The Graduate Theory Association and Graduate Musicology Association of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music are pleased to announce their joint 2027 Symposium of Research in Music, to take place in Bloomington, Indiana February 19th–20th, 2027. We are currently soliciting proposals relevant to any subfield of music research, including (but not limited to) music theory, music analysis, musicology, ethnomusicology, and related disciplines. Papers may address any musical repertoire, as we hope to feature a wide variety of musical conversations. Paper presentations will be twenty minutes in length, with ten minutes of Q&A to follow.
We are very happy to welcome Dr. Philip Ewell (Hunter College, CUNY) as our keynote speaker. Philip Ewell is a Professor of Music Theory at Hunter College CUNY. His specialties include musical race studies, Russian opera, modal theory and history, twentieth-century music theory, and African American music. His work has appeared in the BBC, the CBC, Daily Beast, Die Zeit, New York Times, New Yorker, The Conversation, and WQXR’s Aria Code. His monograph, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, appeared with the UM Press in 2023 and won the PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers and the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory. His co-edited volume, American Antiblackness, recently appeared with Routledge. His second monograph is under contract at The New Press and will appear in 2027, and he is coauthoring a music theory textbook, The Engaged Musician: Theory and Analysis for the Twenty-First Century, which is under contract at W.W. Norton. He is the series editor for OUP’s Theorizing African American Music, and the managing editor of the open-access peer-reviewed journal Black Music, in Theory.
We are also excited to have faculty talks and workshops by Dr. Michael Slattery, Dr. John Romey, and Dr. Halina Goldberg!
The deadline for proposals is Sunday, November 22, 2026. Submissions are to be made through the following Google Form: https://forms.gle/6GGSqidRQpCH16U88 . Submissions should include a proposal of no more than 500 words. and may include up to four pages of supplementary materials, such as: musical examples, figures, or bibliographies.