Baltic Musics After the Post-Soviet, Amherst College, (Virtual) 21-23 January 2022

“Baltic Musics After the Post-Soviet” is an international conference hosted virtually at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College (Massachusetts, USA) on 21-23 January 2022. The conference will bring together scholars and artists working in the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and areas connected by the Baltic Sea) and with Baltic musics to document and understand emerging worlds and narratives of Baltic music. The three-day event will focus on questions of creative and scholarly practice after the “post-Soviet”: What happens as processes of return, reunion, restoration, revival, and reconciliation characterizing “post-Soviet” life in the Baltics give way to new emergencies and urgencies? What happens as generations less impacted by the experience of Soviet occupation and coloniality create sounds and spaces beyond the “post-Soviet”? For Baltic musicians, musical publics, and scholars working to decolonize national culture, critically rethink ethnolinguistic and racialized identities in musical life, and make scenes and traditions sustainable, the certainty of the “post-Soviet” as “that which we no longer are” is also its limit—always once occupied, once colonized.

“Baltic Musics After the Post-Soviet” explores the chronologies and imaginaries of makers, performers, and scholars creating, naming, inhabiting, and interpreting Baltic worlds after the “post-Soviet.” We invite music- and sound-centered papers and presentations of creative work that address Baltic musics after the “post-Soviet” from practice-based, ethnographic, historical, and comparative perspectives. Possible themes to explore include, but are not limited to:

National genres and instruments

Place, soundscape, and environment

Language and multilingualism

Historiography

Collaborative music-making

Movement, emigration, and diaspora

Archives and festivals

Gender, race, voice, and body

Consumerism, media, and music industries

Dance

Religion

Institutions and states

Regionalisms, Europeanness, globality

Hybridity of style and influence

The composer’s voice

Confirmed keynote speakers and presenters:

Rūta Stanevičiūtė (Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre)

Laura Jēkabsone (Composer/Arranger, Latvian Voices)

The conference will feature scholarly papers and presentations of work by makers and performers. For papers, please submit a 250-word abstract along with a 150-word biography. For maker and performer presentations, please submit either a 250-word description of your presentation plan or a prospective program with a 100-word description of relevant themes, topics, or connecting threads. All maker and performer proposals should include 1-3 links to audio/visual/other if relevant materials that are representative of the proposed presentation. All materials should be submitted in PDF format to balticmusics2022@gmail.com by 1 April 2021.

For more information, please see the conference website here: https://bit.ly/3t5SrdJ