INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MUSIC SIGNIFICATION
The Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and the Musicologists’ Section of the Lithuanian Composers’ Union organizes the international conference “Typologies of Music Signification: Retrospective and Perspective” that will take place at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in Vilnius on October 21–23, 2021.
The conference will take place in the Julius Juzeliūnas Spatial Sound Sphere (LMTA Building 1, Gedimino Ave. 42, Vilnius) and will be broadcasted live on tv.lmta.lt. It is possible to participate in the conference via Zoom as well.
Musical signification, as any other issue related to the meaning in music, has constantly been an object of interest for musicologists, composers, semioticians, and philosophers, often in an attempt to classify and categorize it. Looking back at the history of such classifications and foreseeing the need to rethink them, the theme of this conference is dedicated to the theoretical and practical discourses dealing with the interrelations between musical signification and a variety of typologies.
It may be considered that musicological writing has emerged from attempts to categorize abstract phenomena and further efforts to systematize them. Aristoxenus distinguished three basic gènē in his Elementa harmonica. Boethius, in De musica, differentiated the types of musica instrumentalis. The likes of Johannes de Groche, Johann Mattheson, and Johann Nikolaus Forkel not only named new types of music but also identified fundamental categories of music, such as genre and style. The path to discovering many musical phenomena has been based on the process of categorizing and systematizing the outcomes of music signification.
Typologies of signification have been acknowledged as research methods and as part of the theoretical epistemology of music since the dawn of theoretical musicology and, as such, they have retained a significant place in research conducted by the musicologists, ethnomusicologists, popular music scholars, and musical semioticians of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries – from Philip Tagg, Simon Frith, Franco Fabbri, or Fabian Holt to Heinrich Besseler, Carl Dahlhaus, Helga de la Motte-Haber, Mieczyslaw Tomaszewski, and others. Typologization of significations, as a method for gaining knowledge, is of interest to the current research as well.
This conference seeks to reinvigorate the approach to the concepts, terms, and categories employed in the process of music signification as well as attempts to conceptualize the practices of classification of musical phenomena. At this conference, scholars will tackle these tasks from a variety of perspectives: they will discuss them as problems of research philosophy, raise the question of criteria, present individual approaches, analyze historical or current cases, and present the perspectives of systematization.
We welcome you to this interdisciplinary and hybrid event and wish you fruitful musicological discussions both on-site at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and online.
After the conference organizers
18 October 2021