Our project
The online lecture series „Artsong and Gender in Dialogue“ (AGiD) was established in 2025 by Maria Behrendt and Anna Magdalena Bredenbach with the goal of fostering an international community of scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines, all dedicated to exploring artsong through the lens of gender. For the second season, we are delighted to welcome Maren Bagge to our team.
As part of the project, the lectures are recorded and published as videos on this website, subject to the presenters’ consent. Recordings from the first season are available here.
Call for Papers: Season 2
We now invite proposals for the second series of events; this will take place from October 2026 to February 2027. Season 2 will feature the theme
Caring (for/about) Voices
The title works on several levels. Voices in artsong can themselves care: they can express, aestheticize, or contest caring practices, and give lyric form to what often goes unacknowledged. Caring for denotes the practical, often invisible labor that sustains song culture — the work of teaching, accompanying, preserving, and transmitting; caring about denotes the ethical and emotional commitment that animates songs and their makers — the causes, communities, and values that voices carry. Many of the most interesting cases live in the tension between these meanings.
Proposals may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
Artsong and care work:
Songs about motherhood, fatherhood, parenthood, caregiving, and childhood; children’s songs; and the social, cultural, and material conditions of song production including the often invisible labor that sustains musical life.
Artsongs that articulate objects of care:
Songs engaging with political, patriotic, autobiographical, social, environmental, or other concerns that composers, performers, or audiences are committed to or invest in.
Artsongs that care for voices:
Anthologies, collections, arrangements, pedagogical practices, and other forms of preservation, cultivation, or advocacy for particular singers, repertoires, languages, or vocal traditions.
Caring for compositions:
Patronage, editing and edition-making, archival practices, performance traditions, reception histories, and other forms of stewardship that sustain and transmit songs across time and communities.
Across all these areas, we welcome not only repertoire- and topic-based contributions, but also analytical and methodological approaches that ask how care operates within the song itself.
In addition, we invite free papers which may address any aspect of the intersection between artsong and gender beyond the season’s central theme.
Submissions may take the following formats:
• Standard 20-minute conference papers and Q&A
• Full themed panels (Two or three 20-minute papers plus, optionally, a session chair)
Please submit an abstract of no more than 350 words and a short biographical note of no more than 150 words by email by August 15, 2026. For full panel proposals, please include a brief panel description as well as abstracts and biographical notes for all participants.
The submission deadline is August 15, 2026.
We are exploring the possibility of a publication in a collected volume based on selected contributions. Further details will be announced in due course.
Who are we?
Maren Bagge
Maren Bagge is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Musicology Weimar-Jena (University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar).
She studied music, musicology, and mathematics in Hannover and Oldenburg. From 2014 to 2024, she was a research associate at the Research Centre for Music and Gender (fmg) in Hannover, where she completed her doctorate in 2022. Her dissertation Favourite Songs examines popular English song culture in the long 19th century and the central role of women within it. In 2023/24 she was a visiting scholar at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.
In her current habilitation project, she explores music-related exhibitions and memorials, focusing on the GDR and music tourism. Her broader research interests include public music history, musical spaces, media of remembrance, and cultural-historical approaches to 18th- to 20th-century music history linked with methodological approaches from gender studies, network theory, mobility studies, and biographical research.
She is a co-founder of the Postdoc-Netzwerk Musik und Gender and serves as a blog curator for the Women’s Song Forum.
Maria Behrendt
Maria Behrendt is Junior Professor of Musicology at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media and Head of the Research Center Music and Gender (fmg). She studied musicology, media studies and French at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Münster and the University of Wales, Bangor, funded by the German National Academic Foundation and the DAAD.
From 2014 to 2018, she was a research assistant at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar. She completed her doctorate in 2018 with a thesis on romantic aspects in the German art song of the 1830s. After a start-up scholarship from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Musicology at Philipps University Marburg from 2021 to 2024.
Her research interests include song research, film music research and music and gender.
Maria Behrendt is a founding member of the artistic-scientific “trio pontes” (with Anna Schors and Paul Heller), co-author of the podcast “Ein Like für Clara” about musical dedications to Clara Schumann, co-host of the podcast “Musikgespräch” and a member of the board of the Kiel Society for Film Music Research.
Anna Bredenbach
Anna Magdalena Bredenbach is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Music at the University of Erfurt. She studied music education, musicology, German studies, and rhetoric at the HMDK Stuttgart, the University of Stuttgart, and the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. In 2016, she completed her doctorate with a dissertation on the music historiography of the turn of the 20th century from a narratological perspective. Her studies and doctoral research were supported by the Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst and the Deutschlandstipendium. From 2014 to 2019, she served as a research assistant at the Institute for Musicology and Music Education at HMDK Stuttgart. Since 2016, she has been teaching at the University of Erfurt’s Department of Music.
In 2023, she worked as scientific director for the Tübingen Music Festival „Komponistinnen“. Since 2024, she has served as the deputy spokesperson for the Fachgruppe Frauen- und Genderstudien der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung. Her research interests encompass music historiography, musicology and music education, and the intersections of music and gender. Her current project focuses on Josephine Lang and the song culture of Munich in the 1830s.