April 27th - 28th, 2012
NYU Silver Center, Department of Music

Music: Parts and Labor is an integrative, interdisciplinary graduate student conference that allows professors (faculty from both NYU and other universities in the New York area) and graduate students to collaboratively explore the issues of music, its parts and labor, by working closely in seminars, panels, and a roundtable. The constitution of a musical work is a topic of much historical debate in musicological, philosophical, and legal discourses. Music: Parts and Labor aims to interrogate what is at stake in challenging or maintaining certain conceptualizations of the musical work by dismantling it, examining the parts (e.g. intellectual, material) and labor (e.g. intellectual, material) constitutive of its being. We ask how thinking through the labor of the musical work itself, as a part of larger corporeal, cultural, and economic systems provides unique insight into these often intertwined networks and, in turn, music’s efficacy and functionality.

We are pleased to welcome Elisabeth LeGuin (UCLA) as the keynote speaker, as well as Aaron Fox (Columbia), Taoufik Ben-Amor (Columbia), José Esteban Muñoz (NYU), Anne Stone (CUNY), and Maureen Mahon (NYU) on a faculty roundtable, and Suzanne G. Cusick (NYU) and J. Martin Daughtry (NYU) as breakfast seminar leaders. Refreshments, workshops, and special panels will also be featured. Please join us!

For more information and a schedule, please visit http://bit.ly/mpl-nyu, or contact the Organizing Committee Chair, Jessica Schwartz, at jessica.a.schwartz@gmail.com .

All the best,
The Music: Parts and Labor Organizing Committee