Call: The Extensible Electric Guitar Festival seeks participants

The Extensible Electric Guitar Festival, Clark University, Worcester MA USA
April 4-5, 2008

Call for Presentations
SYMPOSIUM: ‘Instruments of the Post-Prohibitive Age’
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 01/01/08
http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/mmalsky/xeg/xeg.html

Our symposium begins where Kyle Gann’s keynote to the Extensible Toy
Piano Festival (Nov. 2005) left us — with a consideration of the
‘post-prohibitive era’.** Listeners have access to music from every
historical era, social context and geographic location, and it’s all
accessible instantaneously. Musicians can synthesize all previous
musical thought. Every musical style, unusual sound, revolutionary
impulse or aesthetic ideal can be incorporated into new music. If
modernism’s relationship with mass-culture was marked by a fear of
contagion, our post-prohibitive era might be thought of in terms of
information-overload. And how do we go about making sense of it all?

Matt Malsky and David Claman, the directors of the Extensible Electric
Guitar Festival, invite paper proposals for a symposium as part of the
Festival on April 4-5, 2008. This symposium will provide a forum for an
open and far-ranging discussion on themes and issues complementary to
the Festival. Presentations will be 30 minutes long. Possible topics
might include (but are not limited to):

- instruments vs. instrumentality: guitars and other expressive objects
and formation of listening subjects
- pleasurable sounds: entertainment & music’s relationship to mass culture
- music and technoculture: musical means, creativity and technological
possibility
- gendering instruments
- racial perspectives on guitars and guitar music
- historical perspectives on musical performance and social practices
- multimedia and new music:the intersection of new musical instruments
in diverse media
- the political economy of contemporary composition: the composer and
our division of musical labor
- the (impossible) concert: music in everyday/public life
- the live and the canned: performance and listening in the age of the
studio
- post-literacy in music: aurality vs. orality

Proposals should be no more than 500 words and include audio-visual
requirements. Please submit your proposal by January 1, 2008 via email
to or by surface post to:

The Extensible Electric Guitar Festival
Clark University
Department of Visual and Performing Arts
950 Main St.
Worcester, MA 01610 USA