Annual Conference 2023
Irish National Committee of the International Council for Traditional Music
18th Annual Conference
24 February 2023
University of Galway
You will find the conference programme at the above link as well as the flipbook pdf at the end of this page.
Please register at this Eventbrite link by the 21st of February to attend the conference dinner. Event registration will remain open through the 24th of February.
The conference schedule is available here: ICTM Ireland Annual Conference 2023 – Schedule
Please find parking information for University of Galway here: Parking
Music and Time
ICTM-Ireland is delighted to announce a return to an in-person annual conference (with some hybrid elements) this coming February, following two years of solely virtual events. In addition to the keynote by Professor Gregory Melchor-Barz from Boston University taking place on campus at the University of Galway, the conference will also feature live musical events and the opportunity for attendees to learn about and experience ancient traditions of sound healing. The 2023 conference addresses the theme of music and time.
Music and time are inseparable. Jerrold Levinson claims that ‘music as people conceive it seems as essentially an art of time as it is an art of sound’ (Andrew Kania, ‘Music and Time’). From an early stage we are encouraged to keep time or to play in time, a concept that varies considerably across different musical cultures. Many scholars have examined these forms of musical time at the micro level, investigating how we perceive (or indeed perform) characteristics such as groove, swing, tightness, drive and others, often building on Charles Keil’s idea of participatory discrepancies. In another sense, music itself transforms our sense of time (Martin Clayton, ‘In Time With the Music’), and others have explored different ways of thinking of ‘musical time’ (for example Jonathan D. Kramer, Thérèse Smith, Eben Graves). Clayton is also among many to investigate the phenomenon of entrainment, and its connection to social cohesion, intra-group communication, and the expression of social identity. Time is experienced in oral/aural-based traditions as the past and the present simultaneously, as oral histories through song are used as a way to remember history and to experience that history in the present moment (Dylan Robinson, ‘Hungry Listening’). Time is also implicated in memory work, and has intrinsic connections with place as expressed in the concept of the chronotope. Our desire to recapture and revisit time – to utopianise certain chronotopes – has arguably led to the ‘simultaneity of pop time’ that characterises contemporary retromania (Simon Reynolds, Retromania). This itself depends on the nature of the recording as a ‘time capsule’, and the sound system as a ‘time machine’ (Evan Eisenberg, ‘The Recording Angel’). Away from the marketplace and among the people, Henry Glassie asks us to accept that ‘tradition is the creation of the future out of the past’ (Glassie, ‘Tradition’), a process continually enacted through traditional music projects, performances, and recordings.
Call for Papers – send to chair@ictm.ie by 12 December 2022
Submissions
We encourage a variety of methodological approaches and subject areas including but
not limited to those researching instrumental music, popular styles, community music,
music therapy, folklore studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, and
applied research inside and outside the academy to contribute to the discussion.
