Call for Papers
41st Annual AMIS/CIMCIM Meeting
15 to 20 May 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and
The Manhattan School of Music
New York, NY
Proposals due by 15 December 2011
The 2012
CIMCIM meeting will be a joint meeting with the American Musical Instrument
Society and will be hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art between May 15th
and 20th. CIMCIM specific
papers are scheduled for May 16th and additional papers of a more
general nature may be incorporated into
joint sessions with AMIS.
The general
topic of the meeting will be The Arts and
Artists of Musical Instruments and the specific CIMCIM topic is: Do displayed instruments become works of
art?
Displaying
musical instruments in a museum environment removes them from the context for
which they were made and that gives them their original meaning, and transforms
them into something else. Musical instruments in museums are displayed,
conserved, handled in a way that reflects their modification from “tools” to
elements of “cultural heritage”, or parts of our cultural past that are loaded
with a new value in relation to their connection to history, music and culture.
This, however, implies changes in the criteria that attribute value and
interest to the instrument: its historic role and connections, its rarity, its peculiarity
of shape and material may become more relevant than the quality and power of
its sound or its usability for concert repertoire.
This shift
in interest towards the uniqueness of the object, however, is typical of the
western concept of “work of art” with its implications in the attribution of
value, preservation and fruition, raising the question: “do displayed
instruments become works of art?
Different
approaches in collecting, display and communication, both nowadays and in the
past, have led to different answers and reactions to this question: papers
addressing this subject under any perspective, theoretical or practical, are
warmly invited from all CIMCIM members and will be selected by the paper
committee of the conference (
15 December 2011 is
the (revised) deadline for submission of proposals. Applicants whose proposals are
accepted will be notified by 13 January 2012. Abstracts for accepted
presentations will then be placed on the Society's website (http://www.amis.org), where
information about all aspects of the conference will be available.
Abstracts/proposals of no more than 350 words should be submitted as Microsoft
Word documents, attached to an e-mail and sent to Ken Moore,
CIMCIM Program Chair (ken.moore@metmuseum.org ) AND to
Please submit two
copies, one including the author’s name, institutional affiliation (if any),
mailing address, e-mail address, and audio-visual needs; the other containing
only the abstract/proposal, with no indication of authorship (for purposes of
blind review). The unsigned (“blind”) copy of the abstract/proposal should also
be pasted into the body of the e-mail message, in case of problems in file
transfer.
Presentations will
ordinarily be limited to 20 minutes (followed by time for questions). The
language of the proposals and presentations is English, and a paper should be
delivered in person at the meeting by its author. All presenters must register
for the conference.
For further information
about the conference, contact: