The tenth annual Columbia Music Scholarship Conference (CMSC) will be held on March 8, 2014 at Columbia University in the City of New York. The theme of the 2014 meeting is Music and Memory. The conference is organized by graduate students from the Department of Music at Columbia University with financial support from the Department of Music and the Graduate Student Advisory Council.
The conference welcomes Prof. Jonathan Sterne from the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University as the 2014 keynote speaker. Prof. Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; histories of signal processing; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception.
Burgeoning interdisciplinary inquiry on memory is enabling scholars to develop new perspectives in a diverse array of fields ranging from history, anthropology, sociology, literary studies, art history, archeology, cultural studies, and media studies, to philosophy, political science, theology, education, psychology, and the cognitive sciences. This conference will add to this growing interdisciplinary conversation about memory in the sciences, arts, and humanities, stimulating a dialogue both on the role of memory in music studies and on the place of music in studies of memory.
The conference seeks to consider the complexity of memory’s embeddedness in music’s practices, subjects, objects, ideologies, sites, and technologies. Interests lie in memory as lived, constructed, represented, performed, transmitted, inscribed, incorporated, and stored, as persisting, travelling and circulating, as material and immaterial, human and non-human, as a capacity and a resource that impacts and shapes everyday lives. In what ways can memory influence musical practice, and in what ways can musical practice influence memory? How might memories be theorized musically? What can music scholars offer to memory studies, and memory scholars to music studies?
Information provided by the CMSC website.
pathways in music 
Music and Emotions
The most difficult problem in answering the question of how music creates emotions is likely to be the fact that assignments of musical elements and emotions can never be defined clearly. The solution of this problem is the Theory of Musical Equilibration. It says that music can’t convey any emotion at all, but merely volitional processes, the music listener identifies with. Then in the process of identifying the volitional processes are colored with emotions. The same happens when we watch an exciting film and identify with the volitional processes of our favorite figures. Here, too, just the process of identification generates emotions.
An example: If you perceive a major chord, you normally identify with the will “Yes, I want to…”. If you perceive a minor chord, you identify normally with the will “I don’t want any more…”. If you play the minor chord softly, you connect the will “I don’t want any more…” with a feeling of sadness. If you play the minor chord loudly, you connect the same will with a feeling of rage. You distinguish in the same way as you would distinguish, if someone would say the words “I don’t want anymore…” the first time softly and the second time loudly.
Because this detour of emotions via volitional processes was not detected, also all music psychological and neurological experiments, to answer the question of the origin of the emotions in the music, failed.
But how music can convey volitional processes? These volitional processes have something to do with the phenomena which early music theorists called “lead”, “leading tone” or “striving effects”. If we reverse this musical phenomena in imagination into its opposite (not the sound wants to change – but the listener identifies with a will not to change the sound) we have found the contents of will, the music listener identifies with. In practice, everything becomes a bit more complicated, so that even more sophisticated volitional processes can be represented musically.
Further information is available via the free download of the e-book “Music and Emotion – Research on the Theory of Musical Equilibration:
http://www.willimekmusic.de/music-and-emotions.pdf
or on the online journal EUNOMIOS:
http://www.eunomios.org
Enjoy reading
Bernd Willimek, music theorist