SEVENTEENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
OF THE DEPARTMENT OF MUSICOLOGY
FACULTY OF MUSIC, UNIVERSITY OF ARTS IN BELGRADE
MUSIC IN SOCIOCULTURAL TURMOIL 2025
October 29-31, 2025
About the conference:
How does music correspond with social processes? How do participants in the musical "ecosystem" respond to the pulse of the times? Beyond reflecting or depicting historical "shifts", can music also anticipate major social turmoil? For example, did the breakdown of tonality in the early 20th century, followed by the emergence of atonal expressionism, foreshadow the catastrophe of World War I?
And have paradigm shifts in music history (almost) always corresponded with societal changes?
A significant number of musicians have actively contributed to social movements and historical changes, "singing" about revolutionary ideas, war conflicts, national uprisings, collective traumas, or ideological struggles. While music can serve as a reflection or mimesis of such events, it also functions as a platform and means of artistic subversion, political protest, and social activism aimed at critiquing artistic and broader social circumstances and responding to the "status quo" (Groys).
Throughout music history, various musical movements, phenomena, and works have carried different forms of artistic (and political) subversion. For instance, the internal musical and poetic "subversiveness" of Debussy’s music anticipated the end of the fin de siècle, whereas the subversiveness of the Fluxus movement (active during the 1960s) was explicitly activist and politically leftist.
Additionally, popular music genres and media-driven musical practices in both analog and digital contexts hold significant potential in this realm. Their mass appeal, broad audience, and the fact that popular music almost always includes lyrics have allowed for more direct and far-reaching artistic engagement during periods of upheaval: Folk and rock could claim to contribute to social change in a way that classical music could not (Bolter).
Moreover, musical performance itself reflects and/or participates in social turmoil, adapting to contemporary socio-political moments or hinting at shifts in social discourse and a new Zeitgeist.
A striking example is the collective online musical performances during the COVID-19 pandemic.
TITLE: The ‘greed’ decade and the orchestra: the shift in contemporary music performance in America’s major orchestras into the 1980s (online paper presentation)
ABSTRACT:
The orchestral practice of contemporary music in the 1960s into the 1970s was rich and stylistically plural in America’s major orchestras (Abrams-Husso, 2022). While much focus has been on the promotion of modernism and serialism in and by academic institutions and private and public foundations in the context of the Cold War, the actual performance of what would have been considered contemporary music at that time remained heterogenous in an orchestral context well into the 1970s (Ansari, 2014; Beal, 2006; Beal, 2008; Brody, 1993; Shreffler, 2005). Ultimately, however, orchestras significantly decreased programming of contemporary music into the 1980s and contemporary music increasingly became a specialized practice within classical music culture. This paper builds on previously published and presented research by examining what and how economic and sociocultural conditions of the so-called “greed” decade of the 1980s contributed to American orchestras’ shift (further) away from contemporary music. While scholarship on the American orchestral canon has long demonstrated the dominance of 19th- and early 20th-century composers, closer examination of contemporary music programming highlights a distinct shift from the 1960s to 1980s that helps contextualize the state of contemporary music in American orchestral performance practice today (Abrams-Husso, 2022c; Dowd et al., 2002, Kremp, 2010; Mueller, 1973; Pompe et al., 2011; Weber, 2003).
For more on the conference, including the complete schedule and program, visit their website.