is a universal communicative phenomenon that is present in all known cultures. It is involved in both social interpretation and meaning creation. It allows people to share and communicate a wide variety of meanings, including emotions, intentions, and symbols. It plays a central role in many traditional and ritual practices and is often combined with other communicative practices such as language or dance. It can be also understood as a more passive phenomenon that merely accompanies the exchange of meaning.

Meaning is a subject of study in many academic disciplines. CIM18 invites analysis and discussion of different aspects of meaning in relation to music, from diverse epistemological standpoints. Possible topics include the origin of musical meaning; meaning in music versus meaning in language; musical semiotics and meaning; gestures in music and meaning; ecological approaches to meaning in music; embodied cognition of musical meaning; meaning in music and deconstruction; hermeneutics of meaning in music; transformation of meaning in music; musical meaning and group membership; musical meaning and social belonging; identity and musical meaning; meaning in music and meaning of social context; aesthetics and meaning in music; and ideology and meaning in/of music.

Interesting questions include:

Is music meaningful at all?
If so to what extent is its meaning constructed by social groups and cultural traditions (“nurture” explanation) and to what extent is it inherent to the human condition (“nature”)?
To what extent is the meaning created by different players including performers, audiences, and composers if relevant?
How does meaning depend on social and historical context?
How music can be used to transmit meaning?
What kind of meaning is a subject of musical communication?
What are the relations between different kinds of meaning in language coexisting with musical meaning in songs, operas, musicals, art performances?
Is meaning transmitted by the means of gestures during music performance and dance?

The aim of CIM18 is to bring together researchers representing diverse academic disciplines and perspectives who are concerned with meaning in music.

The language of the conference is English. All conference submissions must address the conference theme “meaning and music”.

About the conference

The Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (CIM) involves all musicological subdisciplines and paradigms: analytical, applied, comparative, cultural, empirical, ethnological, historical, popular, scientific, systematic, theoretical.

CIM also involves all musically relevant disciplines: acoustics, aesthetics, anthropology, archeology, art history and theory, biology, composition, computing, cultural studies, economics, education, ethnology, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary studies, mathematics, medicine, music theory and analysis, neurosciences, perception, performance, philosophy, physiology, prehistory, psychoacoustics, psychology, religious studies, semiotics, sociology, statistics, therapy.

CIM celebrates diversity. We aim to treat all musically relevant disciplines, all musicological subdisciplines and paradigms, and all music researchers equally. To restore or create equality, CIM promotes minority disciplines and researchers.

CIM promotes epistemologically distant collaborations. All contributions have at least two authors. The first two authors should preferably represent two of the following three groups: humanities, sciences, practically oriented disciplines.

CIM focuses on quality rather than quantity, and fosters intellectually rigorous debate. Academic standards are promoted by anonymous peer review of submitted abstracts by independent international experts in relevant (sub-) disciplines. The review procedure is transparent, and the reviews are impersonal and constructive.

CIM has its own society (the Society for Interdisciplinary Musicology) and its own international peer-reviewed journal (the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies). The best presentations at each CIM are invited for publication in a special issue of JIMS. Other presenters are invited to revise and submit their papers to JIMS for publication in a regular issue.

Submissions to CIM18

Each submission must bring together and combine two of the following two broad areas:

Humanities including Philosophy, Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Phonetics and Phonology, Ethnology and Anthropology, Semiotics, Hermeneutics, Theology, Performance studies, Music theory, Composition, Archeology, Art history and theory, Cultural studies, Literary studies, and Music history.
Sciences including Acoustics, Neurolinguistics, Neuromusicology, Biomusicology, Biology, Computing, Mathematics, Perception, Psychoacoustics, Empirical psychology and sociology, Statistics and computer science, Music therapy, and Cognitive science.
Submissions will be preferred if they have two or more authors that represent very different epistemologies. For example, if the first author represents humanities, the second author should represent sciences. Submissions by one author can be accepted if the reviewers agree the content is as interdisciplinary as comparable double- or multi-author submissions.

Submission guidelines

If you would like to present your interdisciplinary research at CIM18, please submit an extended structured abstract conforming to the following guidelines via EasyChair

Your abstract should begin with a title and the author’s names and affiliations. The main text should be structured with the following six headings:

Background in XXX (first discipline, e.g. “Background in anthropology”)
Background in XXX (second discipline, e.g. “Background in instrumental performance”)
Aims (this should be the shortest section)
Main contribution (this should be the longest section)
Implications for musicological interdisciplinarity
References
Background disciplines should correspond to the expertise of the authors. For example, if the first author is a humanities scholar, the first background discipline should be a humanities discipline.

Length. The total length of each submission, including title, authors, headings and references, must not exceed 1000 words.

Organizing Committee

Piotr Podlipniak (Head of the Committee, Institute of Musicology, AMU in Poznań, Poland)
Maciej Karpiński (Institute of Linguistics, AMU in Poznań, Poland)
Agata Kochanowska (Institute of German Philology, University of Zielona Góra, Poland)
Hanna Kupś (Centre for Chinese Language and Culture, Toruń, Poland)
Jakub Matyja (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland)
Ewa Schreiber (Institute of Musicology AMU in Poznań, Poland)

WWW