From the Society for Minimalist Music website, here’s the invitation for the Fourth International Conference on Music and Minimalism, Long Beach, CA, 3-6 October 2013:
You are kindly invited to submit proposals for the Fourth International Conference on Music and Minimalism, jointly hosted by UCLA and the California State University, Long Beach on the campus of CSULB in Long Beach, CA, 3-6 October 2013.
All scholars interested in music and minimalism are invited to submit paper proposals. The conference welcomes all papers concerning minimalist and post-minimalist music as well as the many subsequent styles they inspired, and is committed to the broadest methodological scope, including analytical, historical, cultural, philosophical, composer-centric, and performance-oriented presentations. In honor of the conference’s West Coast location, the organizers would especially like to encourage papers (or session proposals) on the theme of “Minimalism and the Left (Coast),†including such topics as:
• California minimalism (composers, labels, scenes, trends, institutions like the SF Tape Music Center, Cold Blue Recordings, etc.)
• Minimalism and the Pacific Rim (Japan, China, East Asia)
• Minimalism and Hollywood
• Countercultural minimalism (minimalism, popular music, altered consciousness)
• Minimalism and leftist (or rightist) politics (the 1960s and after)The Society is also interested, as always, in new research on the core minimalist, post-minimalist, and “totalist†repertories; engagement with the work of lesser-known composers, especially from outside the USA, the United Kingdom, and Europe; and position papers on the larger implications of musical minimalism in contemporary world culture:
• The minimalist and post-minimalist “core†repertoire (Young, Reich, Riley, Glass, Adams, etc.)
• Minimalism outside the USA (Louis Andriessen, Simeon ten Holt, Gavin Bryars, Hans Otte, Eliane Radigue, Karel Goeyvaerts, Zoltan Jeney, Steve Martland, Kevin Volans, Jo Kondo, etc.)
• Global minimalism and world music (minimalism in East and South Asia, Australasia, Africa, and Latin America; the influence of these and other non-Western musics on minimalist composers in the West)
• Crucial but less public figures in the minimalist story: William Duckworth, Tony Conrad, Phil Niblock, Jon Gibson, Rhys Chatham, David Borden, Glenn Branca, Julius Eastman, Terry Jennings, John Luther Adams, Gavin Bryars, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Jim Fox, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall, Read Miller, Larry Polansky, David Rosenboom, Phillip Schroeder, Chas Smith, etc., etc.
• Minimalism, opera, new music theater (Robert Wilson, George Coates, Mikel Rouse, Paul Dresher, Rinde Eckert, etc.) and dance (Anna Halprin, Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk, etc.)
• The significance of minimalist and post-minimalist music as cultural practice
• Minimalism, space, ecology, the environment (ambient music, John Luther Adams, deep listening, etc.)
• Minimalism, sexuality, and gender (female composers [Monk, Oliveros, Speech, Lockwood, Radigue, Ustvolskaya]; repetition, cyclic process, and gender; etc.)
• Aesthetics/listening/analysis: discussions of the particular ways in which minimalism invites listening attitudes and their impact on music analysis
• Minimalism, post-minimalism and their influence on contemporary music composition (see lecture recitals, below)
• The performance practice of minimalism and post-minimalism (see lecture recitals below)Contributions are welcomed in the form of individual papers (20 minutes). Abstracts containing a maximum of 400 words should be sent as email attachments, by February 1, 2013, to LongBeach2013 at minimalismsociety.org. The conference is also happy to present lecture-recitals, including the possibility for composers and/or performers to present their own minimalism-related work. Those considering a proposal for a lecture-recital (or any other type of non-traditional session, paper, or event, such as a listening environment or poster session) are strongly encouraged to contact Robert Fink (rfink at ucla.edu) and Carolyn Bremer (carolyn.bremer at csulb.edu) as soon as possible in order to discuss their plans informally, prior to submitting a formal proposal.
More information will be posted on the conference website: http://minimalismsociety.org/