CFP: Sounding Habsburg: Sonic Circulations in Central Europe    

Dvořák American Heritage Association and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, April 22 - 23, 2022

The Habsburg monarchy was an inescapable presence in Central Europe from the late sixteenth through the early twentieth century, and its legacy continues to resonate into the present day. Described as “a ‘laboratory’ for the pluricultural experience” (Feichtinger and Cohen, 2014), scholarship in history has started to interrogate the interconnections and circulations within Habsburg Central Europe. Exploring how ideas of citizenship and belonging were contested between the local, regional, and imperial (Judson, 2016) or the unexpected ambivalences in allegiances to linguistic, ethnic, and cultural groups (Zahra, 2008), this scholarship has opened a productive line of inquiry that can be brought to bear on questions of music and sound. Recent work in music studies, such as Claudio Velluntini’s writing on Verdi and Donizetti in Vienna (JAMS 2020) or Kevin Karnes’s discussion of the aural mapping of Europe in travel literature (JAMS 2018), are important beginnings. In this conference, we seek to wrestle with the sonic/musical aspects of these entanglements within Habsburg Central Europe and explore how the aural can highlight the ways in which citizenship, belonging, and affiliation were contested and/or cleave along unexpected fault lines.

Similarly, recent scholarship on empire, both within a Habsburg context and more broadly, provides a powerful lens through which we can explore the lasting impacts of the Habsburg empire on the region. The nation and the transnational are co-constitutive, a product of both the work of nationalist activists and the ways empires categorize and organize subjects (Judson, 2016). As anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler argues, such imperial formations leave lasting and durable marks that profoundly, albeit differently, impact all those touched by empire and its vestiges (Stoler, 2016). Though originating in a post-colonial context, these ideas can, with care, be fruitfully applied to the continued resonances of the Habsburg empire after its dissolution. Attention paid to the intersections of the national, the transnational, and the imperial in Central Europe can also shed light on the various ways in which the legacies of previous imperial practices continued to reverberate after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. How was music or sound used to organize, categorize, or control the empire's various constituents? In what ways were sound and music mobilized to claim agency within or against the power of the imperial state and by whom? Do these ideas re-appear in a contemporary European context?

The Dvořák American Heritage Association and Austrian Cultural Forum New York, in collaboration with New York University and Virginia Tech, kindly invite submissions for paper proposals on all aspects of Habsburg and Central European sonic and musical culture(s) broadly conceived, with a specific focus on (trans)national circulations, exchanges, and ruptures within Habsburg Central Europe. 

 Possible subjects include, but are not limited to:

  • Intersections of the sonic with constructions of race and ethnicity, either in terms of regional difference or in regard to transnational groups like the Jewish and Roma communities,

  • Close readings of musical works from the region, with an eye (ear) towards issues of transnational circulation, empire, or other relevant topics,

  • Cosmopolitanism broadly defined, and especially as a means of managing sonic and/or musical difference,

  • Habsburg court culture, sound, and meaning,

  • Histories of song collecting and ethnological research,

  • Sounds and musics of empire,

  • Music geographies,

  • Projections and/or contestations of Habsburg identity through military music,

  • Nation, nationalism(s) and national styles,

  • Opera and its intersections with nation building, genre, transnationalism, etc.

  • Vernacular theater traditions, including but not limited to traveling companies, circuses, etc.,

  • Regionality/regionalisms, or

  • Linguistics, recording technology, and spoken languages as sound.

 Please submit proposals by August 20, 2021 via email to soundinghabsburg@gmail.com.

  • Your email should include:

  • Paper title

  • Abstract (for papers, 20 minutes + 10 minute Q&A) of 250–300 words

  • Name of presenter

  • Affiliation (if any)

  • A/V or other technical requirements

Special consideration will also be given for panel discussions featuring three to four speakers, either as a roundtable discussion, lightning papers, or full length papers. 

Acceptance will be announced by November 30, 2021.

Questions may be directed to Christopher Campo-Bowen (ccb20@vt.edu) and David Catchpole (dac692@nyu.edu).

The Dvořák American Heritage Association (DAHA) is actively monitoring the incidence of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the New York region. DAHA is following guidance from local health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding large gatherings, including CDC recommendations on preventing the spread of COVID-19. At this time, we anticipate that the conference will take place in-person as planned. If the situation changes and we are not able to safely host the event in-person, contingencies for a virtual event will be announced.This event has been generously supported by the Bohemian Benevolent & Literary Association, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Virginia Tech, and New York University.