isaScience Conference: Sonic Ties Event

isaScience is mdw’s international conference for interdisciplinary research on music and performing arts. We invite scholars, artists, and activists from various disciplinary backgrounds and academic levels to join the discourse on isa’s annual thematic focus. Since 2013 isaScience is part of isa, the international summer academy of mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria.

isaScience23
Sonic Ties: Rethinking Communities and Collectives
26-30 August 2023, Reichenau/Rax, Austria and online

Keynote Lectures by

Srđan Atanasovski, Institute of Musicology SASA, Belgrade
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, University of Victoria
Sumanth Gopinath, University of Minnesota
Ana Hofman, ZRC SAZU Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Ljubljana
Sound and social relations are tightly interwoven and oftentimes contingent upon each other. ‘Sonic Ties’ offers a lens through which to study the qualities of connection and intersubjectivity that arise through sound. isaScience 2023 explores ‘Sonic Ties’ as a central mode of sharing communality and experiencing collectivity through music, dance, and other phenomena of performance and cultural expression.

By focusing on this specific mode of relating the sonic and the social, mdw’s interdisciplinary, international conference investigates how sound shapes collectives and communities in different societal, historical, and geopolitical contexts, and the ways in which these sonic ties reflect back on the individuals involved. Looking at communities and collectives from social movements to musical ensembles, from ethnic communities to artist collectives, isaScience 2023 seeks to investigate the entanglements of sound and power relations. What are the different forms and degrees of sonic participation and to what extent are they tied to local or globalized experiences?

Academic Board: Andrea Glauser, Marko Kölbl, Stephanie Probst

Registration is free of charge. Complementary funding for travel and accommodation costs is available after acceptance of the proposal on a case-by-case basis.

mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna covers lunch and coffee breaks on-site.
Contact: Kathrin Heinrich, isascience@mdw.ac.at
Organisation: Kathrin Heinrich, Valerie Gföhler, Therese Kaufmann (currently on leave)

Saturday, 26 August 2023

Arrival and Check-in at Hotel Marienhof

17.00 Apéro at Hotel Marienhof
19.30 Concert of the isa23 awardees: A selection of the best young musicians of isa23
Schloss Reichenau

Sunday, 27 August 2023

Listening Sessions throughout the conference days:

Michelle Atherton: Underground Communities: Listening to the Soil

09.00-09.30: Coffee & Registration
09.30-10.00: Opening & Welcome Address isaScience
10.00-11.15 Keynote Lecture: Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier
Listening to the Sonic Sea: Creating Ties in Time of Change
11.15-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Panel: Sound, Embodiment, and the Social
11.30-12.00 Sophie Zehetmayer
Affective Bodies in Time: Synthesizing Relations of Musical and Social Rhythm
12.00-12.30 Andrea Liu
Occupy Wall Street’s “Human Mic”: A Sonic Embodiment of Solidarity
12.30-13.00 Masimba Hwati
Nyaudzosingwi the Onomatopoeic factor in ‘Toyi-toyi and Zhii riots of 1960 Bulawayo
13.00-14.30 Lunch Break
14.30-17.00 Panel: Sounds of Protest
14.30-15.00 Carolin Müller
Sonifications of Sensations of Crisis: Embodied Resistance and Sonic Warfare
15.00-15.30 Hanna Grześkiewicz
Sounding Feminist Resistance – On Resonances of Recent Feminist Mobilisations in Poland and Iran
15.30-16.00 Break
16.00-16.30 Beth Hartman
“I Will Rescue You”: Musical Saviors and The Anti-Trafficking Movement
16.30-17.00 Gala Naseva
The Reproduction of Hegemonic Social Structures in the Post-Yugoslav Community: Turbofolk and Gender Identity
18.00 Welcome Dinner

Monday, 28 August 2023

09.30-11.00 Panel: Sonic Emancipation
09.30-10.00 Archita Arun
Look Closer, Into, Through: On Priya Ragu’s “Good Love 2.0” and “Chicken Lemon Rice”
10.00-10.30 Zu Lingshan
The Sonic Ties in Region: The Glocalization of Chinese Mongolian Rock Music
10.30-11.00 Rasika Ajotikar
Thinking music on musical terms or political terms?
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Panel: Claiming Spaces through Sound
11.30-12.00 Thalia Raftopoulou
Sound Affect and Public Space in the Case of the Athenian Apartment Building, ‘polykatoikia’
12.00-12.30 Katherine Griffiths
Recovering the 1980s and 1990s London Lesbian Club Scene
12.30-13.00 Gui Ren & Ryo Ikeshiro
Female Soundwalk: Chinese Female Immigrants and Public Space in Hong Kong
13.00-14.30 Lunch Break
14.30-15.45 Keynote Ana Hofman
Musical Leisure: Sonic Ties against Commodification and Exploitative Forms of Lives
15.45-16.30 Break
16.30 Critical Lecture Walk through Reichenau with Juri Giannini

Tuesday, 29 August 2023

09.30-10.45 Keynote Lecture: Srđan Atanasovski
Histories of Workers’ Songs: Between Communities and Representations
10.45-11.15 Break
11.15-12.45 Panel: Music and Memory Practices
11.15-11.45 Gay J Breyley
Sonic collectivity and communal sorrow: Hajipour’s song ‘Baraye’ and Hatami’s album 35.256031, 47.013321, 27.081979
11.45-12.15 Sukanya Kar
Re-thinking the Indigenous Song Performances of the Rajbanshi Community: Contrapunctuality of Mnemonics, Orality and Indigeneity
12.15-12.45 Heya Collective
Precarity Sounded Through Networked Music Performance
Lecture Performance (online)
12.45-14.30 Lunch Break
14.30-16.00 Panel: Shaping Community via Media
14.30-15.00 Cheng Wei Lim
YouTube, Vernacular Music Theory, and Marginalized Communities
15.00-15.30 Aditi Deo
Casting Sonic Ties: Radio and the Imagination of a Transnational Community for India (online)
15.30-16.00 Tianyu Jiang
Experimenting Sonic Ties: The Transdisciplinary Collaborative Practices of Shanghai Community Radio (SHCR) (online)
16.00-16.30 Break
16.30-17.45 Keynote Sumanth Gopinath
Listening to Dolly Parton’s Elusive Race Politics
18.00 Dinner & Disco

Wednesday, 30 August 2023

09.30-11.00 Panel: Beyond the Human
09.30-10.00 Serena Lee (Lecture Performance)
Frost on the Bell: Relating Through Resonance
10.00-10.30 Collin Edouard (online)
The Memories within Haitian Voices: Vocality and Ritual
Mounting in Haitian Vodou
10.30-11.00 Luca Soudant (Lecture Performance)
Resounding Gender
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-12.30 Interdisciplinary Ties? isaScience 2013-2023
A Roundtable Discussion on Research Approaches in Music and
Performing Practices
13.30 Farewell Lunch at Looshaus am Kreuzberg