Agents and Actors: Networks in Music History

Sixth Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History

The Fifth Symposium took institutionalisation as its theme in order to contribute to and clarify the ways in which they exert power, the relationships between them, and the hierarchies they establish. In the final plenary session, delegates debated a range of topics that might be given further consideration in the next symposium. The discussion largely focussed on two areas of interest – heritage and networks – and both were considered important current areas of work with which the next symposium could engage. It has been decided that the sixth symposium should concentrate on networks and music, while the seventh would focus on questions of heritage.

The Sixth Symposium on Music History will therefore focus on issues relating to agents, actors and networks and the ways in which they relate to music in order to discuss changes in focus towards more collective and complex objects of study.

Proposals for papers and group sessions are invited on any of the following topics:

• The construction and formation of networks in music history
• The history of networks in music from antiquity to the present
• The power exerted by networks in music history
• The institutionalization of networks in music
• The theoretical underpinnings of working with networks (actor-network theory; art worlds, cultural fields, assemblages, mediation theory)
• Close reading of musical scores against understandings of networks
• The place of networks in diachronic and synchronic histories of music
• The inner workings and dynamics of networks of music

Keynote speakers of the symposium are

Annegret Fauser (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, US)

Antoine Hennion (Mines ParisTech, FR)

Benjamin Piekut (Cornell University, US)

Proposal length:

• individual presentation proposals: max 2200 characters, incl. spaces;
• panel session proposals: max 2500 characters, incl. spaces + each panelist’s proposal 2000 characters, incl. spaces.

Contact for inquiries (no proposal submissions): networks2022@uniarts.fi