The Graduate Student Workshop Program (GSWP) emphasizes instruction, participation, and discussion among graduate students.
History
The Graduate Student Workshop Program was founded by Wayne Alpern, who acted as Administrative Director of the Program from 2006–2011, and whose efforts, innovative ideas, and financial contributions supported the Program during its initial years.
Eligibility and Selection
- All full-time students registered in a graduate program in music theory, or in a graduate program in musicology or composition with a substantial theory component, and who have not received their Ph.D. as of June 15, 2025, are eligible to apply. (Separate workshop opportunities are also available to those who have completed a Ph.D.) Students seeking a MM degree are welcome to apply.
- Participants are selected by a random draw from the pool of applicants.
- The GSWP is intended to provide students with the opportunity to study with a professor not at their home institution; therefore, students affiliated with the institution of the instructor are not eligible for that instructor’s workshop.
- Prior GSWP participants are permitted to apply, but preference will be given to first-time applicants.
- To encourage interaction, each workshop is limited to approximately 10–12 participants.
Applications
- The deadline to apply is June 15, 2025.
- Please be sure to indicate for which workshop(s) you are applying—you may apply for one or both.
- You must also have a professor at your institution send an email to the Executive Director, confirming that you meet the requirements for participation stated above.
Commitments
- Please note that GSWP workshops will take place the morning of Friday, November 7; by applying you are committing to arrive at the conference in time to participate in the workshop.
- In the event that a student selected for a workshop also has a paper accepted to the conference and scheduled by the program committee at a time conflicting with the workshop, the student may need to forego participation in the workshop.
- These workshops may require many hours of preparation in advance, including both reading and writing assignments. You are not expected to be an expert in the subject matter of the workshop(s) for which you apply, but you should have a serious interest in and commitment to it.
Cost
There is no fee to participate in the program. Participants are responsible, however, for the cost of SMT membership and conference registration (but not at the time of application), as well as for other expenses of attendance, including transportation, housing, and meals.
2025 Workshops
Hearing Technologies
Jennifer Iverson (University of Chicago)
Machines mediate our music. This statement is truer by the day. And yet: do we know how to think (and hear) our machines and our music together? What kinds of analytical methods can music theorists use to take account of technologies together with sounds? This workshop draws upon sound studies to enrich music analysis. Drawing from a short slate of readings by Jonathan DeSouza and Tara Rodgers, our group will delve into questions of materiality, interfaces, cognition, and sound.
In advance of the workshop, students will read and will be placed into small groups. Each group will collaboratively decide upon an instrument, object, or machine to bring into the workshop, about which they have developed some initial ideas and questions. The object could be a traditional musical tool like a metronome, acoustic instrument, or a particular synthesizer, or it could be a digital tool like a software interface or app. Alternately, the object could be a mundane “everyday” tool that has sound-making or sound-changing capacity, like a cochlear implant, microphone, or radio. The group’s exploration, both of the object and the sounds it makes, could be at any stage of development, from basic curiosity to well-developed research. We will spend the majority of the workshop collectively developing ideas about the objects and their sounds, extending groups’ initial work and moving together toward analyses that include both sound and technology.
Analyzing Antiphony: Theorizing Music-Text Relations for the Digital Episteme
Braxton D. Shelley (Yale University)
Playful (re)combinations of music and text have fascinated music scholars for centuries—for millennia, too. How might this (pre)historic preoccupation elucidate the expressive habits of social media users? How might the torrent of content produced every day on digital platforms reinvigorate the music-theoretic study of the relationships that can arise between words and music?
This workshop will bring classic texts and recent scholarship on music-text relations to bear on the parodic contrafacta that are the engines of digital sociality. Clearly, memes, GIFS, reels, duets, and other manifestations of the practice I call “digital antiphony” have much in common with the analog traditions around which the literature on music and text was conceived. But do these scholarly tools still work? And how might they be updated for the digital episteme? In preparation for the workshop, participants will read excerpts from the scholarly literature and analyze a group of collaboratively determined digital objects. We will spend the majority of the workshop discussing the products of this preparatory work before collectively constructing a mock conference paper around a digital constellation that we select together.
Contact
For additional information, please contact the Chair of the Committee on Workshop Programs.