EMS27-Beijing call for papers and works
Leigh Landy
Thursday 24 - Sunday 27 June 2027
If nature is a labyrinthine concept, famously characterized by Raymond Williams in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society as “perhaps the most complex word” in the English language, attempts to clarify its relationship with other phenomena and fields of cultural production will likely become only more complex. In place of primary terms, we often seem to be engaged in secondary levels of analysis: for instance, pivoting from “first” to “second nature” (Adorno) or from the “natural attitude” to various forms of the “phenomenological attitude” (Pierre Schaeffer and his successors in phenomenologically oriented inquiry). Aesthetic ideas emerging from experimental electronic practices have likewise decentered “music” and positioned it within the broader domain of “sound,” with corresponding transformations in the disciplinary facets that embrace acoustic ecology and sound studies as well as compositional domains that include soundscape composition, field recording, and data sonification. The exceptional semantic fluidity of the concept of nature is matched by its productive energies and varieties. We invite contributions that explore new and challenging configurations of the relationship(s) between electroacoustic music(s) and nature(s). These may include historiographical and critical engagements within the broad ‘Western’ tradition we have sketched above as well as conceptualizations of “nature” and creative work with “natural” elements in electroacoustic media outside of this tradition.
EMS27 seeks to present, alongside up-to-date research results, a number of papers investigating how today’s and tomorrow’s specialists expect this important field to evolve. Will it settle in as a contemporary sub-area of musicology? Or will it find its own foci of scholarly endeavour thanks to the fact that it incorporates all sounds as well as many forms of technology?