CFP: Bach Symposium, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, 25-26 Apr 2025

[AMS Office]

UMASS BACH SYMPOSIUM 2025
APRIL 25-26, 2025

Why Bach? Navigating 21st-Century Scholarship, Performance, and Pedagogy

Contemporary critiques of the Western musical canon, and renewed calls for its expansion, deconstruction, reimagination, or abrogation, invite reflection upon the functions, meanings, and value of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music in the twenty-first century. Evolving aesthetic and cultural ideals reflecting efforts to promote a global perspective in classical music invite dialogue about Bach’s continued significance today, including with regard to performance repertoire, scholarly methodologies, and pedagogical practices. This symposium seeks to reflect upon the continuing contributions of Bach’s life and works in twenty-first century culture.

Keynote speaker: Daniel R. Melamed (Indiana University, Bloomington; President, American Bach Society)

For the 2025 UMass Amherst Bach Symposium, we invite proposals from scholars, performers, composers, and educators to engage with the theme of how and why we perform, study, teach and respond to the music of Bach in the twenty-first century. Sample topics might include (but are not limited to):

• The role of Bach's music in music pedagogy (Theory/History/Education/ Performance).
• Evolving interpretive approaches to the music of Bach.
• Examinations of Bach's human body in relation to his compositions.
• Examinations of Bach's social contexts in relation to his compositional ideas and works.
• Reworkings of Bach's compositions in the 21st century.
• Representations of Bach’s works online, in the media, and in concert.
• Bach festivals and Bach-focused ensembles—past, present, and future.
• Visual representations of Bach's music or poetic metaphors for Bach's music.
• Appropriations of Bach’s music in political contexts.
• Bach's place in popular culture and music criticism.
• Bach the Uniter, Bach the Healer.
• The future of Bach scholarship.
• Is Bach’s “greatness” just a social construction?
• Bach’s place in ongoing debates concerning musical canons.
• Bach’s place in a global history of Classical Music.
• Bach’s masterpieces: foundational or ephemeral?
• Bach’s music in a global context. 

Organizers: Erinn Knyt, Evan MacCarthy, and Ernest May

Please e-mail abstracts of around 300 Words to Erinn Knyt (eknyt [at] umass.edu) by Sept. 16, 2024.