Tonality, 1900-1950: Concept and Practice

FAIN: RZ-51152-10

Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)
Philip Rupprecht (Project Director: November 2009 to August 2011)

A conference on tonal music in the first half of the 20th century, bringing together scholars from six states and Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland.

TONALITY 1900-1950: CONCEPT and PRACTICE will be a three-day music conference held jointly at Duke University and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill on October 1-3, 2010. The event will be international: we will bring eight leading scholars from Germany into dialogue with eight colleagues in the US. The conference is jointly planned by the Project Director, Philip Rupprecht (Duke) and his colleague at UNC, Felix Woerner. Additional planning of the conceptual framework has involved collaboration with our colleague Ullrich Scheideler (Berlin). The international outlook of the event is crucial to sparking exchange between German and American musicology, traditions with common roots but by now distinct intellectual concerns. Tonality, briefly, is the system of pitches that communicates a feeling of key in folk and art music. We challenge the received idea of a general collapse of tonal music around 1910, seeking to write a revisionist history of the period. We plan four panels.