Nineteenth-Century Programme Music

25-27 novembre 2016, Lucca
Lucca, Complesso Monumentale di San Micheletto
https://www.luigiboccherini.org/programmemusic.html

All proposals should be submitted by email no later than Sunday 24 April 2016 to <conferences -at- luigiboccherini.org>

organized by

Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Lucca)

Musical depictions have existed from the earliest times; but the cultivation and popularity of orchestral programme music was a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, when it came to encompass close links to literature and painting. Liszt coined the phrase ‘programme music' in the mid-nineteenth century: «In programme music […] the returns, alterations, modifications, and modulations of the motif are conditioned by their relationship to a poetic idea» (Liszt, Gesammelte Schrifen, iv, p. 69). Nowadays the term ‘programme music' is applied to any purely instrumental music that is based on any extra-musical ideas — such as those belonging to the spheres of literature or painting  — and is understood to exist in direct opposition to ‘absolute, instrumental music'.

This conference will focus on all forms of programme music as they emerged the beginning of the nineteenth century, until the turn of the twentieth. The scientific committee particularly welcomes proposals that address the themes listed below, although other, related topics are also welcome:

• Genres of Literature and Music: Fantastical Literature, Poetry, Prose, Narrative, Poem

• Influences of Visual Art on Music

• Programme Music versus Absolute Music: Theoretical and Aesthetic Issues

• French Programme Music from Berlioz to the Impressionism of Ravel and Debussy

• Myth and Mythology: Wagnerism and His Legacy in relation to Programme Music

• Descriptive Music and Orchestral Miniatures

• Symphonic Poems from Liszt until the Turn of the Century

• Programme Music and Nationalistic Influences

Programme Committee: Roberto Illiano (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini); Fulvia Morabito (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini); Luca Lévi Sala (Yale University, New Haven, CT); Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald (Warwickshire, UK)

Keynote Speaker: Jonathan Kregor (University of Cincinnati, OH), Rainer Kleinertz (Universität des Saarlandes)

The official languages of the conference are English, French and Italian. Papers selected at the conference will be published in a miscellaneous volume.

Dr. Roberto Illiano
conferences -at- luigiboccherini.org
www.luigiboccherini.org