Music meets geography: Symposium opens doors to research!

Music meets geography: Symposium opens doors to research!

The 38th International DVSM Young Talent Symposium, which deals with the interface between music and geography, will open on June 20, 2025 at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. The event will take place from June 27th to 29th and is accessible both on site in the New Hall in the west wing on the Essen-Werden campus and online. The public has free entry to the lectures and the musical supporting program. The symposium offers a platform for networking and exchange among musicology students.

The topic of the symposium highlights the interactions between music, spatial structures and social networks. Experts from various sub-disciplines of musicology will present different perspectives on this topic. The opening speech will be given by Dr. Christoph Mager from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, who is invited as a keynote speaker. The event opens with a student council concert, which offers participants a first impression of interdisciplinary exchange. folkwang-uni.de reports that…

Intermediality in focus

A central theme of the symposium will be intermediality, which is becoming increasingly important in musicology. This interdisciplinary perspective considers the relationships between music and other media such as literature, images and imagination. The research questions on intermediality focus, among other things, on the dialogic expansion of music's communicative abilities and its embedding in intermedial networks. The focus is also on the relationship between the senses and their role in the media arrangement. dvsm-verband.de explains how intermedia approaches influence musicology.

Important aesthetic phenomena such as musical theater, songs, songs and music videos are analyzed in this context and their transformation processes are considered. The increasingly dynamic discourse in German-speaking countries is reflected in the increased engagement with these intermedia relationships.

Support for student research

The German Association for Musicology (DVSM) plays an outstanding role in promoting student research and networking musicology students throughout German-speaking countries. The young talent symposium not only serves to exchange ideas, but also to make valuable contacts. It encourages participants to discover and develop new perspectives in musicology. The current daily program and further information about the symposium are available online at fs-muwi.folkwang-uni.de/nachwachsensymposium.

The symposium team members include Robert Blumenau, who specializes in the Russian musical avant-garde, and Sandra Bogdanovic, a qualified ethnomusicologist with an interest in music anthropological approaches. Jasmin Goll and Christopher Klauke contribute their in-depth knowledge of the fields of musical theater, popular music studies and transcultural musicology. Antonia Kölble and Tanja Mayboroda work on relevant cultural information and ecological aspects of music. Pia-Christin Wolff and Elizaveta Willert address the intermedia challenges and feminist perspectives within musicology. The diversity of topics and research focuses will enrich the symposium.

Overall, the symposium promises to be a stimulating forum for exchange among young scientists and to further deepen the important connections between music and geography as well as intermedia approaches. dvsm-verband.de offers a comprehensive overview of the topics and organizers.