CFP - Scholars for Social Responsibility

Call for participation, papers and presentations

Scholars for Social Responsibility (SFSR) will hold its third annual meeting at the AMS/SMT meeting in Los Angeles. Anyone from either society who is interested in issues of social responsibility is welcome to attend. We plan to offer several short papers or presentations followed by discussion. We write now to issue a call for participation on the topic of socially conscious compositions.

Composers who have invested their work with an explicit sense of social consciousness have drawn on an impressive range of techniques, from setting politically-charged texts to working with preexisting material of a distinctly partisan character to writing in a style, simple and/or provocative, meant to directly convey social commentary. Topics that composers have addressed musically include war, racism, women’s suffrage, the Holocaust, capital punishment, abortion, HIV/AIDS, cancer, drug abuse and addiction, lesbian / gay issues, nuclear disaster, and poverty. A theorist or musicologist who approaches these works interpretively (historically or analytically) faces a serious challenge, that of elucidating the experience of social consciousness.

We seek a small number of focused analytical and/or historical papers or presentations, ten to fifteen minutes in length, that take up this challenge across a wide repertory involving different points of view about social consciousness in music. Our discussion may also include possible actions or activities relating social concerns and the academy.
The organizers of this session are Timothy Brown, Deborah Burton, Amy Engelsdorfer, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, Betsy Marvin, and Anton Vishio.

Email submissions are preferred. Please send proposals of 500-750 words by September 1 to:
Dr. Timothy Brown
690 South Dahlia Circle, T-105
Glendale, CO 80246
acecomposer@netzero.net

SFSR is an open forum for ideas on social responsibility of diverse kinds; we are not allied with any one group or perspective, and all opinions are welcome.
As an Interest Group of the Society of Music Theory, the SFSR complies with the requirements of 501(c)(3) organizations; we do not endorse partisan political statements.

For further information about the group and past conference sessions see the SFSR website: http://www.freewebs.com/sfsr /.

Deborah Burton
deborahburton@compuserve.com