isaScience 2020; Karoline Feyertag and Slavomíra Martišková (Web)

Venue: Reichenau an der Rax
Time: 12.-16.08.2020
Proposals – extended by: 31.03.2020

isaScience 2020 focuses on critical perspectives on heroic imaginations, cultic actions and the formation and maintenance of canons. Across musical styles and cultural spheres, heroes, cults and canons contribute to the creation of normative and exclusionary and even violent settings, dictating what ears and eyes should deem adequate and valuable. Likewise, heroisation, cultification and canonisation define what remains unheard, unseen and regarded as unworthy.

Historically, the making of “heroes” and the processes of canon formation have been closely associated with Western art music and the celebration of certain composers as “great artists” as well as the consecration of their works as “masterpieces”. These practices employed for the production of artistic values are informed by the ideology of the autonomous artist and the increasing formation of a museal culture that developed throughout the 19th century.

Moreover, these practices supported the emergence of a more strictly defined boundary between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” cultural forms and became the dominant standard by which popular and traditional music forms were evaluated. These developments are closely linked to Eurocentric, imperialist and elitist institutions such as opera houses, concert halls and music conservatoires that allowed for classed, gendered and racialized modes of producing, performing, consuming and appropriating music.

Later on, despite discursive struggles over cultural authority, the music industry – including music publishers, record company personnel, journalists and other cultural intermediaries – as well as the development of recording technology, the internet and social media have played a significant role in the definition of stardom, the making of heroes and the processes of canon formation within diverse cultural worlds, including jazz, rock/pop, hip hop, traditional music, classical music and folk music, among others. The introduction of … weiterlesen (Web).