Theme

Embodiment is the idea that our mental life depends directly on our body - its internal biological norms, and its patterns of activity in the environment - rather than just on the brain. This view has stimulated a large body of work in both humanities and sciences, contributing novel fascinating perspectives in music scholarship.

Indeed, recent empirical and theoretical work on how we engage with, and make sense of, music is more than ever concerned with movements, gestures, sensorimotor couplings, and motor resonances. These are now recurrent themes in the music research community and are increasingly understood as features central to musical learning, emotion, development, perception, and performance, among others.

The centrality of body and action for human musicality has also promoted a debate for understanding the history and cultural diversity of musical subjectivity: how embodied and social factors contribute to the development of musical styles and identities across different historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. Because of this, categories like body and action become relevant for historical topics concerning music and “the flesh” (carnality), alterity, pleasure/pain, torture/death, rituals and religion, power, and compositional practices.

However, the real implications this framework can offer for our understanding of music and musicality remain unclear. What does it really mean for music cognition to be embodied? The aim of this conference is to foster collaborations between scholars working in the humanities and the sciences to critically engage with this question, and explore the main theoretical, empirical, and performative challenges that embodiment poses in the musical domain.

CIM19 also provides a meeting point for those who wish to reflect upon, and interpret, the social, historical, epistemological, artistic, and even political aspects that emerge when embodiment is adopted as explanatory tool in musical contexts. CIM19 promotes interdisciplinary scholarship at the crossroads of musicology and other disciplines, and invites submission for analysis, critical reflection, experimental reports, and discussion of different aspects of embodiment in relation to music, from diverse epistemological standpoints.

About CIM

CIM has its own society (the Society for Interdisciplinary Musicology) and its own international peer-reviewed journal (the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies). The best presentations at each CIM are invited for publication in a special issue of JIMS. Other presenters are invited to revise and submit their papers to JIMS for publication in a regular issue.

• CIM celebrates diversity. We aim to treat all musically relevant disciplines, all musicological sub-disciplines and paradigms, and all music researchers equally.
• CIM promotes epistemologically distant collaborations. All contributions are encouraged to have at least two authors. The first two authors should preferably represent two of the following three groups: humanities, sciences, practically oriented disciplines.
• CIM focuses on quality rather than quantity and fosters intellectually rigorous debate. Academic standards are promoted by anonymous peer review of submitted abstracts by independent international experts in relevant (sub-) disciplines.

Funding

CIM19 is funded in part by a Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellowship granted to AS by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): project number M2148. Because topics and aims of this project strongly overlap with those of CIM19, the latter serves as the project's final conference. Funding for CIM19 are also generously provided by Land Steiermark, UniGraz - Forschungsmanagement, as well as ÖFG.

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