Appel à contribution : « Eyes and Ears: Comparing Formal Analyses in Art and Music (Southern Low Countries, 1350-1700) », Anvers, août 2024, date limite le 15 janvier 2024

This is the first of two workshops; both will be in person although there is scope for hybrid participation. The workshop is part of a project entitled ‘Analysing Art and Music in the Southern Low Countries (1350-1700)’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). This project is a partnership between the Open University (UK), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Alamire Foundation (both Belgium).

The purpose of this initial workshop is to bring together art historians and musicologists to develop new, interdisciplinary methodologies for studying sensory experiences historically. Our aim is to explore similarities and differences in how art historians and musicologists produce formal analyses. Central issues include:

• where exactly is the balance between the sensory, the analytical, and the historical?
• what are the roles of texts and of textual interpretive models?
• how can musicologists and art historians use their respective analytical methods to learn from each other?
• how might developing interdisciplinary modes for formal analysis advance the broader field of sensory history?

To make these questions manageable, the workshop will focus on the Southern Low Countries between 1350 and 1700, which offers an incredible wealth of visual, spatial, textual and musical sources for research.

For the project we seek four art historians and four musicologists with relevant profiles. In the first workshop, participants will give informal presentations of twenty minutes each, setting out ideas and problems for general discussion, possibly explored through specific case-studies. To guarantee interdisciplinarity, art historians and musicologists will be assigned as discussants to one another. This is why numbers are restricted and the audience will consist of art historians and musicologists at the Open University only.

A second workshop will take place in Antwerp in August 2024, forming part of the Laus Polyphoniae early music festival. This second event is open to everyone and the papers, building on the first workshop, will now be formal research presentations of around 40 minutes each. The results from both workshops will be worked into a special issue of the Open Arts Journal, an on-line, open access, peer-reviewed scholarly periodical run by the Open University (UK). For this reason, interested scholars should be willing to commit to both workshops and to the publication. Of course, travel to the workshops and accommodation will be paid for as long as costs are within reason.

To register interest, please send an abstract of 200 words to Margit Thøfner (margit.thofner@open.ac.uk) before 15 January 2024. Please include details of disciplinary and institutional circumstances. Margit is happy to respond to informal enquiries up until 20 December 2023; final decisions on participants will be communicated by 31 January 2024.

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