UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES
Graduate Student Conference
February 8 & 9, 2007

"uniting SOUND & TEXT"

Keynote Speaker:  Michael Steinberg, Brown University

Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen/ Die da träumen fort und fort,
Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,/ Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.
- Joseph von Eichendorff

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Sound—musical, vocal, or otherwise—maintains a perplexing relationship to the
mute world of text.  The purpose of this conference is to unravel some of the
implications of the many intersections between the acoustic realm and that of
literature.   How is sound made manifest within literature and theory, and how
does sound (and music in particular) function when laden with textual
significance?  Does music, in its abstractness, maintain a distance from and
sense of superiority over linguistic discourse, or will it, as Eichendorff’s
poem suggests, reveal itself at the command of a magic word?

We welcome submissions in the fields of German culture, literature, music,
history, philosophy, or linguistics, or from scholars engaging with any of the
following or other topics relating to the union of sound and text:

Opera and Song
Voice and Vocalization
Gender of Voice
The Castrato
E.T.A. Hoffmann/Romanticizing the Voice
Silence/Dynamics of the Pause
Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk
R. Strauss and Hofmannsthal
Foreign Accents, Modes of Speech
The Scream/Acoustics of Trauma
Religious Music in the German Sphere
Sprechstimme and Sprechgesang
Schoenberg, Adorno, Mann
Brecht and his Musical Collaborators
Folk Song
Mahler and Des Knaben Wunderhorn
Orchestral Song
Radio, Hörspiele and Hörbücher

Participants are invited to attend a Liederabend including the world premiere of
a song by Alma Mahler, performed by mezzo-soprano Elif Ezgi Kutlu of the Curtis
Institute of Music, on the evening of February 8. The music will be discussed
in a roundtable at the close of the conference.

*****

Deadline for Submission of Abstracts (1 page, in English): December 15, 2006
Submit Abstracts to: [log in to unmask]

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-- 
Mara Taylor
Department of Germanics
University of Pennsylvania
745 Williams Hall
255 S. 36th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

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