AMS

AMS New England Chapter Meeting
2025-02-22 | Online
The American Musicological Society, New England Chapter, announces its virtual meeting of Winter 2025, to take place on February 22 via Zoom and hosted by Wesleyan University. The Program Committee invites proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers and for roundtable sessions or workshops (pedagogical, performative, and/or scholarly). The keynote speaker will be Dr. John Dankwa (Wesleyan University), who specializes in African music, with performance areas ranging from West African traditional drumming to African pop and art music.
Papers focusing on global topics are especially encouraged–including, but not limited to, topics from any period or genre on historic and current non-AngloEuropean music, interactions between AngloEuropean and non-AngloEuropean musical cultures, globalization and colonization. All abstracts are subject to blind review, and submissions from faculty, independent scholars, and students are encouraged and welcome.
Abstracts should be submitted by December 30, 2024 to the Program Committee through this Google form or at the following email: ams.newengland [at] gmail [dot] com. Submitters will be informed of the committee’s decision by January 27, 2025, with the hope of announcing the conference program on February 5, 2025.
Please refer to the AMS guidelines for abstracts: “Proposals should represent the presentation as fully as possible. A successful proposal typically articulates the main aspects of the argument or research findings clearly, positions the author’s contribution with respect to previous scholarship, and suggests the paper’s significance for the musicological community, in language that is accessible to scholars with a variety of specializations.” Applicants are requested to submit only one proposal per meeting, and that the proposal not be currently under review for presentation at other conferences. In the case of a roundtable or workshop, the same guidelines apply, and the committee asks that the single proposal be for the session as a whole, including information for all participants, rather than individual proposals.
For more information, please visit: https://www.newengland.ams-net.org/?p=1473

AMS Greater New York Chapter Meeting
2025-02-01 | Online
The winter meeting of the AMS Greater New York Chapter will take place ONLINE on Saturday, February 1, 2025. The chapter invites 200-250 word proposals on all areas of musical scholarship. Email proposals are due November 15th.
For more information: https://ams-gny-announcements.blogspot.com/

Singer Songwriter Traditions: Yesterday and Today with Allison Young
2025-01-31 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Harold J. Kaplan Concert Hall, Center for the Arts, Towson University, 7700 Osler Drive, Towson, MD, 21204, United States
Allison Young is composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist whose music is influenced by her research into early twentieth-century American popular song styles. Through her solo work and collaborations with Postmodern Jukebox, Young converses with the past even as she creates something entirely new.
Join us at Towson University on January 31, 2025 to experience a wide history of American popular music in one evening! Young will discuss her influences, her creative process, and the challenges of retaining the sense and style of the songs as they existed in the past. Along the way, she will discuss the problems with the repertoire, including racialized song lyrics and outdated gendered references, and present her model for carefully reusing old music in the present. Tickets are required. Reserve your free ticket.

AMS/LoC Lecture: Recovering the Extraordinary Life and Songs of Carrie Jacobs-Bond - Christopher Reynolds
2024-12-04 07:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Montepelier Room, James Madison Memorial Building, 101,1199 Independent Ave SE, Washington, DC, 20540, United States
Carrie Jacobs-Bond (1861-1946) was the most successful songwriter – male or female – in the first half of the 20th century. Her most popular songs sold millions of copies of sheet music and records and were sung around the world, translated into dozens of languages. Critics often thought of her music either as “semi-classical,” as “high-class songs,” or, because so many millions of people sang her songs, as folk music, calling her a descendant of Stephen Foster. Americans sang her songs at weddings, funerals, and gatherings of all kinds, usually by heart. She was also an early female entrepreneur, founding her own music publishing house, designing her early sheet music covers, writing the lyrics to half of her nearly 200 songs. As a result she earned enough to build homes in Chicago, in the hills north of San Diego, and in Hollywood, where she was one of the founding cultural figures. Before Mrs. Bond began to tour as a means of promoting her songs, performing them to thousands of audiences over four decades, there was no such thing as a woman singer-songwriter. And like popular folk and rock singer-songwriters in the 1960s and later, she made no pretense of being a professional singer. Quite the contrary.
A sure measure of Bond’s broad appeal: professional singers and performers of all musical styles embraced her songs. Many leading opera singers (e.g., Ernestine Schumann-Heink and Lawrence Tibbett) promoted them in their recitals, in dozens of recordings, and in testimonials. Vaudeville and Broadway musicians regularly performed her songs—Elsie Baker and Eubie Blake made early recordings; with the advent of national radio networks in the late 1920s, popular musicians and swing band leaders increasingly arranged and recorded their versions. She was always among ASCAP’s top royalty earners. In 1938 her earnings of $10,000 put her in an elite group with Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin’s estate. Yet while there are currently 19 biographies of Berlin (seven since 2000) and 18 of Gershwin (nine since 2000), there are no scholarly biographies of Mrs. Bond.
Jacobs-Bond’s life story and cultural significance, like her songs, are today mostly unknown. In this presentation, Christopher Reynolds will examine what it is that made her such an extraordinarily significant figure, and then discuss three of her songs that became central parts of American rituals: “I Love you Truly,” at weddings, “I’ve Done My Work,” at funerals, particularly those of Black Americans, and “A Perfect Day,” a song that was routinely sung to end public gatherings of all kinds, a song favored above all others by WWI soldiers.

AMS Board Meeting
2024-11-14 19:30 - 22:30 (America/New_York) | Palmer House Hilton Hotel, 17 E Monroe Street, Chicago, IL, United States
This is a regularly scheduled breakfast meeting of the AMS Board of Directors. In-person. Closed meeting.

2024 AMS Annual Meeting
2024-11-14 - 2024-11-17 | Palmer House Hilton Hotel, 17 E Monroe Street, Chicago, IL, United States
In 2024, the American Musicological Society will hold its annual meeting on 14-17 November at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. Join us for this exciting scholarly event which will feature hundreds of papers, workshops, roundtables, lectures and performances. Don’t miss out.

AMS Board Meeting
2024-11-13 14:00 - 17:30 (America/New_York) | Palmer House Hilton Hotel, 17 E Monroe Street, Chicago, IL, United States
This is a regularly scheduled meeting of the AMS Board of Directors. In-person. Closed meeting.

AMS Capital Chapter / MLA Atlantic Chapter Meeting
2024-10-18 - 2024-10-19 | Library of Congress, Washington, DC
This is the fall chapter meeting of the AMS Capital Chapter, which will be held jointly with the MLA Atlantic Chapter.

AMS Midwest Chapter Meeting
2024-10-12 - 2024-10-13 | Online
AMS-Midwest Chapter Meeting, Fall 2024
Hosted online by the University of Missouri, October 12–13, 2024
Deadline for abstract submission: Friday, September 6, 2024, by 11:59 PM, EST
The Midwest Chapter officers are pleased to announce that the Fall 2024 meeting will be held online on Saturday and Sunday, October 12–13. Judith Mabary and Megan Murph will be the “virtual” hosts for the meeting.
Proposals for presentations, special sessions, panel discussions, and papers with a performance component are welcomed on any topic related to musicology. Given that 2024 serves as the centennial of the death of Puccini, the first recordings made by Duke Ellington, and the world-premieres of Sibelius’s Symphony no. 7 and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the committee especially encourages proposals related to the milestone year of 1924. Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and should clearly indicate the scope of the research, methodology, and conclusions. Presentations will be limited to twenty minutes, with an additional ten minutes allotted for questions and discussion. Speakers at the 2023 Fall meeting are not eligible to submit a paper abstract for the 2024 Fall meeting; however, they are welcome to participate in panel discussions. Only one submission per person is allowed.
The meeting will feature a keynote presentation by Karen Fournier (University of Michigan) titled “Suburbia and the Supermarket: Parodies of Gendered Spaces as Feminist Protest in Early British Punk.”
Complete Guidelines for Paper Submission may be found at:
https://amsmidwest.weebly.com/fall-2024-call-for-papers.html

AMS Southwest Chapter Meeting
2024-10-05 | University of North Texas, Denton, Denton, TX, United States
The AMS Southwest Chapter (AMS-SW) is pleased to announce its Fall 2024 Meeting, to be held Saturday, October 5 at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. This will be an in-person meeting; however, AMS-SW remains committed to making our meetings accessible, and hybrid options are available. Student members of the AMS-SW chapter may submit their papers to the competition for the Hewitt-Oberdoerffer Award. For further details, please see the AMS-Southwest Chapter Upcoming Meetings webpage: https://ams-sw.org/index.php/upcoming-meetings/.

AMS/LoC Lecture: Heard on the Small Screen: Music in Jack Arnold's and Henry Mancini's Episodes of Peter Gunn - Reba Wissner
2024-09-28 02:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | Pickford Theater, James Madison Building, Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave SE, Washington, DC, 20540, United States
Best known for his science fiction films, Jack Arnold also directed television episodes in different genres, not only science fiction but also westerns, comedies, and detective shows. Among all of his television works, Peter Gunn provides an important example because this is the first television series that has an original score rather than library music for every episode (Withey, 2001). This meant that the score would be composed specifically based on the rough cut of the episode, considering the director’s choices. Before Peter Gunn, television networks were required to have 13 original scores for a television season and any additional shows relied on music libraries to piece together cues for a complete score (Wissner, 2013). Further, the series was in a style of television noir (Glover, 2019) that Arnold had to account for when directing and which series composer Henry Mancini had to consider when writing the score. Mancini responded by composing a rock-jazz hybrid he deemed as West Coast Cool Jazz and this was the first television score to use jazz throughout, pioneering a new style of television scoring in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of the hallmarks of the series was that its music was inseparable from the show and often, even its narrative, and the show’s creator, Blake Edwards, noted that the series’ music was responsible for at least half of its success (Burlingame, 2002). Much of the research on Arnold’s works concern his directorial practices and styles and the films themselves but there is little literature on his television episodes and virtually no literature on the music of these episodes. A discussion of the music in these episodes is important because the choice of music helps to heighten the directorial choices that Arnold made and understand how Mancini responded to those choices through his scores.
As a detective show, which differed from much of Arnold’s other works, Arnold had to fit the established parameters of the show when directing (he was called in to direct his first episode midway through the first season when Edwards had already established the series’ format). Similarly, Mancini had to incorporate jazz, which was pervasive in the detective genre in 1950s television, with a consideration of each episode’s plot, script, and Arnold’s directing style. Mancini also established a unique compositional style for the series based on the onscreen action. In this lecture, Reba Wissner will discuss how the composition of music amplifies Arnold’s directorial choices in his episodes of Peter Gunn (“The Hunt,” “Vendetta,” “Bullet for a Badge,” “Love Me to Death,” “Keep Smiling,” and “The Ugly Frame”). Wissner will plot out Mancini’s compositional process as a reflection of Arnold’s directing choices by using Peter Gunn as a case study and elaborate on how this small scale study of Mancini’s music for the show under one director can be expanded to the other directors who worked on the series.

AMS Council Workshop: Advancing the AMS Mission Over Time
2024-09-20 03:00 - 16:15 (America/New_York) | Online
The AMS Council Workshops have been instituted to further educate Council members on AMS operations and to increase transparency. The Council Workshop on Advancing the AMS Mission Over Time will be held at 3 PM EST online. Council members will receive instructions to register for the meeting in their email inbox. By invitation only.

AMS/RRHoF Lecture: What Is The Modern Rock 500? - Counting Down the Evolution of Modern/Indie Rock & Independent Radio - Robin James
2024-09-19 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 1100 E 9th Street, Cleveland, OH, 44114, United States
Every Memorial Day Weekend from 1989-2009, and from 2023 until who knows when, the Cincinnati-area independent (internet) radio stations WOXY and Inhailer broadcast a countdown of the top 500 songs in their library. Dubbed “The Modern Rock 500” in 1989 and renamed “The Indie 500” in 2024, the chart’s contents can tell us a lot about what “modern rock” is and how it differs from alternative and indie. Doing a deep dive into each of the yearly countdowns, Robin James will show how the countdown shifts from a pluralistic and “modern” approach to genre to a more guitar-oriented one that views the influence of non-rock genres like electronic dance music and reggae/dub as relics from the 20th century. The ongoing existence of the Modern Rock 500 as an institution has an even more important lesson for lovers and practitioners of independent media: as an institution that survived the closure of WOXY in 2010 only to be resurrected again by former WOXY staff and the crew at Inhailer.com, The Modern Rock 500 both reveals the challenges indie media faces in an increasingly financialized industry, and models some successful tactics one indie media institution has used to survive amid those challenges.
For more information, visit https://tickets.rockhall.com/events/0182b120-9521-36c4-171c-967341dbaf4f

AMS Greater New York Chapter Meeting
2024-09-14 | CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY, 10016, United States
The Greater New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society will meet on Saturday, September 14th, at the CUNY Graduate Center.
We invite you to send us proposals for presentations. E mail 250 word abstracts by August 15th. We look forward to reading proposals in all areas of musical scholarship.
Instead, Please send abstracts to both DrJSDailey “at” aol.com and Jonathan.Waxman “at” gmail.com. Do not send attachments, but put the abstract right in the e mail. Include your name, phone number, e mail address and include a brief biography that contains your affiliation (if you have one). Put AMSGNY Fall 2024″ in the subject line.

AMS Board Meeting
2024-09-13 12:30 - 15:30 (America/New_York) | Online
This is a regularly scheduled meeting of the AMS Board of Directors. Closed meeting.

2024 Kennedy Creek Old Time Music Festival
2024-09-06 - 2024-09-08 | Kennedy Creek Resort, 3001 High Valley Road, Suches, GA, 30572, United States
The Kennedy Creek Old-Time Music Festival takes place every autumn at the Kennedy Creek Resort in Suches, GA. Participants are invited to reserve cabins, yurts, or campsites, and food is available at the resort restaurant. Guest artists teach workshops, lead competitions, and present concerts, but the main event is always jamming with friends. Admission is free.
For more information, visit the Many Musics of America website.
