SMT Newsletter

I’m delighted to have been elected Vice President of SMT. Huge thanks to my predecessor, Leigh Van Handel, for serving the Society in that role over the past two years, and also for showing me the ropes as I step into this new position.

One of the main tasks of the Vice President is to serve as a liaison with the various interest groups. These groups play a vital role in the Society: they allow scholars to come together around shared concerns, and they provide an easy entry point into the discipline for students who are hoping to find a community of fellow scholars with similar interests. SMT is fortunate to have many diverse and thriving groups (twenty-eight in all). Still, the sheer number of groups has posed some scheduling challenges during annual meetings. To address these challenges, we have just instituted a new “rotation” system, in which each interest group is allotted space on the SMT program for two years and then takes one year off. During “off” years, interest groups may choose to team up with another group that does appear on the program, which we hope will foster even more collaboration among groups; they may also choose to hold an off-site event. I’m grateful to the interest group chairs for their flexibility and generosity in adopting this new plan.

The regional music theory societies are also thriving. One of my goals is to continue to foster collaboration among regional societies so that they can all benefit from their collective experience and wisdom. To that end, I met with the presidents of the regional societies, where we discussed (among other things) how best to coordinate regional meetings to avoid unnecessary conflicts; how to ensure that at least one regional meeting each year is held virtually, so that scholars with limited resources can take part without incurring expensive travel and lodging costs; and how to provide tech support to those organizing online conferences. I’m eager to meet with the Society presidents again in the spring and continue the conversation. Many thanks to all of them for their important work.

For the second year in a row, I have helped to organize an online workshop on the process of writing and submitting a proposal for the Society for Music Theory’s Annual Meeting, with a particular focus on cross-cultural and disciplinary expectations surrounding music theory. The event—jointly organized by the Society for Music Theory and the Society for Musical Analysis in the UK—took place on Thursday, January 22, and reflects increased collaboration between the SMA and SMT, further cultivating music theory’s international landscape. Janet Bourne (from the University of California, Santa Barbara) and I shared some tips about proposal writing and then offered feedback to those who submitted proposals in advance of a January 1 deadline. Huge thanks to Janet for agreeing to review proposals for a second year, and also to Peter Smith, Aidan McGartland, and Rebekah Donn for helping to organize this year’s event.

On behalf of the outgoing Vice President, I’m pleased to report on the 2025 Subvention Grants. These grants are awarded to reimburse scholars for costs incurred in the preparation and publication of scholarly projects. The committee awarded five grants for publication projects, with awards going to Hunter Hoyle, Noel Rivera, Scott Gleason, Jeff Perry, and Marc Hannaford. Thank you to the Subvention Grant committee, consisting of David Byrne, Amy Fleming, David Forrest, and Olga Sanchez, for reviewing the applications, and to donors to the SMT-Forward campaign for making these awards possible. The next deadline for submitting a Subvention Grant application will be in early August. Please feel free to reach out to me at vicepresident@societymusictheory.org if you have any questions or comments regarding the interest groups, regional societies, international societies, or subvention grants.

It’s an honor to serve the Society, and I look forward to the coming year!

Stephen Rodgers

Since the previous Secretary’s report for the August 2025 SMT Newsletter, the Executive Board has passed the following motions. Specific language of the various motions can be found in the minutes.

1. To approve the consent agenda (consisting of the minutes and reports from the Treasurer, President, and Executive Director) for the May, October, and November meetings of the Executive Board.
2. To change the title and description of the Minority Travel Grant to the Many Voices Grant.
3. To approve the Archives Policy.
4. To increase the number of people on the Investment Committee to five, including a Manager and Associate Manager who are appointed for expertise and serve ongoing terms, plus three additional members serving three-year terms.
5. To determine that in the case of open-source or continually republished items, the various Publication Awards Committees should consider the year given in the copyright statement to be the relevant year when considering eligibility.
6. To change the size and composition of the Publications Committee, clarifying that in situations where a vote is required, each publication receives one vote.
7. To adopt the 2025 Investments Directives Addendum, directing disbursements from the SMT quasi-endowment to partially fund dissertation fellowships, student breakfast, editor stipends, publication subventions, international travel grants, Many Voices travel grants, IUU travel grants, and the climate study for the upcoming fiscal year.
8. To approve the Final Budget for 2026.

Respectfully submitted,

Mitchell Ohriner
Secretary
University of Denver

The “Many Voices Travel Grant” was introduced in 2025 to broaden participation in the Annual Meeting in Minneapolis and the committee selected ten awardees from a competitive pool of applicants. The International Travel Grant was also offered for the 2025 Annual Meeting, and five awardees were selected by the committee. Please consider applying for these opportunities for the 2026 Annual Meeting in Milwaukee. Anyone may apply for the Many Voices Travel Grant! Students and first-time recipients are given preference. Applicants must reside outside of North America (US or Canada) to be eligible for the International Travel Grant.

Information on these and other SMT Travel Grants is available here: https://societymusictheory.org/grants/meetings.

On November 7, the committee hosted an impressive group of panelists for our sponsored session, “Emerging Directions in Music Theory Publication.” The session included presentations from three editorial teams and a discussion with the audience. We thank Anna Yu Wang (Music Theory in the Plural Special Issue), Táhirih Motazedian (SMT-V), Kimberly Goddard Loeffert, and John Peterson (Modeling Musical Analysis) for their inspiring insights on their publication aims and best practices that all of us involved in authoring or editing could learn from. We also thank engaged audience members who actively participated in the discussion portion of the session.

During the Student Breakfast Reception, we announced our plans for the reinvigorated Mentoring Program. We especially encourage students and junior scholars to apply. Please visit our webpage on the SMT site for more details.

On November 8, travel grant recipients and committee members attended a luncheon at Lotus Vietnamese Restaurant, just one block from the conference hotel (pictured). It was busy (partially because of AMS-SMT attendees) but we managed to find seating for seventeen people in our group. We broke into tables of four or five, each with a committee member and a few grantees and we got to know each other and each of our unique contributions to the Society. Please apply for a travel grant and, if you receive an award, join us for the luncheon in Milwaukee!

In 2026, the committee is welcoming two new members in 2026:

• Jerome Bell, doctoral candidate at the Eastman School of Music
• Rachel Mann, Associate Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

Finally, we thank Lydia Bangura and Hanisha Kulothparan for their service to the committee.

The Development Committee surpassed its goal of raising $25,000 this year. Thank you! The generosity of our membership has been outstanding. A full list of donors is published on the SMT website.

During the month of June, we ran a successful campaign that—for the second year in a row—was underwritten by Mary Wennerstrom, Professor Emerita at Indiana University and SMT Lifetime Member. Mary Wennerstrom added $25 to every donation of any amount. In total, we had more than one hundred donors and raised $13,000.

In November, our committee raised $2,616 through a book auction. We received donations of rare, antiquarian treatises from three distinguished SMT members: Richard Cohn (who proposed the auction idea), Thomas Christensen, and Elizabeth Marvin. We added a few items from the SMT office, including out-of-print books and early volumes of Music Theory Spectrum. We received significant interest not only from those who placed bids on the items, but also from potential future donors who have books they would like to contribute. Thus, the SMT book auction may become an annual event.

Upcoming plans include efforts to increase both large and small donations. For large donations, we’re looking ahead to 2027 as the 50th anniversary of SMT’s founding to develop an SMT-50 campaign. For small donations, we’ve added a student member to the Development Committee who can help craft appeals to junior members of the Society.

Many of the services and grants that help SMT members are funded through donations. We recognize that everyone’s financial situation and feelings of belonging and support in SMT are different. Our messaging therefore has tried to appeal to those who can afford more than the minimum and who feel comfortable supporting the SMT community. This is how we fund travel and family care grants, student fellowships, publication subventions, conference livestreaming, and membership subsidies, among other initiatives.

The Development Committee welcomes your fundraising ideas; please e-mail the chair any time. I extend my deep gratitude to the full committee membership: Andrew Davis, Jennifer Diaz, Nora Engebretsen, Leah Frederick, Sarah Iker, Jan Miyake, and Evan Tanovich. It is our pleasure to help the Society fund resources that support scholarship and provide assistance to scholars in need.

The Professional Development Committee (PDC) sponsored a variety of events during the Annual Meeting in November 2025, including the annual Student Breakfast Reception (organized by Gerry Lopez and Micah Mooney), the Conference Guides Program (organized by Scott Gleason), the CV Review Program (organized by Knar Abrahamyan and Despoina Panagiotidou), and a three-hour special session titled "Teaching Music Theory Through Times of Disaster and Trauma."

The Professional Development Committee (PDC) offers a range of programs and services to benefit SMT members at every stage of their careers. The committee sponsored a variety of events during the Annual Meeting in November 2025, the tastiest of which was the annual Student Breakfast Reception. Many thanks to PDC members Gerry Lopez and Micah Mooney for their assistance with this year’s breakfast, which offered student attendees a valuable opportunity to meet one another and to network in a relaxed environment.

The Conference Guides Program contributes to the professional development of SMT members in the earliest stage of their careers by pairing interested newcomers with experienced faculty and graduate students. We received twelve requests for conference guides from newer conference attendees. Thanks to all those who volunteered to serve as guides and particularly to PDC member Scott Gleason, who coordinated the program.

Sincere thanks as well to PDC members Knar Abrahamyan and Despoina Panagiotidou, who organized this year’s CV Review Session, and to reviewers Yayoi Uno Everett, Johanna Frymoyer, Megan Kaes Long, Ji Yeon Lee, Toru Momii, and Sam Reenan. A total of 22 participants received invaluable feedback on their CV and other job-application materials during this year’s session.

Finally, the PDC also sponsored a three-hour special session at the 2025 meeting entitled “Teaching Music Theory Through Times of Disaster and Trauma,” and featuring presentations by Lyn Ellen Burkett, Amy Carr-Richardson, PDC chair Evan Jones, Jeffrey Perry, and Mark Richardson. The five presentations were followed by a lively question period, then by small- and large-group discussions. The PDC thanks Lyn Ellen Burkett, who captained the proposal process and provided critical organizational leadership.

—Evan Jones

Demographic Data

Since ConfTool—the system SMT uses to review proposals—does not automatically collect demographic information for all submissions, the data below reflects only accepted proposals. This year’s accepted program includes 106 paper presentations, 24 poster presentations, three alternative-format sessions (accepted in full), and seven integrated-format sessions comprising 21 papers. Demographic data represent unique individual presenters, some of whom identify with multiple categories or presented in more than one format. As a result, the number of presenters (174) exceeds the number of accepted proposals (154), and demographic totals do not align exactly.

Gender

• Men – 88/174
• Women – 65/174
• Unknown – 19/174
• Gender Neutral – 3/174
• Transgender – 2/174
• Other – 2/174

Race & Ethnicity

• White – 123/174
• Asian – 26/174
• Unknown – 24/174
• Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish – 13/174
• Native American, Alaskan Native, or First Nation – 3/174
• Middle Eastern or North African – 2/174
• Other – 2/174

Professional Status

• Students – 53/174
• Assistant Professors – 37/174
• Associate Professors  – 31/174
• Full Professors – 22/174
• Unknowns – 11/174
• Lecturer/instructors – 10/174
• Independent Scholars – 5/174
• Other – 5/174

SMT Outstanding Publication Awards and Emerging Scholar (Article) Awards 2025

As 2025 Chair of the Publication Awards Committee, I would like to thank my colleagues Damian Blättler, Juan Chattah, and Tomoko Deguchi for their extraordinary insight, diligence, and helpfulness. We were enormously impressed at the depth and scholarly range of the articles under consideration this year, and, after careful consideration, we decided to award four Emerging Scholar awards and five Outstanding Publication awards.

The first category is the Emerging Scholar Award (Article) which is given for an article published no more than seven calendar years after the author's receipt of the Ph.D. (or, in the case of someone who does not hold a Ph.D., before the author reaches the age of 40).

The first article offers a groundbreaking contribution to the field in defining a clear methodology for analyzing vocal placement within a virtual space in recent popular music by using computer software to isolate vocal tracks, describing the method of analysis, and displaying a 3D image to create a quantifiable method to compare the different tracks.

The first Emerging Scholar Award goes to Michèle Duguay for her article "Analyzing Vocal Placement in Recorded Virtual Space," published in Music Theory Online.

Our second article sheds light on pentatonic scale transformations and contributes to a significant enrichment and advancement of Chinese music theory.  Precise language is adopted to the four basic xuangong transformations, and quin-directed transformation. The transformations are conceived as theoretical conception and practical application using examples spanning from Confucian court music, traditional instrumental music, Cantopop, and Chinese new music, both tonal and atonal.

The second Emerging Scholar Award goes to Nathan Lam for his article "Pentatonic Xuangong Transformations in Chinese Music," published in Music Theory Online.

The third article explores metric variety across 165 recordings of a single song to produce a model of dynamics within a musical ensemble, demonstrating the shared knowledge that allows for distributed cognition, the musical effects that makes possible, and how these performance relationships are interpersonal power dynamics as well.

The third Emerging Scholar Award goes to Nathaniel Michell's article "On Meter and the Social Dynamics of Cueing in Bill Monroe's 'Muleskinner Blues,'" published in Music Theory Online.

In the fourth article, the author reveals how Figaro's aria from Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro, long taken as a prototypical minuet, resists that label when examined through its phrase structure, hypermeter, and rhythmic design. Rather, the piece may gesture instead toward the contredanse, carrying different social implications and a subtler irony. In questioning how listeners historically recognized style, this article invites a more transparent, historically grounded, and cognitively informed topic theory.

The fourth Emerging Scholar Award goes to Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska for her article "On Figaro's Alleged Minuet and Some Challenges and Opportunities of Topic Theory" published in Music Theory Spectrum.

The second category is the Outstanding Publication Award (Article), which is given for a distinguished article by an author of any age or career stage.

The first article presents detailed research about the sources and transmission of two cornerstones of the modern conception of harmony. The study keeps straight the many uses of the term, as well as keeping track of the reactions and rebuttals across the work of various scholars amidst all their misquotations and misattributions, ultimately arriving at the idea that harmony's principal objects are chords of three or more notes, and that chord motion is dictated by relationships between them in which consonance and dissonance play a role.

The first Outstanding Publication Award goes to David E. Cohen's article "From Ramos to Rameau: Toward the Origins of the Modern Concept of Harmony," published in the Journal of Music Theory.

Our second article offers a significant expansion on the everyday music theory classroom topic: the cadential six-four. Examples of unconventional harmonies that function as cadential six-fours, are derived from diverse types of music from late-19th- to 20th-century composers and popular genres. These harmonies are significantly modified on the surface while retaining the chord's underlying rhetorical cadential function. The article demonstrates the conflict that formed between a chord's grammatical syntax and its morphology while tracing the development of its harmonic conception and independence.

The second Outstanding Publication Award goes to Gabriel Fankhauser for his article, "Displaced Cadential Six-Four Chords," published in Intégral.

The third article uses innovative methodology to explore music-dance interactions. Devising a first-of-its-kind notation that pairs dance information with musical score as well as using archival video clips to clearly and convincingly illustrate the subtle imitations or metric dissonance between dance steps and music, the article shows how Balanchine's choreography applies musical techniques to dance at a high level.

The third Outstanding Publication Award goes to Kara Yoo Leaman for her article "George Balanchine's Art of Choreographic Musicality in Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux," published in Music Theory Spectrum.  

The fourth article offers an innovation discussion with a methodology drawing upon schemata (Gjerdingen) and improvisation in determining accented core tones and tritone resolution of bass and melodic skeleton to distinguish the important scale degrees of Galant schema passages in twenty seven works that extends the published research into labeled schema within formal structures and use in the creative process.

The fourth Outstanding Publication Award goes to Gilad Rabinovitch and Aaron Carter-Enyi for their article "Melodic Organization and Sequential Ordering of Galant Schemata," published in Music Theory Online.

In the fifth article, the authors reimagine the very foundations of corpus construction by exposing how inherited social hierarchies—racism, sexism, and exclusion—can silently shape the repertoires we treat as representative. The authors propose a methodological and ethical framework for rebalancing the demographics of musical corpora and confronting the biases embedded in our tools of analysis. Their study is both empirically rigorous and morally clear-sighted, charting a path toward corpus work that not only measures music but also reflects the diversity of those who make it.

The fifth Outstanding Publication Award goes to Nicholas Shea, Lindsey Reymore, Christopher White, Ben Duinker, Leigh VanHandel, Matthew Zeller, and Nicole Biamonte for their article "Diversity in Corpus Studies," published in Music Theory Online.

—Mark Richardson

The SMT Book Publication Awards Committee gave awards to five excellent books in 2025. The Emerging Scholar Book Award went to Anabel Maler for Seeing Voices: Analyzing Sign Language Music, published by Oxford University Press. There were many excellent eligible for the Wallace Berry Book Award and the committee chose four recipients: Richard Beaudoin for Sounds as They Are: The Unwritten Music in Classical Recordings, published by Oxford University Press, Michael Dodds for his book From Modes to Keys in Early Modern Music Theory, published by Oxford University Press, Philip Ewell for On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, published by the University of Michigan Press, and Yoel Greenberg for How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form, published by Oxford University Press. We congratulate all five authors on their outstanding work.

Matt BaileyShea, Chair of the SMT Book Publication Awards Committee

​​The Autographs and Archival Documents Interest Group (AADIG) and the Analysis of World Musics Interest Group combined this year to hold a joint annual meeting, which took place on Saturday, November 8th during the 2025 SMT Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The meeting featured four lightning talks: Yonatan Malin (University of Colorado-Boulder) presented "Archives and Living Traditions: Interpreting Klezmer Manuscripts from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine"; Nico Schuler (Texas State University), "Digital Archival Research for the Rediscovery of Late-19th Century African-American Music: A Case Study";  Aidan McGartland (McGill University), "Uncovering Interculturalism in Margaret Sutherland's The Young Kabbarli"; and Eli Oesterheld (Northwestern University), "'And They Say There Are No New Melodies': Tensions Between Novel Cultural Practices and Familiar Musical Syntax in the Music of the John Frum Cargo Cult."

The session concluded with separate simultaneous business meetings of the interest groups. We announced that Lee Cannon-Brown was elected the new co-chair of the AADIG and thanked outgoing co-chair Christoph Neidhöfer for his leadership over the last three years.

The AADIG promotes scholarship that is informed by the study of archival materials, broadly construed. To remain updated on all group activities we encourage everyone to see our Facebook and Knowledge Commons pages, as well as our webpage with SMT, where you can sign up for our e-mail list.

During our business meeting at the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, we met jointly with the Performance and Analysis Interest Group for a session of lightning talks from Nate Mitchell, Ash Mach, and Amy Ming Wai Tai. The session was attended by 25 participants, who enjoyed the chance to engage with all the participants through a general round table discussion. We would like to thank Rachel Gain for their leadership as co-chair, and we will run elections to select a new co-chair. We continue to solicit suggestions for new publications on dance and movement to add to our collective Dance/Movement and Music Bibliography and submissions for our DMIG resource depository. For more information on DMIG, its events, and its resources, please visit our DMIG Knowledge Commons page and DMIG website, or e-mail the chairs at danceandmovement@societymusictheory.org.

At the SMT Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, the Film and Multimedia Interest Group met jointly with the AMS Music and Media Study Group for a lively poster session dedicated to the “Intersections of Music and Multimedia.” Posters were presented by Wenshi Chen, Greg Martin, Caleb Rebarchak, Sam Falotico, Adam Rizzo, Joyce Li Yue, and Natalie Miller. A wide range of topics were featured, including intertextuality in the J-Pop music videos of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, improvised algorhythmic EDM, emotion and narrative in Bridgerton, the psychology of audiovisual congruence, the challenge of recorded sound to Eurocentricity, rhythmic gaming in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and the influence of the Western genre on musical soundscapes in The Mandalorian. Many thanks to all our participants for their excellent scholarship and to all of those in attendance for making it such a wonderful evening.

The interest group also announced the two winners of this year’s Film and Multimedia Interest Group Publication Award: Julianne Grasso for her article “Affective Zones: The Spaces of Possibility in Video Game Music,” published in Music and the Moving Image, and Nathaniel Mitchell for “Variations on a Theme by K. K. Slider: Memory and Play in Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” published by SMT-V. Congratulations to our winners, and huge thanks to our Publication Award Committee, chaired by William Ayers, Frank Lehman, and Abby Shupe!

While Chelsea Oden is stepping away from co-chair duties, and we wish her nothing but the best, we are happy to have such a vibrant community of scholars who are willing to take on service for the FMIG. Please let us know if you would like to collaborate or serve the group.

For more information about our group, please visit our website and join our e-mail list on Knowledge Commons. We encourage your active involvement, and we look forward to seeing you at our next event.

The Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries Interest Group (GIMP) held a panel on “Interculturalism in Brazilian, Ghanaian, and Nigerian Music” utilizing a broad range of analytical approaches reflective of the boundary-crossing nature of the musical works we celebrate as a community. The repertoires represented both embrace and defy categories such as art music and jazz, often alluding to features and forms of indigenous traditional, European classical, and contemporary popular musics. We thank Alcalde, Choi, Guerra and Vishio for their brief but thought-provoking presentations followed by a lively discussion with the audience that highlighted the important musical connections between West Africa and Brazil.

The GIMP IG is preparing for another exciting session for Milwaukee 2026, and we welcome ideas and especially offers for collaboration with the rest of SMT. Please be in touch with the co-chairs to join the interest group and get involved. We look forward to hearing from you!

Photo of 2025 GIMP Panelists. From left to right: Stephen Guerra, Anton Vishio, Hang Ki Choi, and Bruno Alcalde.

The Hip-Hop/Rap Interest Group (HHRIG), founded in 2022 at SMT New Orleans, had a productive year that featured four events: a planning meeting in February, our traditional, online summer research forum in June, a joint meeting with the Jazz IG at SMT Minneapolis, and an off-site event in Minneapolis, organized by member Jacob P. Cupps (Washington University in St. Louis), which brought local hip-hop artists and HHRIG-affiliated scholars into dialogue. We also published our first Mixtape Award, HHRIG’s version of a publication award, which was in the design of a cassette tape and distributed to conference attendees. For this year, thanks to the work of our Program Committee Chair (Kjell-Andreas Odekkalv, University of Oslo) and member (Devin Guerrero, Texas Tech University), the award recognizes a wide range of publications on different subtopics such as sampling and flow. We have thereby fulfilled all stated goals from 2022, which include greater collaboration between scholars and practitioners of hip-hop/rap, and the recognition of outstanding research in the field of music theory on hip-hop/rap music. 

For our joint meeting with Jazz in Minneapolis, a CFP for lightning talks was developed by a program committee including two co-chairs of each IG plus an additional member from Jazz and Hip-Hop/Rap. To make the review process more helpful, each applicant was given informal feedback on their proposal. At the meeting, five lightning talks were presented: “Deconstructing Jazz Rap: Footwork, Sampling, and Formal Process in RP Boo & Armand Hammer’s ‘Blood Running High’ (2023)” by Jacob. P. Cupps; “Hargrove’s Horns: An Analysis of Roy Hargrove’s Horn Arrangements for the Soulquarians” by Collin Felter (University of California, Irvine); “Analyzing Jazz–Hip-Hop Hybridity: Tension and Release in the Music of DOMi & JD BECK” by Anna Peloso (Indiana University); “Jazz as Collaborator and Canvas in Rap: McKinley Dixon’s Conversational Soundscape in Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?” by Leah Amarosa (University of Oregon); and “Interactions Between Jazz Schemata, Melody, and Formal Position in Popular Music” by Kevin Costello (Queens College). 

The off-conference outreach event, entitled Sound Ecologies: Sonic Environments in the Twin Cities, was attended by around 25 people drawing from members of SMT, AMS, and the wider Minneapolis community. HHRIG member Jacob P. Cupps coordinated this event with Alex Kohlmann, the manager of a shared arts space (Resource) in eastern Minneapolis. This innovative event featured dialogue between six local Hip-Hop musicians and four HHRIG-affiliated music theorists. After a light dinner, the event explored the metaphor of “sound ecologies” for their work. The discussion settled for a while on everyone’s sense of musical “home,” and which thoughts and emotions this idea brought up. All present encountered a wide variety of perspectives ranging from music-theoretical to a local DJ and radio host, to a noise and synth punk musician, to a producer, teacher, and mycologist. We hope to continue events like this that blur the disciplinary boundaries between the SMT and local communities. 

In 2026, we plan to hold our post-conference business meeting, the online summer research forum, and an SMT meeting. We will also explore new possibilities with our Mixtape Award.

For more information or to get involved in the HHRIG, join our Humanities Commons group or e-mail Ben or Stephen (smthhrig@gmail.com).

The SMT Jazz Interest Group held its thirty-first annual meeting at the 2025 Joint AMS–SMT Annual Meeting in Minneapolis. The meeting was held jointly with the SMT Hip-Hop and Rap Interest Group and featured a series of lightning talks fostering dialogue between jazz and hip-hop scholarship. Presenters included Jacob P. Cupps, Collin Felter, Anna Peloso, Leah Amarosa, and Kevin Costello. Many thanks to Varun Chandrasekhar and David Geary for serving on the program committee for this session alongside the chairs of both interest groups.

We also awarded Marc E. Hannaford the 2025 Award for Excellence in Jazz Scholarship for his 2025 article “Eric Dolphy’s and Yusef Lateef’s Synthetic Formations," published in Music Theory Online 31, no. 2. The article sheds light on Dolphy's and Lateef's improvisational systems while persuasively arguing for the necessity of understanding these actions as both insurgent and political. The committee commended the author not only for his adept synthesis of archival work, theoretical analysis, and critical theory, but also for his virtuosic command of all three approaches. Congratulations, Marc! And many thanks to this year’s award committee: Varun Chandrasekhar (chair), Dustin Chau, and Ben Geyer.

We welcome anyone interested in jazz or improvised music to join the Jazz Interest Group! The primary hub for our year-round activity is on Knowledge Commons. Our group page is private to maintain a space for respectful and productive discourse, but our chair will quickly approve your membership request. Our online Jazz Theory Bibliography is managed by James McGowan (Carleton University); please contact him with any new entries, questions, or comments. Please contact Sean Smither (Juilliard) with other questions about the group.

–Sean R. Smither, Jazz IG chair

The SMT-Philosophy Interest Group had a wonderful and well-attended meeting this year! Our meeting featured talks on musical ontologies from Stefanie Bilidas, Andrew Goldman, and Amy Bauer. We commend all three presenters for wonderful talks and look forward to Andrew Goldman's talk being published for SMT-V. In addition to these talks, we also solicited members to serve on the inaugural committee to give an annual award for excellence in Philosophy and Music Theory, and look forward to giving the award out next year.

Finally, we also are soliciting one person to serve a two-year term as co-chair of the interest group. If you are interested in serving, please e-mail Varun Chandrasekhar (c.varun@wustl.edu) for more information!

Varun Chandrasekhar

The Music Cognition Interest Group convened at the 2025 Joint Annual Meeting of AMS/SMT on Saturday, November 8. Our session aimed to support early-career scholars by giving them a venue to present their recent empirical projects. To this end, we were pleased to curate a program of talks from three undergraduate students, a Ph.D. candidate, and an assistant professor:

• “Hearing As”: Prior Knowledge of Syntactic Structure Affects ERP Components for Musical Expectation
  Andrew Goldman (Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Cognitive Science, Indiana University)
• If You Give a Mouse a Melody: In Search of the Disney Sound
  Amy King (Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory, Northwestern University)
• Simple but Mighty: Revisiting Longuet-Higgins’ Key-Finding Algorithm
  Nathaniel Korn (undergraduate student in Computational Linguistics and Music Theory, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
• Sounds Good, Feels Good: Measuring Music and Emotion Perception in College Students
  Nico Yanzaguano (undergraduate student in Music and Neuroscience, Ursinus College)
• The Role of Memory in the Perception of Popular Music Chord Progressions
  Abigail Fiedler (undergraduate student in Music Studies and Psychology, Oberlin College)

Additionally, the 2025 annual meeting marked the end of Samuel Gardner's term as co-chair of the interest group. We would like to thank him for all the work he has done to keep the group running smoothly and create a space to share exciting new music cognition research!

The Music Notation and Visualization Interest Group hosted a lively panel in Minneapolis. Moderated by Eric Isaacson, author of Visualizing Music (IU Press 2023), scholars Victoria Malawey, Leah Frederick, Johanna Frymoyer, Judith Lochhead, Mitchell Ohriner, and Steven Rings each discussed a high-quality diagram they had published in a recent book or article. The session drew attention to best practices and the decision-making process when creating music-related graphics, something that is the concern of any music theorist working on an article, conference paper, dissertation, or book.

The interest group has created a Humanities Commons site that will soon be populated with resources, blog posts, and announcements relating to the graphical representation of music.

The Music Theory Pedagogy Interest Group met at SMT on Friday, November 7, 2025 for a session on Values-Aligned Teaching. Eight lightning talks alternated with time for small-group discussion on articulating our values and how our teaching aligns with these values. Presenters included Phil Duker, Jennifer England, Peter Schubert, Alexandrea Jonker, Dave Easley, Jocelyn Ho, James Humberstone, Ellen Shaw, Leah Frederick, and Michael Chikinda. We ended with a brief business meeting.

The MTPIG is seeking feedback on several items, including whether to try to become a Standing Committee of SMT and ideas for next year's meeting. We are also looking for nominations for Chair, to start a three-year term at SMT 2026. The position involves planning our annual meeting at SMT, communicating with SMT and other interest groups as necessary, moderating our quiet e-mail list, and writing up a report like this one for the SMT Newsletter. For more information on these discussion items or to nominate someone (including yourself) for Chair, please e-mail Timothy Chenette (timothy.chenette@usu.edu).

For more information on our group or to sign up for our e-mail list, please visit the Music Theory Pedagogy Interest Group Page on the SMT website.

The Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group is a discursive space for scholars of music after 1945, with an emphasis on the modernist, experimental, and avant-garde.

At our 2025 meeting in Minneapolis, we met jointly with the Improvisation Interest Group to discuss the role of improvisation in recent concert music. Our meeting included presentations by Antares Boyle, John Scott, and Joel Hunt, and the lightning talk format allowed for an extensive Q & A with wide-ranging discussion between our presenters, chairs, and audience members.

At our meeting, we also announced the winners of our 2025 Publication Award: Nathan L. Lam for "Pentatonic Xuangong 旋宮 Transformations in Chinese Music" and Alexander Sanchez-Behar for "Jazz Influence and Synthesis in the Music of John Adams."

For more information about our Interest Group, join our Knowledge Commons page or visit our website. We are currently having elections to re-elect our co-chairs, before discussing a possible change to our election and meeting schedule at next year's business meeting.

—Noah Kahrs and Gui Hwan Lee, Co-Chairs

The Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic will hold its 2026 annual conference virtually on February 20–21. All papers and addresses for this conference will be presented in a live, online format. John Peterson and Kim Loeffert will be delivering a keynote address together. I am grateful to Eugene Montague for chairing the program committee. For more information about the conference, please visit the MTSMA website. The deadline to submit proposals has passed.

This year, we are electing five new executive committee members: a president, a secretary, and three members-at-large. New committee members will be announced at the 2026 meeting. The deadline for nominations has passed.

Jia Yi Lee has recently agreed to serve as the Web Editor for the Society. With a virtual conference upcoming, I am especially grateful to her for agreeing to serve in this capacity.

I unfortunately neglected to send a report to the Summer edition of last year’s Newsletter, so it’s appropriate for me to additionally recap the highlights of our 2025 conference now! 

The Dorothy Payne Award for best student paper at the 2025 conference went to Jacob Eichhorn (Eastman School of Music): “Twelve-Tone as Topic: Satire, Politics, and Postwar American Concert Music.” A special thank you goes to Gretchen Horlacher for delivering the professional development workshop and keynote address. At the business meeting and executive board meeting, we enacted positive change for our Society. MTSMA will begin implementing dues beginning with the 2026 virtual conference, which will allow us to better track membership and support the Society. This will not result in more money paid by members, as we are lowering conference fees in tandem with the implementation of dues. We also adopted many amendments to our bylaws to clarify them and reflect current practices. 

I look forward to another productive and captivating 2026 conference!

Megan Lavengood, MTSMA President

Current Executive Committee Members of MTSMA

• President Megan Lavengood (George Mason University)
• Vice President William O’Hara (Gettysburg College)
• Secretary Chelsey Hamm (Christopher Newport University)
• Treasurer Richard Drehoff Jr. (Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University)
• Members-at-Large
  • Kim Loeffert (Virginia Tech)
  • Paula Maust (Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University)
  • Emily Milius (Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University)
  • John Peterson (James Madison University)
  • Simon Prosser (George Mason University)
• Student Representative 
  • Jia Yi Lee (Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University)

Music Theory Southeast (MTSE) will hold its annual meeting on February 27–28, 2025 at Morehouse College (Atlanta, GA). The conference will include scholarly presentations, a concert by Society members, and a graduate student workshop led by Horace Maxile (Baylor University). The program committee, chaired by Evan Jones (Florida State University), includes Sabrina Clarke (Meredith College), Tamika Howard (Lanier Technical College), J. Daniel Jenkins (University of South Carolina, ex officio), and Jess Forgione, 2025 Irna Priore Prize for Student Research Winner (Michigan State University). Local arrangements will be coordinated by Benjamin Dawson (Morehouse College).

The Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory (RMSMT) is pleased to announce our 2026 Annual Meeting, which will take place March 27–28, 2026 at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. This will be a joint meeting with the Rocky Mountain chapter of the American Musicological Society. For more information, please consult the RMSMT website.