[AMS-announce] CFP: Music and the Melodramatic Aesthetic, Univ. of Nottingham, Sep 2008

[Announcements for the AMS]

**REMINDER: 31 May deadline**

Conference: Music and the Melodramatic Aesthetic
5-7 September 2008, University of Nottingham, UK

The early nineteenth-century stage genre of melodrama, as exemplified by Pixérécourt's mélodrames à grand spectacle, expressed the moral struggle between good and evil through the interrelationship of music, speech, gesture and tableau in scenes of high emotion. This cross-disciplinary conference (Music, Theatre, Film, Art History, Philosophy) is the culmination of an AHRC-funded Research Workshop exploring melodrama as a performance process and an aesthetic, and tracing the nature of its influence on later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century drama - including opera, ballet, pantomime and early sound and film recordings.

The keynote speaker will be Prof Jacqueline Waeber (Duke University).

Individual papers and session proposals are invited on (though not restricted to) the following topics:
--The gestural language of melodrama, opera, ballet, silent film --Performance materials (including treatises, manuals, images, recordings) --Gestural and musical clichés --The high/low divide --The communication process between actors/singers and audience --Ethics and aesthetics --The evolution of melodrama through the nineteenth century --Tableaux --Static/kinetic moments --Gesture and movement in music --Performative processes --Excess --Sonic/visual spectacle --Body-voice-orchestra as locus of meaning --Sound vs. image --Cultural transfer

For more information on the Research Workshop (and the conference itself in due course) please visit www.nottingham.ac.uk/nottingham.ac.uk/music/mma

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers (max. 300 words) and/or 90- minute panel sessions to the conference organiser sarah.hibberd at nottingham.ac.uk by **31 May 2008**. Please include your institutional details and email address. We aim to notify applicants within three weeks of this deadline. It is envisaged that a selection of papers will be published.