The complete booklet is now online.

The call for papers of tosc@bern.2017 received 223 proposals from 30 countries: USA(58), UK (28), Italy (20), France (19), Germany (18), Austria (15), Canada (7), Spain (6), Portugal (6), Brazil (5), Australia (4), Czech Republic (4), Switzerland (4), Greece (4), Poland (3), Finland (3), Russia (3), Sweden (3), Israel (3), Slovakia (3), China (3), Japan (2), Colombia (1), Ireland (1), Denmark (1), Cyprus (1), Holland (1), New Zealand (1), Lithuania (1), Tunisia (1).

The topics proposed spanned all historical periods, as well as touching on various issues related to opera in its widest sense. Seventy papers have been accepted for the Conference.

THE tosc@bern.2017 AWARD

The tosc@bern.2017 award for the best paper by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career is was assigned to James O’Leary, Assistant Professor of Musicology at Oberlin College and Conservatory (actually the oldest continuously operating conservatory in the United States, situated in the Great Lakes Region in the South West of Cleveland (Ohio)). Entitled “Kurt Weill’s ‘Idiotic Theories’ and ‘Human Development’,” O’Leary’s paper imaginatively challenges the so-called “two Weill thesis”—the long-held idea that Kurt Weill, transnational composer par excellence, turned away from his avant-garde aspirations after his emigration to the United States, and instead catered to the American entertainment industry. Investigating the genesis and reception of the 1946 musical Street Scene, O’Leary argues instead that Weill began to shift his focus from what he now called “Brecht’s idiotic old theories” of the avant-garde to the notion of human development, and that he continued an experimental strain of Broadway Musical that sought to engender critical political thought through emotional rather than intellectual engagement. Combining archival findings and theoretical considerations, O’Leary sounds out a ‘third way’ between the radically unconventional avant-garde (as traditionally understood by Adorno and others) on the one hand, and ‘mere’ conventionality on the other: his paper concludes that Weill in America “used convention unconventionally,” and thereby fostered what he dubs a “popular avant-garde.” The scholarly committee of tosc@bern.2017 was unanimous in its appreciation of this very convincing and stimulating paper – particularly in view of the foremost importance of “the uses of convention” and the dialectic relationship between conventions and their transgression in so many operatic genres, as well as its relevance for transnational opera studies. O’Leary ends with a call to investigate more broadly the hidden, “popular” strand of avant-garde composition. It is up to him and future scholars to take up this call; but it is up to us to congratulate James O'Leary for his successful paper, which may be published in the Swiss Yearbook of Musicology 2018.