Call for Papers

Histories of Hidden and Vernacular Theories of Music
2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting, November 6-9
Hyatt Regency Hotel in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Co-organized by the AMS History of Theory Study Group and SMT History of Theory Interest Group

For some time now, historians of music theory have been on the hunt for sources beyond the familiar archive of elite treatises and composition manuals, in search of new insights into past approaches to conceptualizing and formalizing music. This shift has been part of a broader questioning of what gets to count as music theory in our histories of the field. Scholars have already taken into consideration the vernacular music theory expressed by fans on online blogs (Rings 2013) and jazz liner notes (Hannaford 2022); the hidden theories of oral culture (Christensen 2011), conservatory pedagogy (Gjerdingen 2008), and of the electronic music studio (Iverson 2018); the forms of vernacular music analysis that amateurs engage with when making music (O’Hara 2022), or pairing music with other forms of expression, like light shows (Lucas 2021); the vernacular philosophies of practicing musicians (Gallope 2024); and the esoteric theories presented in theosophical treatises (Gawboy 2023).

The goal of this panel is to take stock of what these methods have revealed so far; to encourage new case studies of vernacular or hidden music theories; to investigate the processes by which these modes of theory and analysis become objects of history; to understand the agency and intention of the actors involved; and ultimately, to develop criteria and perhaps a taxonomy that can help us better work with these kinds of sources.

We invite c. 300-word abstracts for an 8-10 minute lightning talk for a panel during AMS-SMT 2025 (Minneapolis) that could engage with (but not be limited to) the following questions:

• What are sources for the history of theory that we can draw on other than the familiar suspects (treatises, musical instruments)? What different stories might they tell us?
• What are some of the methodological challenges we face when working with diverse sources of hidden/vernacular music theory?
• What are the criteria for defining something as hidden/vernacular music theory? How might we taxonomize these sources? What are the challenges?
• What are the processes by which hidden/vernacular music theories become objects of history?
• What differences do we see between hidden/vernacular sources of theory that emerge from written vs. oral cultures?
• What could be gained and what could be lost by identifying such sources as theory or analysis?

Please submit your proposal to historyofmusictheory@gmail.com by 11:59 PST on Thursday, March 13, 2025.

Organized by:

AMS History of Theory Study Group (Giulia Accornero, Siavash Sabetrohani)
SMT History of Theory Interest Group (William O’Hara, Daniel Walden)

Accessibility and the History of Theory
2024 AMS Annual Meeting, November 14-17
Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago, Illinois

Organized by the AMS History of Theory Study Group Business Meeting Call for Presenters.

This meeting will focus on relationships between the history of music theory and urgent questions of accessibility. What have music theories made (in)accessible, and to whom? What do the field’s concepts, objects, and practices reveal about ability and disability? And in what ways or contexts might histories of music theory serve as occasions for the historicization or even critique of current discourses around accessibility? Discussion will be prompted by short presentations and anchored in pre-circulated materials.

CFP:

While scholarly efforts make musicology and music theory more inclusive discipline with respect to disability (e.g., Straus 2011, Howe et al 2016, Holmes 2017, 2023), wide-ranging and pertinent work in disability studies (e.g., Dolmage 2017), and performances engaging issues of accessibility and disability (e.g., the June 2024 performance of Bach’s St. John Passion by the Sing & Sign sign language choir, soloists, deaf performers, the collegium thomanum and the “Weimar Baroque” orchestra under the baton of Diogo Mendes), accessibility remains an issue in musical thought and practice, e.g., in-person only conferences, exclusionary publishing practices, outdated pedagogies.

With such issues in mind, the AMS History of Music Theory Study Group invites proposals for 5–10 minute lightning talks that address relationships between histories of music theory and accessibility.

Possible questions to consider include, but are not limited to the following:

• What have music theories made (in)accessible, and to whom?
• What do the field’s concepts, objects, and practices reveal about ability and disability?
• In what ways or contexts might histories of music theory serve as occasions for the historicization or even critique of current discourses around accessibility?
• How might the turn toward “global” histories of theory intersect with imperatives for accessibility?
• How have technologies, broadly construed, made music accessible (or inaccessible)?
• How have bodies and/or their parts (e. g. Guidonian Hand, Eurythmics, sign language) made music and musical thought more accessible (or inaccessible)?

We envision the panel of 3–5 talks, followed by general discussion.

Please email abstracts of no more than 150 words, together with a brief bio (ca 100 words)  to historyofmusictheory@gmail.com. The deadline for submission is August 20, 2024. We will inform potential speakers of the decision by September 30.

Per the current rules set by AMS leadership, accepted speakers will be expected to participate in person at the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois (November 14–17, 2024).

Oral Cultures in the History of Music Theory
2023 AMS/SMT Annual Meeting, November 9–12
Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel in Denver, Colorado

Music theory tends to engage with written cultures, to the exclusion of oral traditions (and contexts where non-written modes of knowledge dissemination prevail). In a joint interest group meeting, the IGs for the Analysis of World Musics and the History of Music Theory will inquire into the overrepresentation of insights from written traditions in music-theoretical scholarship. We invite proposals for lightning talks to address this imbalance, its challenges, and possible avenues for future engagement. Presentations could also focus on elucidating oral music theory traditions.

Some guiding questions include:

• How might we adapt our framing language, methodologies, scholarly assumptions, etc. to welcome greater participation of scholars associated with or working on oral traditions?
• What are the different constraints or affordances of music-theoretical insights that take on an oral modality?
• What are the stakes of addressing repertoires that are disseminated predominantly through oral tradition in theoretical contexts? What rationales might account for the shortage of examples?
• Which precedents or traditions of theorizing attend to oral cultures of music? How?
• Are there examples in which a theoretical account of orally-traded repertoires has influenced the repertoire itself, in its modes of dissemination, conceptual framing, idiomaticity, or stylistic development?

We envision the panel to feature a series of 10-minute lightning talks, followed by general discussion.

Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words, together with a brief bio (ca 150 words)  to historyofmusictheory@gmail.com. The deadline for submission is Thursday, July 13, 2023. We will inform potential speakers of the decision by July 31. Accepted speakers will be expected to participate in person at the 2023 AMS/SMT Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado (November 9–12, 2023).

Identity in Music Theory and History
Pre-Conference (Nov. 9-10, 2022), in conjunction with the joint AMS/SEM/SMT annual meeting, in person and online
Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana

Building on recent interrogations of the ways in which race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, dis/ability, and class have shaped disciplinary agendas; on histories that extend or decenter Europe and the global North; and on historicizations of music theory’s fundamental concepts, this conference will address the role(s) identity does, might, or ought to play in histories of music theory.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers that engage with music theory and identity from a wide range of perspectives, including but not limited to:

• What does it mean to be a music theorist (in the present, past, and/or future)? Who gets—or wants—to be one, and why?
• What kinds of identities does (historically oriented) research in music (theory) address? In what ways does musical thought help individuals, communities, institutions, and/or cultures negotiate questions of identity?
• How does (the history of) music theory look from the perspective of disciplines with rich histories of reflection on identity and community, e.g., ethnomusicology, anthropology, philosophy, sociology?
• How does identity shape the ways in which music theories are read or used? How do identities and concepts interact to shape musical values and support or resist existing power structures? How might we understand the patterns of exclusion that these processes involve?
• How might cultural and ethnographic approaches to the study of music theory reshape the nature of music-theoretical claims?
• In what ways might a focus on identity broaden the horizons of music theory? Conversely, what are the limits of identity in, and how might issues of identity limit, music theorizing?
• What is the place of biography in the history of theory?
• How have links between language and identity shaped music theory, and how do acts of translation reshape it?
• How has identity functioned as a historiographic category in histories of music theory? In what ways has identity been elided from histories of music theory, and to what end(s)?
• What do histories of music theory become if musical concepts (e.g., harmony, rhythm, proportion, timbre, and form) are understood not as foundations of the discipline but rather as media that shape, resonate, and interact with the identities of those for whom such concepts matter?

Please submit abstracts (350 words) to historyofmusictheory@gmail.com by March 25, 2022, with the heading “Identity NOLA”.

Mode as a (Post-)Colonial Concept
The AMS History of Music Theory Study Group is organizing a special session for this year’s annual meeting (Chicago, 4–7 Nov.)

Spanning centuries-old histories in Western and non-Western traditions alike, mode continues to be an important locus for the interrogation of musical thought. This special session will contribute to the ongoing conversation on the conceptual and epistemological frameworks of mode in music theory by placing it in a broader historical context and by approaching it from a global perspective.

We invite proposals for short papers (ca. 15 mins) that engage with the idea of mode from a wide range of perspectives, including but not limited to:

1. To what extent are the many definitions and conceptualizations of “mode” across musical cultures comparable with one another? Is a global understanding of mode possible that avoids the pitfalls of both fragmentation and reductionism?
2. How do emic and etic perspectives apply to mode, viewed globally, forty years after Harold Powers’s “Tonal Types and Modal Categories”?
3. To what degree are the “emic” aspects of mode, which made the concept unreliable as a music-analytic category to Powers, the same ones that might ground post-colonial (i.e., pluralistic and culturally inflected) approaches to music history and musical analysis?
4. As “tonality” appears increasingly compromised as a music-theoretical category, might mode be revisited as a viable historical and ideological framework for the study of Western music? If not mode, then what?
5. Mode in non-classical repertories (e.g., jazz, pop music): conceptual lingua franca or cultural imposition?
6. Mode as a marker of the exotic, the archaic, the uncorrupted, the racialized Other.

Proposals of no more than 200 words should be sent to historyofmusictheory -at- gmail.com by May 15th.

Music, Theory, and Their Sources

The Early Music Analysis Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory is proud to announce their third biennial conference, co-sponsored with the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies.

Dates: Thursday, June 18–Saturday, June 20, 2020

Location: Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., Chicago, IL 60610

Proposal Submission Deadline: 11:59 pm EST, Sunday, February 16, 2020

CFP:

The study and performance of early music requires us to recreate and represent past musical practices. In this work, we must consult a variety of historical and modern sources available to us today, ranging from manuscripts and prints to editions, translations, audio recordings, and digital sources. In addition, it is often essential to consider other kinds of ‘sources’ in a broader sense, such as biographical studies, transmission histories, or the invocation of historical authorities like Boethius or Isidore. This conference, “Music, Theory, and Their Sources,” will explore the ways in which we engage with these sources of and for early music and the degrees of mediation intrinsic to them. We invite proposals from scholars of diverse research areas including—but not limited to—music theory and analysis, musicology, performance practice, the history of music theory, codicology, art history, and digital humanities that take into consideration the sources for early music and music theory. In addition to paper presentations, the conference will include a collection presentation featuring several of the remarkable items contained in the Newberry’s holdings and a concert by the Newberry Consort.

For guidelines on submitting proposals, please see the PDF available at https://www.newberry.org/06182020-music-theory-and-their-sources or the EMAIG website: https://www.earlymusicanalysis.org/events

For any questions, please contact Ryan Taycher (rtaycher -at- umass.edu)

Musicology after Beethoven
XVII International Congress of the German Musicological Society (GfM)

16-19 September 2020

CFP:

Upon invitation of the Department of Musicology/Sound Studies of the University of Bonn and the Beethoven Archive of the Beethoven House Bonn, the four-yearly international congress of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung 2020 will take place in Bonn from 16 to 19 September. Two main symposia are devoted to the topics “New Tasks in Beethoven Research” and “Aesthetic Normativity in Music”. Colleagues from Musicology and related fields are cordially invited to contribute to the programme of the congress. Possible formats are:

• Free papers (20 min. + 10 min. discussion)
• GfM study group session (max. 210 min.)
• Free session (max. 210 min.)
• Roundtable (90 min. or 120 min.)
• Poster presentation
• Presentation of research projects (30 min. or 45 min.)

Congress languages are German and English. Abstracts can be submitted in both languages and cover any research area of musicology. Please submit your proposals by 31 January 2020 via the conference website (www.gfm2020.uni-bonn.de). The conference management will be supported by a scientific advisory board in the selection of the programme. Submissions are only possible via ConfTool. The results of the review of the submitted abstracts are expected to be announced in April 2020.

May 1, 2018: CfP:
Women in the History of Music Theory
2018 Joint AMS/SMT Annual meeting, November 1-4
Grand Hyatt San Antonio Hotel in San Antonio, TX

CFP:
For the 2018 joint AMS/SMT meeting, we are organizing an open round-table discussion on “Women in the History of Music Theory”: Since (at least) Ptolemais of Cyrene, women have been actively involved in creating and transmitting music theory, often to a hitherto unacknowledged extent, although modern scholarship has recently begun to explore these contributions. This open round-table discussion seeks to identify the historical and social conditions under which these activities took place, while also examining the ways in which music theoretical work by women was received. Over the course of the discussion, we hope to consider how new historical methodologies combined with an expanded definition of music theory can assist in recovering and highlighting these contributions.

We invite anyone who would like to participate in the panel that will lead the discussion to send a brief proposal (no more than 200 words, please) to historyofmusictheory@gmail.com by May 10; we anticipate that panelists will offer short contributions (ca. 10 min), rather than full 20 min papers, in order to maximize time for open discussion.

Instruments of Music Theory
Pre-AMS Mini-Conference in conjunction with the 2017 AMS Annual Conference
The Eastman School of Music, November 8-9

Music-theoretical systems have relied upon various forms of instrumental mediations, from the monochord and the Guidonian hand to the Music Encoding Initiative and computer-based toolkits such as music21. Such tools enable the articulation (and testing) of theoretical propositions, but they also limit the kind and content of the epistemic claims they enable. Does a “History of Music Theory,” then, map a “History of the Instruments of Music Theory”? What are the instruments (musical, scientific, mechanical, conceptual, digital, etc.) through which music-theoretical knowledge is generated, and how do such instruments shape and condition music-theoretical knowledge?

We invite 250-word proposals for 20-min papers that address any aspect of music theory and “instrumentality.” Our definition of “music-theoretical instruments” is intentionally broad and encompasses musical instruments (traditional and experimental), notational systems (practical and theoretical), diagrammatic and visual representations, recording technologies, digital analytic toolkits, etc. We particularly welcome submissions that engage topics in non-Western musics.Submissions will be accepted through May 1, 2017, and speakers will be notified of acceptance in late May or early June.

Please send all submissions (as MS Word or PDF attachments, with the subject “History of Theory Proposal”) and queries to Andrew Hicks at ajh299@cornell.edu. Proposals should include the presenter’s name, contact information, and institutional affiliation (if any).