(deadline extended to June 1!)
October 4-5, 2024
32 Waverly Pl, New York, NY 10003
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Marisa Solomon
(Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University)
Keynote Performer: Emily Johnson
(Choreographer and Director of Catalyst)
Within music and sound art, composition is most often understood as a process of creation. In ecology, however, decomposition often refers to a biological process of decay, a breakdown of organic matter necessary for cycles of death and rebirth. As has become clear in our time of entwined ecological and political crises, fragmentation and decay are both material and socio-cultural. Patterns of discardment are unevenly experienced as they are shaped by race, gender, class, disability, and sexuality. And yet, from the ruins and undergrounds and the discarded and rejected, de/composition – both breakdown and regrowth, metaphor and material reality – also reveals sites for renewal where alternative imaginaries proliferate. Through the transformation of life after life within microbial ecosystems to the dissolution of economic and political systems on a planetary scale, notions of decomposition generate possibilities for composition – for creating new futures, led by those most often discarded and dispossessed today. De/composition presents these processes of transformation through powerful affective lenses of disgust, horror, hope, and uncertainty.
Many material and figurative processes of de/composition leave sonic traces. Aesthetic investigation into these sounds through creative and scholarly practices can help us understand instances of de/composition that would otherwise be difficult to detect or represent. Furthermore, de/composition informs music and sound art practice as both a powerful metaphor and physical reality.
The 2024 NYU GSAS Department of Music Graduate Student Conference invites proposals for papers, performances, audio works, and installations that engage with any or all of these registers of de/composition, across historical and global perspectives. Proposals might engage with (but are certainly not limited to) the topics listed below:
ecologies of rot, decay, discard, and dissolve
regeneration, life cycles, recycling, processes of undoing or stripping away
scavenging, collage, collection, sampling, propagation
death and afterlives, end(s) of world(s), eschatologies
eco-horror, monsters, dark ecologies
repulsion, grossness, ickiness, proliferation
speculative and science fictions, magical realism, blurred fiction/reality
alternative temporalities, altered perception, subjectivity
corruption, distortion, static electronic or data-system failure, interference, masked information
sites of decomposition and the entities that reside there (e.g. undergrounds, underworlds, ruins, undercommons)
breakdown, failure, mistakes, accidents
We welcome submissions from artists and scholars at any career stage and from any discipline, and especially encourage graduate students and independent artists and researchers to submit. For performances, fixed media, and installations, all styles and technical approaches are welcome (for installations, see note below). We hope that financial concerns will not prevent anyone from submitting an abstract: there may be a limited fund available to support travel on an as-needed basis.
Please submit abstracts and proposals to nyudecomp@gmail.com by 11:59pm ET Sunday June 1, 2024. In your email, please include:
Name(s) of presenter(s)
Affiliation and/or location
Title of work or presentation
3-5 keywords
An abstract (for paper presentations) or proposal (for performances/installations)
For paper presentations:
Submit a 250-300 word abstract
Please indicate if you have a preference for a full 20-minute talk or a shorter 7-10 minute lightning talk
A/V or other technical requirements (a piano will be available)
For performances and installations:
Submit a 250-300 word description of the proposed work
Include hyperlinks to the finished work (or work-in-progress)
Submit a tentative stage plot and tech rider.
Please note: we’re interested in installations but our ability to accommodate them might be limited. The more equipment you can provide, the better. A list of our equipment is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UzCmIy7PGEc1pRB9nI1tD-4ZlE4a0auUn4LIXHOlxkU/edit?usp=sharing. An engineer will be available.
Please feel free to email co-chairs Elizabeth Frickey and Bailey Hilgren at nyudecomp@gmail.com with any questions.