Millennial mega-meeting

Irvine, Thomas (2001) Millennial mega-meeting. Early Music, 29 (1), 150-151. (doi:10.1093/earlyj/XXIX.1.150).

Abstract

Writing a comprehensive report on 'Musical Intersections', a mammoth conference held at two hotels inToronto, is a risky undertaking. A book of abstracts the size of a small-city telephone directory is proof enough that the organizers, 14 North American professional music societies, meant their millennium meeting to be the biggest, broadest and most inclusive of its kind ever presented. For the observer interested primarily in early music, the first challenge was to sort out the boundaries of the term itself. Readers of this journal need hardly be reminded that the chronological and geographical boundariesof the field of historical performance are being constantly redrawn. Given the presence of so many colleagues who study such a wide variety of music, one could have spent the entire weekend following the thread of a single genre. Indeed, one could have pursued one word—for instance 'authenticity', a term that is perhaps less common now in discussions about the so-called mainstream repertory, but is critical, for instance, to the scholarly discourse of popular music. Or one could have chosen a more eclectic approach, focusing on a few events of immediate interest and spending the rest of the time cutting across as many 'intersections' as possible, a technique that brings with it the inevitable frustrations of insoluble conflicts of schedule and highlights missed while dashing from hotel to hotel. This observer chose the latter and did the best he could; any omissions are his responsibility

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics