15th ICMS
New dates: 1st to 5th of September 2021
ICMS 15, organized by Joan Grimalt and Eero Tarasti, will take place at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona, from the 1st to the 5th of September 2021.
Performance and musical signification
The theme of this year’s ICMS is the link between music signification and performance. In other words, how might we interpret vocal or instrumental performance in the light of expressive strategies, topoi, narrative analyses, and other approaches? And how might an expressive analysis (including a topical, thymic, or narrative approach) help performers achieve a better understanding of the piece and its interpretation? How might such approaches help us to compare different performances of the same musical piece?
In music conservatories or music schools all over the world, where the instrument is still at the curriculum’s core, an analysis including expressive values should be encouraged. The incorporation of musical signification in pedagogy can help interpreters and teachers find valuable musicological, theoretical, and semiotic tools to complement intuitive performing approaches.
Although we are inviting papers relating performance and musical signification, those dealing with any other issues concerning musical signification are of course welcome.
The ICMS
The International Congress on Musical Signification (ICMS) is a biannual meeting on recent developments and trends in the studies of musical signification. It is the major platform of the international research project Musical Signification, launched in Paris in 1984, and subsequently directed for 34 years by Eero Tarasti.
Following ICMS 14 in Cluj-Napoca (Romania), ICMS 15 will be held in vibrant Barcelona, capital city of Catalonia, generously hosted by its higher education institution, the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC), under the auspices of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS), the International Semiotics Institute (ISI) and the Academy of Cultural Heritages (ACH).