Conference “Poetry, Music and Sound Art: Recent Medial Correlations” – a Retrospective

9 July 2024

Photo: private

From June 20 to 22, 2024, our third international interdisciplinary conference “Poetry, Music and Sound Art: Recent Medial Correlations” took place in Hamburg at Warburg-Haus. It was conceptualized and organized by Rebecka Dürr, Kira Henkel, and Vadim Keylin.

Scholars from the fields of literary, cultural, and sound studies, musicology, and the digital humanities gave fourteen talks. The speakers were (in alphabetical order) Rachel Bolle (Vienna), Valentina Colonna (Granada), Jacob Kingsbury Downs (Oxford), Cornelia Gräbner (Lancaster), Kira Henkel (Hamburg), Gregor Herzfeld (Regensburg), Juliana Hodkinson (Aarhus), Susanne Kogler (Graz), Beata Kornatowska (Poznań), Alison Maggart (Austin), Holger Schulze (Copenhagen), Zoë Skoulding (Bangor), Gardy Stein (Hamburg), and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen (Aarhus). Organized into six multifaceted panels, the speakers discussed a wide range of artworks and themes that impressively demonstrate the reciprocal relationships between poetry and music or sound.

The first panel, “Oral Poetry between Tradition and Innovation,” shone a spotlight on the latest transformations that have taken place in the African griot tradition and dub poetry. The second panel, "Poetic References in Music—Musical References in Poetry," examined intermedial references between music and poetry using the examples of lit-hop and contemporary poetry influenced by Frédéric Chopin. The third panel, “Musical Settings of Poetry in the Digital Age,” focused on the diverse ways in which contemporary classical composers work with poetic texts as well as the recent evolution of the art song genre. Panel four, “Sonic Sites of Poetry,” introduced the topic of poetic sound art and examined practices such as poetic sound walks, sound installations, and online performances of sound poetry. The papers in the fifth panel, “Ecocritical Perspectives in Musical Spoken Word,” dealt with the ecological and post-humanist themes of collaborations between poets and musicians that pair music with spoken poetry. Finally, the last panel investigated the “Musicality of Poets’ Voices” from the perspectives of the digital humanities and artistic research.

In addition to the panels, the conference program included a lecture-performance by Danish media-artist and writer Jakob Schweppenhäuser, titled “EYE AM DISAPPEARING: Sounding a Dark Anthropofugality”.

The results of the conference will be published in 2025, supplemented by further contributions on the intersections of poetry, music and sound art. The book will be available both in print and open access in our series with De Gruyter (https://www.degruyter.com/serial/poetryda-b/html).

Link to photos of the conference.