Call for papers


Inside, Outside, and in Between: Institutionalization in Music History

Fifth Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History

The Fifth Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History focuses on the importance of musical institutions and institutionalization.

The Fourth Symposium took cosmopolitanism as its theme in order to contribute to and clarify the cosmopolitan turn in the arts and humanities, to explore its meaning in terms of musical practice and theory, and develop new perspectives on music history. In the final plenary session, delegates debated a range of topics that might be given further consideration in the next symposium, speaking of pedagogy, cosmopolitanism as teaching tool, and destabilizing conservative frameworks in music history teaching. The discussion ranged widely over topics such as networks, connections, mobilities and immobilities, geographical transactions, border crossings, mythologies, utopias and heterotopias, tourism and travel, and humanism and post-humanism. The most productive discussion, however, was around institutionalization.

The Fifth Symposium on Music History has therefore chosen to focus on issues relating to the cultural control and cultural norms that have been—and still are—established by musical institutions.

Inside, Outside, and in Between: Institutionalization in Music History. The Fifth Sibelius Academy Symposium in Music History

Theme: The role of institutions and the institutional process in music history.

Proposals for papers and group sessions are invited on any of the following topics:

  • The power exerted by cultural institutions
  • The institutionalization of music practices
  • Close reading of musical scores and institutional practices
  • The consecration given to musicians by public or state institutions
  • Hierarchical institutions vs. non-hierarchical networks
  • Histories of musical institutions
  • Institutions and technocracy
  • The role of educational institutions
  • What counts as a musical institution? When did they first arise?

Keynote speakers of the symposium are

Stan Hawkins (University of Oslo, Norway): Institutionalizing Cosmopolitanism and White Masculinity: Dandyism in Popular Music

Avra Xepapadakou (University of Crete, Greece): Towards the Institutionalization of Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Greece and Southeastern Europe

Jim Samson (Royal Holloway University of London): Institutionalizing Music Theory: Two Historical Moments

Proposal submission: please use the link https://www.lyyti.in/inst2018-proposal and submit your proposal for an individual presentation or a panel by September 30, 2017. The organizing committee will be in touch no later than November 3, 2017 with the information about acceptances.

Proposal length:

  • individual presentation proposals: max 2200 characters, incl. spaces;
  • panel session proposals: max 2500 characters, incl. spaces + each panelist’s proposal 2000 characters, incl. spaces.

Contact for inquiries (no proposal submissions): inst2018@uniarts.fi