Study Group for Russian and Eastern European Music (REEM)
British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies
Study Group for Russian and Eastern European Music
Annual Conference 2010
Central and Eastern European Music: Musical Crossroads?
Oxford University Faculty of Music (Denis Arnold Hall)
Saturday 26 June 2010
The BASEES Study Group for Russian and Eastern European Music invites proposals for its 2010 annual conference, to be held at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, on Saturday 26 June. Past conferences have been devoted to the themes of ‘Eastern European Musical Relations’, ‘Music in Russia and Eastern Europe after “The Thaw”’, ‘Russia’s Musical Revolutionaries’, and ‘Musical Nationalism and Modernism in Russia and Eastern Europe’. This year, we would like to bring Central and Eastern European music further into the spotlight. Proposals are especially welcome that deal with the musical relationships between these countries, as well as between them and countries from other regions of Europe: Western and Southern Europe, Scandinavia and the Nordic lands, and Russia. Apart from highlighting inter-European musical dialogues, we hope that the conference will also reflect on how Central and Eastern European music may be defined in a number of ways depending on the context (political, cultural, historical, geographical), as well as analysing music’s particular role in shaping and negotiating various European identities. While REEM’s previous conferences featured papers that primarily employed historical musicological methods, we would welcome papers that draw on ethnomusicological approaches.
Convenors: Katerina Levidou and Philip Bullock
Abstracts of no more than 400 words and short biographical notes (of no more than 200 words) should be sent to reemstudygroup@googlemail.com by 10 April 2010. Abstracts will be reviewed and results will be announced by 30 April 2010.
Background: In the last twenty years or so, scholarly interest in Russian music has undergone a renaissance in the UK. There are now around ten music departments where either Russian or East European music (or both) is offered as a staff specialism, with the result that there has been a rapid expansion of postgraduate interest. There are also growing links between musicologists and Slavists working in Russian departments, and between British-based scholars and Russians. The idea for a BASEES Study Group for Russian and East European Music (REEM) has been raised by several scholars from different institutions in the last year, and it seems that, with this recent upsurge of interest, the formation of this Group is timely, even overdue. The group is affiliated to the University of Oxford Music Faculty.
Purpose: The Study Group will seek to foster collaborative research and exchange of ideas within this growing community. By extending the research profile of the Study Group to include East European music, we will gain from the expertise of several well-established British academics with excellent connections with Polish, Hungarian and Czech scholars. We also hope to develop contacts with colleagues in Russia and Eastern Europe, wherever possible enabling scholars to travel to the UK. There is no musicological forum that would facilitate this as an ongoing project, and all such exchanges are currently made on an ad hoc basis. BASEES offers a unique opportunity to organise this in a more structured way, and should therefore create much closer links between scholarly communities here and abroad.
The Study Group has a number of key aims:
- To foster research links between scholars working in music and Russian departments in the UK. To this end, the convenors feel it important that the organization of the Study Group’s activities is the product of collaboration between Slavists and musicologists;
- To provide a forum for academics and postgraduates to exchange ideas and meet one another at regular conferences, with the possibility of resulting publications;
- To explore the many connections between Russian and East European musicological issues and develop contacts between scholars working in these areas;
- To support and encourage postgraduate research into Russian and East European Music;
- To bring musicologists into the wider community of BASEES, something which should greatly benefit both Slavists interested in musical issues, and musicologists who need a less narrowly 'musical' forum to discuss broader cultural and aesthetic issues;
- To establish and maintain an email list, in order to inform members of the Study Group about forthcoming events of interest;
- To raise the presence of REEM at meetings of the Royal Musical Association.
The inaugural conference, EASTERN EUROPEAN MUSICAL RELATIONS, took place in the Department of Music, University of Bristol, on Saturday 24 June 2006. The 2006 programme can be downloaded here.
THE ROYAL MUSICAL ASSOCIATION and BASEES RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN MUSIC STUDY GROUP held a POSTGRADUATE STUDY DAY on Russian and East European Music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama on 10 February 2007
REEM held a conference on MUSIC IN RUSSIA AND EASTERN EUROPE AFTER ‘THE THAW’ at the Department of Music, Victoria Rooms, University of Bristol, on Friday 29 June 2007. The programme can be seen here.
In 2008 REEM held a conference on RUSSIA'S MUSICAL REVOLUTIONARIES, in association with the Oxford University Faculty of Music and the Bate Collection, which took place at the Denis Arnold Hall in Oxford on 1 October and was organised by Rosamund Bartlett and Pauline Fairclough. The programme can be seen here.
REEM held a conference on MUSICAL NATIONALISM AND MODERNISM IN RUSSIA AND EASTERN EUROPE on 17 October 2009, which was hosted by the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, and was organised by Katerina Levidou and Rosamund Bartlett. The programme can be seen here.
Convenors:
Rosamund Bartlett, Philip Bullock and Katerina Levidou.