creativity/machine

Call for Papers

Symposium ” Play!: Contemporary Composition, Technology and Listening”
As part of Extensible Toy Piano Project

It has been almost 50 years since John Cage defined experimental music in terms of the contemplation of sound and the use of technology. All sound–and even silence– could and should be the stuff of music for everyone, listeners and composers alike. The tape recorder was a means of not only storing sounds, but of engaging them in new and direct ways.

Meanwhile, at almost the same moment, Milton Babbitt delimited composition as serious and rational, the composer as a specialist, and technology as the handmaiden to determinacy.

Matt Malsky and David Claman, the directors of the Extensible Toy Piano Project, invite paper proposals for a symposium as part of the project’s Festival on November 5-6, 2005 (for more information, see the project website). Presentations will be 30 minutes long. Possible topics on the themes of the festival might include (but are not limited to):

- musical (post)modernism: aesthetic contemplation vs. intellectual
endeavor
- overwhelming noise & disturbed silence: entertainment & the
relationship of electroacoustic music to mass culture
- music and technoculture: musical creativity and technological
possibility
- fun and form: toys as expressive objects and their listening subjects
- multimedia and new music: the intersection of new musical instruments
in diverse media
- the political economy of contemporary composition: the composer and our
division of musical labor
- the (impossible) concert: music in everyday/public life
- the live and the canned: performance and listening in the age of the
studio
- post-literacy in music: aurality vs. orality

Proposals should be no more than 500 words and include audio-visual requirements. Please submit your proposal by July 15, 2005 via email to mmalsky[at]clarku[dot]edu or by surface post to:

The Extensible Toy Piano Project
Clark University
Department of Visual and Performing Arts 950 Main St.
Worcester, MA 01610
[in the US i guess - could people, _especially_ cultural studies people, who should know better, please stop assuming everyone on their international email discussion lists is from the States?]