Travels in Hyperreality:
medievalism and postmodern musical cultures

A joint conference organised by OBERTO, the opera research group at Oxford Brookes University, and REMOSS (Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen).

Postponed until 2021. 

It has been 37 years since Umberto Eco wrote Travels in Hyperreality. Gazing at the ‘postmodern neomedieval Manhattan new castle’ of Trump Tower, he found ‘a new feudalism’ in a ‘New Middle Ages’. Now that Trump is sovereign, Eco’s playful comparisons between saints and pop stars overspill their boundaries grotesquely. But why is the pop star so sainted? And if ‘the relationship between illuminated manuscript and cathedral is the same as that between MOMA and Hollywood’, does the tower loom as large as the soundbite?

For its fifth annual conference, the REMOSS (Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen) study group invites proposals on the theme of ‘Travels in Hyperreality’, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between pre- and postmodern musical cultures. We aim to acknowledge medievalism’s pervasiveness in postmodern society and ask what worldviews we share with premodernity—what relationships with ambiguity, truth, reality, and excess—and how they manifest themselves in the world of sound. 

Keynote lectures will be given by Lindsay Steenberg and Bruce Holsinger.

See here for more details.

‘Don’t mention the C Word’ – re-assessing the meaning and impact of censorship in opera

OBERTO is supporting the above conference which has been organised by former Brookes doctoral student, Dr Andrew Holden, in conjunction with the University of Leeds, RHUL and an Early Career Fellowship from the Institute for Musical Research. It will be held at the University of Leeds, Thursday 11 June  2020. See here for more details

OBERTO conference 2020

The 2020 OBERTO conference will take place at Oxford Brookes University in early September on a date to be confirmed.  The abstracts from past conferences can be seen here