The Aesthetics of Absence in Music of the Twenty-First Century

About the conference

Absence connotes a lack of presence; the not-there, the what-is-not, the empty void of nothingness. Ever since antiquity, essentialist philosophy has challenged the legitimacy of such an idea: while reality is defined by what we say about it through positive assertions, it does not make sense to refer to that which is absent and is therefore not real. Yet absence is a vital part of our lived experience; we talk of absence and invoke the non-present in doing so. 

Over the past decades, numerous societal and technological changes and challenges have amplified the experience of absence in everyday life, with issues of isolation, remoteness, loneliness, and even death, of ever-increasing global concern. The influence of these issues has also been felt in the arts and in a range of music that draws inspiration from longstanding traditions of artistic engagement with silence, emptiness and other types of absence.

This conference asks: how has the continued relevance of absence as a creative and aesthetic impulse been expressed, felt, and understood in recent years? How do new musical expressions of absence say something about the ways in which we engage and interact with and make sense of the world in which we live today? And how might music help us to understand the status of absence where language falls short? 

This conference sets out to explore the many ways in which absence is activated and explored in music of the twenty-first century and aims to stimulate a broad and interdisciplinary conversation. We warmly invite perspectives from across all domains of music studies, including those of performance and composition, and related disciplines, such as aesthetics, critical theory, and cultural studies. 

Keynote speaker: Professor Judy Lochhead - Stony Brook University

(See full programme and book of abstracts below)

Live stream

The conference was streamed live on YouTube.

Themes

Presentations address – but are by no means limited to – music of the twenty-first century and: 

• Notions of absence and its related themes (e.g. nothingness, voids, and boredom)

• The (perceived) absence of musical conventions, traditions, parameters or events (e.g. silence, formlessness, decay, lo-fi, virtuality, white noise)

• Absences of the self (e.g. death, disassociation, disappearance, prostheses, the subconscious, the virtual) 

• Absences of the other (e.g. isolation, loneliness, remoteness, distance, longing, desire)

• The no-longer-there (e.g. phantoms, ghosts, nostalgia, memory, melancholia) 

• Near-absences (e.g. ‘soft and quiet’ aesthetics, reductions and abstractions of form and content)

• Absence in relation to its counterpole (e.g. excess, overload, maximalism)

Abstracts

The closing date for abstract submissions was 1 December 2022. See final programme below. 
Download book of conference abstracts (click here) 

Getting to the Conference

For information about how to get to the University of Oslo, please click here.

The conference took place in Salen (the main hall) in the ZEB building, on the main Blindern Campus. The street address is: Sem Sælands vei 2. 

The conference was free and open for all.

Contact

For any further information, contact aestheticsofabsence@gmail.com

Organizer

This conference was convened by Christine Dysers (Department of Musicology, Uppsala University) and Peter Edwards (Department of Musicology, University of Oslo).

Scientific committee: 

Christine Dysers (Uppsala Univ.), Peter Edwards (UiO), Nanette Nielsen (UiO), Erling Guldbrandsen (UiO), Emil Bernhardt (UiO), Halvor Hosar (Uppsala Univ.), Meghan Quinlan (Uppsala Univ.), Jonas Lundblad (Uppsala Univ.)

Conference Programme

All times are in Central European Time (CET), UTC +1
Conference papers should be maximum 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for questions