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The Craziest Musicology Conference of All Time

Writer's picture: Árni HeimirÁrni Heimir

Updated: Aug 23, 2024

One of my favorite movies (apart from Amadeus, which is in a league of its own) is What’s Up, Doc?, Peter Bogdanovich’s zany screwball comedy from 1972. I saw it as a kid and loved it even then, but certain layers of its plot have become more relevant – and funny – to me as time goes on. Not least of which: it takes place in San Francisco during the annual convention of the American Musicological Society – a meeting that I have attended almost 20 times by now. One of these meetings, in fact (in 2011), took place in San Francisco, although, compared to Bogdanovich’s film, it was a fairly mundane event.


The film, however, is anything but mundane. Howard Bannister (Ryan O’Neal) is an absent-minded musicologist who attends the AMS conference with his fiancée Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn, in her first movie role). As soon as they reach the hotel, he accidentally bumps into Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand), an adventurous, free spirit who falls in love with him at first sight – thus creating problems in his relationship with Eunice, as well as in his attempt to win a substantial grant for his research on the musical qualities of igneous rocks. The story becomes even more zany through a series of subplots. One of them involves identical plaid suitcases, only one of which contains the subject of Howard’s research, while others contain jewels and top secret papers -- which some rather shady individuals want to get their hands on, no matter what the cost.


None of the conferences I have ever attended have been nearly as adventurous as What’s Up, Doc? – but that is probably just as well. Musicology conferences such as the AMS (American Musicological Society), IMS (International Musicological Society) and RMA (Royal Musical Association) are mostly very well-behaved events consisting of lectures, concerts, parties, and networking – and, perhaps most importantly, catching up with friends, schoolmates, and colleagues. Coming from a small country in which musicology has only recently been established as an academic discipline, keeping in touch with scholars and ideas from all over the world is particularly important. In his discussion of What’s Up, Doc?, film critic Richard Brody calls the musicology conference "the ultimate nerd convention" -- which strikes me as an accurate description. At this year’s AMS conference, the offerings range the gamut from "Learnedness as Type and Style in Haydn’s Nelsonmesse" to "Seriously Unserious: The Aesthetics of Absurdity in Viral Hip-Hop Remixes," and "Mean Girls: Or, Violence as Female Rage in Contemporary Popular Music."


This autumn, I will be lecturing at AMS in Chicago, as well as the annual meeting of the Royal Musical Association in London (celebrating their 150th anniversary!). I will also be a guest speaker at a conference, hosted by Leeds University, on the various uses of folk music in the early twentieth century. In these lectures, I will be discussing several different aspects of Icelandic music, and am looking forward to hearing my colleagues speak on topics ranging from medieval to contemporary, as well as catching up with old friends, many of whom I haven’t seen since pre-Covid times. The only topic that seems to be missing at all these events is ignatious rocks – which, now that I think of it, was probably my first exposure, at age twelve or so, to a musicological topic at all.


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