The Tenth International Congress of the International Project on Musical Signification will take place 21-25 October 2008  in the Lithuanian cities of Vilnius and Kaunas.
The ICMS is a biannual conference to provide a platform for presentations and discussions of recent developments and future trends in Musical Semiotics. It has been held since 1986 as part of the International Project on Musical Signification.

Deadlines: 1st of April 2008 is the closing date for reception of registrations and abstracts.
1st of July 2008 is the closing date for the registration fee and for for hotel reservation with special rates.

The congress intends to enable discussion and exchange about both 'archaeology' of music and its after-life. By this, it shall also be addressed to transcend recent research on similar themes represented by historical musicology, cultural musicology and related disciplines.

You are invited to attend the congress and/or submit a proposal for a presentation no longer than 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes for discussion). Proposals for round tables will also be considered. The proceedings of the Congress will be published.The official languages of the Congress are English, French, German and Spanish. All speakers are requested to provide a short summary of their paper in English AND the actual language of their paper.

The musical semiotics could provide a refreshing platform for rethinking the musical worlds and capacity of music to decode and to construct human reality – from cultural practices to their theoretical conceptualisations.

Musical signification always transcends an understanding of music as purely artistic phenomenon limited by its aesthetic autonomy: it reflects culture and society, and must involve the investigations of other arts, cultural and social history, philosophy, ideology, sciences, etc. Music-making and re-creating (in all its forms – from performing to hearing and distributing) clearly defines its engagement with the world in a specific way. Mapping whole parts of human reality, music raises the important issues for musical semiotics in analysing and explaining the music's references to the diversity of its contexts.

The topics of ICMS10, "Before and After Music", might include, but are not limited to the following aspects:

• Historical and cultural contextualisation of musical signification;
• Historical and conceptual grounds of musical meaning;
• Musical sign systems and their relationship to other sign systems;
• Multidisciplinary perspectives to the life of musical signs;
• Pre-signs and post-signs in compositional practices;
• Codal (in)competence in musical communication; Performing of and listening to music as signifying practices;
• Interpretation of signs, its historical-social contexts, and its effect on musical signification;
• Cross-cultural versus in-cultural connotations in musical signifying practices;
• Musical signification and consumption of music: new perspectives in the age of globalised reproduction.

 Further information can be found on the conference website: http://www.ktu.lt/ICMS10/