SMT Newsletter

At the Annual Meeting in Jacksonville, the SMT President, Vice President, and Executive Director met with Interest Group chairs. The productive discussion focused on issues related to the growing number of Interest Groups, which (as discussed in prior VP reports) causes scheduling challenges and conflicts, increased expenses, and difficulties in communication and support.

To address these challenges, we proposed a rotation system where each Interest Group  would hold meetings at SMT Annual Meetings two out of every three years. In an IG’s “off” year, they would be encouraged to plan their own business meetings or social hours, collaborate with another IG who was “on” that year, and/or submit a proposal for a special session through the Program Committee. This rotation process would help avoid scheduling conflicts and challenges for attendees, as well as ease logistical and financial demands on the Society. We are currently working with the IG chairs to determine which groups are willing to take their “off” year at the upcoming meeting in Minneapolis.

The meeting with IG chairs also included brainstorming ways to transform the Interest Group Fair into a more engaging and social event, helping Interest Groups reach new members and foster stronger connections. These proposed changes aim to improve the overall experience for both Interest Groups and conference attendees. 

I’ve been having discussions with representatives from the UK and European music societies about ways of strengthening the relationship between those societies and SMT. The European societies have formed a collaborative network, the European Network for Theory and Analysis of Music (T&AM), with a website that includes announcements for opportunities and events. Additionally, at SMT Jacksonville, President Jan Miyake and I met with representatives from the Society for Music Analysis to establish collaborative activities for 2025, including inviting SMT members to present at SMA’s online colloquium and an online SMT Conference Proposal Workshop for SMA and T&AM members focusing on writing and submitting a proposal to SMT’s annual meetings. I look forward to many more joint activities between these organizations. 

Last but not least, SMT’s regional societies have been coordinating spring conference scheduling and establishing a virtual conference rotation system to avoid scheduling conflicts between regional conferences and to ensure accessibility. The regional societies who have held online conferences successfully are sharing their experiences, ideas and resources related to infrastructure, and support for online conferences with the other regional societies. I thank the leaders of those groups for their time and commitment to one of the most vital parts of the Society.

I’m also pleased to report on the 2024 Publication Subvention Grants. These grants are awarded to reimburse scholars for costs incurred in the preparation and publication of scholarly projects. The committee awarded seven grants for publication projects, with awards going to Antares Boyle, Michael Buchler, Chelsea Burns, Fred Cruz Nowell, Martin Ross, Patrick Valiquet, and Kristen Wallentinsen. Thank you to the Publication Subvention Grant Committee, consisting of Arnie Cox, David Forrest, and David Byrne, for reviewing the applications; thank you also to donors to the SMT-Forward campaign for making these subvention grants possible. The next submission deadline for a Publication Subvention Grant application will be July 31, 2025, with notification in August. 

If anyone has any suggestions or feedback about any of the above activities and initiatives, you are welcome to contact me at vicepresident@societymusictheory.org.

It’s my great pleasure and honor to begin my term as the Secretary of the SMT, and I’m grateful to my immediate predecessor, Charity Lofthouse, for her years of service to the Society and for her kind assistance in the transition. Since her final report in the August 2024 Newsletter, the Executive Board has passed the following motions:

• Motion to approve the minutes of the meetings of the Executive Board held in May 2024 and September 2024.
• Motion to approve Baltimore as the location of the 50th (!) Annual Meeting in November 2027.
• Motion to adopt a new harassment policy.
• Motion to form an ad hoc committee to revise subvention grant language. 
• Motion to adopt a change in publication award eligibility, specifying that all awards except the emerging scholar awards can be won more than once.
• Motion to adopt the 2024 Investment Directives Addendum.

Wishing you a happy New Year,

–Mitchell Ohriner, SMT Secretary 
secretary@societymusictheory.org

FIGE Mission and Name Change

The mission of the Committee on Feminist Issues and Gender Equity (FIGE, pronounced “fig-ee”) is to promote gender equity and feminist scholarship in the field of music theory. The name change modernizes our identity as we acknowledge that gender is not binary; the name also clarifies our role in building an inclusive space within the Society.

Annual Meeting Recap

Building on the 2023 FIGE session that explored the foundation of feminist scholarship and the movement toward models of analysis in music scholarship that have been deemed “feminist,” the 2024 session featured music by women as well as an emphasis on analytical methods that were once considered “taboo” or “lesser than” other methods of analysis. Presentations by Douglas Rust on Daphne Oram’s Pulse Persephone, Stephen Rodgers on Lili Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel, and Clare Eng on Teresa Teng’s pop songs asked participants to reconsider some of the ways we listen to and experience music. 

The FIGE Brown Bag session was well-attended and offered participants an inclusive and welcoming space to discuss gender, gender discrimination, and professional bias related to gender, along with strategies for dealing with these issues.

I would like to thank outgoing member Carissa Reddick (University of Northern Colorado) for her service and to welcome incoming members Lena Console and Fred Cruz Nowell. Finally, it is a pleasure to turn over the chairship to Cora Palfy (Washington & Jefferson College); FIGE is in excellent hands.  

Services to Promote Gender Equity and Feminist Scholarship 

The Proposal-Mentoring Program

This program pairs music theory graduate students and junior scholars who identify as female, non-binary, or trans with mentors who have served on national and international program committees and/or are music theorists whose paper proposals have consistently met with success. 

The Virtual Research Group Program

This program establishes groups of 3–4 peers at any rank (graduate student to senior scholar) who identify as female, non-binary, or trans, and who meet online. Groups will discuss writing goals, solutions to common writing problems, and get feedback from one another on their writing. Between meetings, peers will share their work and edit the work of one fellow peer. Groups normally meet three times. Once a group has completed its meeting schedule, members may ask to be paired with an outside mentor. This person will bring fresh eyes to the project and offer tips on appropriate journals or publishers. 

Professional Mentoring

The Professional Mentoring Program provides mentoring for any SMT member to discuss gender-related professional issues confidentially with volunteer mentors who have navigated similar situations in their own careers. Mentors are available to discuss a broad range of issues such as job searches, tenure and promotion, negotiation, work and family, harassment, discrimination, and others. 

Facebook Group

We have a private Facebook page for the SMT Committee on Feminist Issues and Gender Equity, with about 600 members. Please join us in the group, and if you're already in the group, invite your SMT friends!

Any suggestions or questions regarding FIGE or the services above may be sent to Cora Palfy, incoming chair of FIGE, at fige@societymusictheory.org. 

In collaboration with the Scholars for Social Responsibility Interest Group (SSRIG) and Project Spectrum, the Standing Committee on LGBTQ+ Issues organized our 2024 special session around the work of Jacksonville-based queer, trans, Black, and Brown activists. In anticipation of how the location of the conference would affect our membership’s attendance, this session was presented in a hybrid format. Invited speakers included GeeXella (Duval Folx), Elias Joseph (Jacksonville SDS and Girls Rock Camp Jacksonville), Sara Mahmoud (Jacksonville Palestine Solidarity Network and Jacksonville Community Action Committee), and Angie Nixon (co-owner Cafe Resistance and member of Florida House of Representatives, 13th district). The session began with a workshop led by GeeXella on community building. The second half of the session featured a conversation with all the invited speakers, as well as Vivian Luong (chair of the standing committee) and Steve Lett (chair of SSRIG) on local, life-affirming practices that resist Florida's state-level violence against trans and queer folks, and how these practices relate to national and global struggles towards liberation. We also created and distributed copies of a zine featuring local queer organizations and businesses. 

Our standing committee would like to thank the SMT and Project Spectrum for their generous support for this event. We would also like to thank (in alphabetical order) Steven Lett, Christina Misaki Nikitin, Toby Rush, and Chris Segall for their assistance in making this hybrid event possible. The SMT Standing Committee on LGBTQ+ is always open to suggestions for future events and ways to support queer members and scholarship, which you can send to lgbtq@societymusictheory.org.

The Committee on Race and Ethnicity (CoRE) held two events at the 2024 SMT Annual Meeting in Jacksonville, Florida.  Our sponsored session “Has Music Theory Become More Diverse Since 2019?” examined the current state of diversity and inclusion in the music theory field five years after the 2019 plenary session “Reframing Music Theory” at the SMT Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio. Participants in the session included Clifton Boyd, Hang Ki Choi, Yayoi Uno Everett, Philip Ewell, Catrina Kim, Hanisha Kulothparan, Gerardo Lopez, Elizabeth Marvin, and Joseph Straus, who all made valuable contributions to this ongoing discussion. Additionally, we organized a CoRE luncheon for committee members, session panelists, and travel grant recipients. CoRE will continue to offer travel grants for upcoming meetings.

The SMT CoRE is dedicated to promoting diversity in race, culture, values, and perspectives within the Society. The CoRE committee includes Bruno Alcalde, Lydia Bangura, Hanisha Kulothparan, Gwi Hwan Lee, Charles Lwanga, and Tori Vilches. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact the committee’s co-chairs, Aaron Carter-Enyi or Ji Yeon Lee at core@societymusictheory.org.

The SMT Workshop Programs are a stimulating way to explore new topics and to interact meaningfully with SMT colleagues whom you may not have known before.  The Peer Learning Program is intended to encourage “thinking together,” in the spirit of the Mannes Institute, founded by Wayne Alpern and active from 2001–11.  The 2024 PLP workshops were led by Megan Long (Oberlin College & Conservatory of Music) exploring  “A Toolkit for Analyzing Sixteenth-Century Polyphony” and by Daniel K. L. Chua (The University of Hong Kong) and Alex Rehding (Harvard University) on “Hitchhiker’s Guide to IMTE (Intergalactic Music Theory of Everything).”  The Graduate Student Workshops, also founded by Alpern, were led in 2024 by Chris Stover (Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University) on “Global Music Theory (as an Insurgent Practice)” and Daphne Tan (University of Toronto) on “Music Psychology and the Ideas of Ernst Kurth.”  Please join me in thanking these workshop leaders and my fellow 2024 committee members (Nancy Rogers, chair; Landon Morrison, and Maryam Moshaver).

The 2025 members of the Committee on Workshop Programs include Lori Burns, Ed Klorman, Mariusz Kozak, and me.  We have met and chosen an exciting slate of workshop leaders for 2025.  Our invitations have been extended, and we await confirmation of titles and topics. Watch smt-announce for further details and information about how to apply.  If you have not participated in a Workshop, consider applying in 2025! 

When I became Chair of the Fundraising and Development Committee last year, I learned three things.

First, the revenue that SMT receives from membership dues and conference registration fees only covers about 60% of our expenses.

Second, many of SMT’s initiatives that help its members directly are funded through donations. These include conference livestreaming, family care and travel grants, dissertation fellowships, publication support, membership and journal subsidies for students and undersupported scholars, and more.

Third, SMT does not actively solicit donations from external sources. Our fundraising is driven by SMT members.

Before I became Development Chair, I didn’t quite realize all of this. In fact, I always balked at SMT’s requests for donations. I already pay hundreds of dollars for membership and to attend the conference. Why is SMT asking for more? Surely, many SMT members feel the same way.

But now I see things differently. The fees that SMT charges are actually the minimum they can be to sustain our Society. Our most important initiatives require additional support. Some members are in the privileged position to be able to afford more than the minimum. Those members can support the equitable mission of ensuring that everyone in our Society can participate and benefit from our resources and opportunities.

The Fundraising and Development Committee’s messaging this past year relied on two cornerstone values: wealth redistribution and community belonging. We recognize that not everyone is in the same financial situation, and not everyone has felt valued and included in the Society. We’ve tried to appeal to those who feel most comfortable donating—comfortable in both senses of the word—to help make things better for everyone.

In 2024, I was fortunate to lead an engaged committee that shares these values: Andrew Davis, Leah Frederick, and Executive Board members Jan Miyake, Nora Engebretsen, and Jennifer Diaz. Jan charged us with establishing an annual fundraising cycle. We made solicitations for Giving Tuesday, the end of the calendar year, Valentine’s Day (through a limerick penned by our esteemed President), a month-long June campaign, and the SMT Annual Meeting.

The June campaign was generously funded by Mary Wennerstrom, Professor Emerita at Indiana University and the founding Secretary of SMT. We called it the Incorporation Day Campaign, as it concluded on the anniversary of the June 30, 1978, ratification of the SMT Articles of Incorporation. Mary pledged $25 for every donation made during the month of June. We shared video clips from an interview that Jennifer conducted, where Mary reminisced about the early days of SMT and explained why supporting the Society is important to her. The campaign raised over $12,000, a considerable success for a usually quiet time of the donating year.

Looking forward, the committee plans to replicate our solicitation cycle in 2025. We welcome fundraising ideas from SMT members. Please reach out! One goal for the year is to increase small donations. We hope to emphasize that every dollar counts, and that it’s incredibly helpful for graduate students and junior scholars who can comfortably do so to add a $5 donation to their membership or registration.

SMT members are a generous bunch. Our committees, our journals, and our conferences are all run by a community of volunteers. You donate your time—as you are able, when you feel valued—to help improve our community. You set up livestream cameras, review travel grant and dissertation fellowship applications, and share your research with others so that those who cannot easily travel to the conference due to disability, cost, or family care can participate equitably, and so that early-career, underrepresented, and international scholars can be welcomed into the field. These initiatives rely not only on volunteering, but also on the financial support of SMT members.

In the year ahead, we hope to remind you that your contributions help shape the future of our community.

We accept your gifts with gratitude. Donations may be made via the SMT website. 

With the support of the Executive Board, the IT Committee once again partnered with the Committee on Disability and Accessibility to livestream sessions of our Annual Meeting. Together with a team of volunteers, we provided livestreams for paper sessions from two presentation rooms as well as the Business Meeting, Award Ceremony, and the Keynote Address. 

Megan Lavengood and Sarah Marlowe worked together to create a native web version of the SMT Newsletter, improving accessibility and the display on mobile devices. Additional updates were also made to the website to improve functionality and consistency of data displayed on multiple pages.

I would like to thank the members of the 2024 IT Committee for their work to maintain the SMT's IT infrastructure and support our online resources: Megan Lavengood, web editor; Philip Baczewski, systems administrator and associate web editor; and members-at-large Brian Jarvis, Reiner Krämer, Táhirih Motazedian, Lindsey Reymore, and Jeff Yunek. 

The SMT Nominating Committee (Scott Murphy, chair; Stefanie Acevedo, Bryn Hughes, Nathan Lam, and Daphne Tan) issued a call for online nominations last December, and accepted nominations through January 15. The committee extends its gratitude to all who submitted nominations. The committee is currently preparing a slate of candidates for the offices of Vice President and two new Members-at-Large of the Executive Board. When the slate has been finalized, Secretary Mitchell Ohriner will inform the membership. Online voting will take place this spring. The Nominating Committee strongly encourages all members to vote in the election. 

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 2024, the tastiest of which was the annual Student Breakfast Reception. Many thanks to PDC member Gerry Lopez for organizing 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 ten requests for conference guides from newer conference attendees. Many thanks to all those who volunteered to serve as guides and to PDC member Tara Boyle, who coordinated the program.

Participants in this year’s CV Review Program received invaluable feedback on their CVs and other job-application materials. Sincere thanks to PDC member Knar Abrahamyan, who organized the program, and to reviewers Clifton Boyd, Hon Ki Cheung, Diego Cubero, Sumanth Gopinath, Marc Hannaford, Nathan Lam, and Táhirih Motazedian.

The PDC also sponsored a panel session at the 2024 Annual Meeting titled "Negotiating Sensitive Topics" moderated by incoming PDC chair Evan Jones. Attendance was excellent, and there was lively discussion focusing on academic freedoms, and challenging situations and conversations many colleagues are facing. Many thanks to outgoing PDC chair Samuel Bivens, who authored a compelling session proposal and recruited eight outstanding panelists: Michael Buchler, Adrian Childs, Christopher Endrinal, J. Daniel Jenkins, Ji Yeon Lee, Rachel Lumsden, Horace Maxile, Jr., and Noel Painter.

The 2024 SMT Program Committee included Maryam Moshaver (chair), Mariusz Kozak, Tomoko Deguchi, Kyle Adams, Brad Osborn, Somangshu Mukherji, Guy Capuzzo, and Jan Miyake (ex officio). The committee first met during the 2023 Annual Meeting to plan for the upcoming year and to discuss ideas for a keynote or plenary event. Stephen Rodgers, chair of the 2023 Program Committee joined us to answer our questions, share his experience, and offer invaluable advice.  We held our subsequent committee meetings via Zoom, over a total of sixteen hours in April and early May 2024.  I am especially grateful to all the members of the Program Committee for their generosity, ingenuity, and humor in constructing and providing titles for so many of the sessions.  In some instances, we were able to group papers in unconventional combinations that foregrounded interconnectedness of ideas and cultures in our field in new and subtle ways.

Professor Vijay Ayer (Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts, Harvard University) kindly accepted our invitation to deliver the Annual Meeting Keynote Address; his paper was titled “What’s Left of Music Theory?” 

In the 2024 Annual Meeting, in addition to the traditional Poster session, we introduced a new category of Public Music Theory Poster Exhibit. The intention here, besides continuity with the 2023 Plenary Session’s focus on the theme of public music theory, was to invite the local community to attend the Poster Exhibit, which featured topics of interest to high school teachers and students of the Jacksonville area.  Special thanks are due to Michael Buchler (Past President) and Amelia Abouljoud (SMT intern and conference assistant) for their tireless work in reaching out to the local schools and educators and encouraging their engagement with SMT.  A second objective for introducing this new category was to provide members with an opportunity for deeper exploration of the potentials for communication and interaction specific to the Poster genre of presentation.   

The Program Committee reviewed 339 proposals including 316 single- or joint-authored papers, eighteen integrated sessions, and five alternative format sessions.  From these proposals, 155 were accepted: eighteen were posters, ten of which doubled also in the eighteen Public Music Theory Poster Exhibit presentations.  The overall acceptance rate for the proposals was 45.7 per cent. 

Demographic Data

Since ConfTool, the system SMT currently uses to review proposals, does not automatically gather demographic information for all submissions, the demographic data presented below reflects only the accepted proposals. The data includes the individual presenters from the integrated and alternative-format sessions.  For this reason, the number of presenters (181) exceeds the number of accepted proposals (155).

Gender

• Man  111/181 (61%)
• Woman  42/181 (23%)
• Unknown  12/181 (6.6%)
• Other: 8/181 (3.9%)
• Prefer not to answer  5/181 (2.7%)
• Gender Neutral 3/181 (1.65%)

Race and Ethnicity

• White  106/181 (58.5%)
• Asian 29/181 (16%)
• Unknown  21/181 (11.6%)
• Some other race, ethnicity, or origin: 18/181 (9.9%)
• Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish 5/181 (2.7%)
• Black or African-American 1/181 (<1%)
• Middle Eastern or North African 1/181 (<1%)

Professional status

• Full Professor 17/181 (9.4%)
• Student 51/181 (21%)
• Assistant Professor 38/181 (20.9%)
• Associate Professor  35/181 (19.3%)
• Lecturer/Instructor  13/181 (7%)
• Other  13/181 (7%)
• Unknown  8/181 (4.4%)
• Independent Scholar  6/181  (3.3%)

I am deeply grateful to the members of the Program Committee for their generous contributions in time and expertise, and for their collegiality and patience in the long collaboration process that created the 2024 program.  My special thanks go to Jan Miyake and Jennifer Diaz for their admirable attention to detail, unflagging support, and gentle persuasion.

Emerging Scholar Award (Book)

This book presents a general methodology for analyzing “film tonality,” demonstrating that there is analytic and hermeneutic value in interpreting long-range key relationships as part of the arc of a film's dramatic structure. It argues that large-scale key relationships in film mirrors prominent approaches to large-scale key relationships in other genres, such as Wagnerian opera. Through the use of various analytic lenses, including neo-Riemannian theories, associative and directional tonality, as well as theories of tonal agency and intertextual tonality, the book convincingly demonstrates that these long-range key relationships, and their musical meaning, coalesce with the plots of the films in which they occur. A 2024 Emerging Scholar Book Award goes to Táhirih Motazedian for her book Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film, published by the University of California Press.

The twenty-first century has seen an explosion of new research on the topic of meter and rhythm. Theorists have uncovered new ways to think about accents, grouping, tempi, and time. But certain problems persist, even at the heart of our popular song traditions. What happens when performers establish a meter, but then begin to trouble it by adding or subtracting beats, opening up puzzling ambiguities, or simply losing the meter altogether? This book gives us new tools to appreciate the metric sophistication of artists such as Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Buffy Sainte-Marie. The book not only establishes novel frameworks for metric theory, but also masterfully links the concept of flexible meter with authenticity and self-expression. Readers will experience the innovative music of the 1960s and 1970s through a collection of singer-songwriter classics that touch on politics, voice, and lyrical design. A 2024 Emerging Scholar Book Award goes to Nancy Murphy for Times A-Changin’: Flexible Meter as Self Expression in Singer-Songwriter Music, published by Oxford University Press.

Notation is commonly understood as a technology for representing musical sounds. Yet this book argues that notation can also shape musical structure, aesthetics, and theoretical concepts. Combining music analysis and music history, the book examines compositions from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe. In this repertoire, notational signs were modified by “metasigns” that asked performers to transpose the written parts; to sing them backwards, or in augmentation or diminution; to change the mode or mensuration; or to omit or add notes systematically. Moreover, the book shows how mensural notation affected premodern music theory. Revealing how notation and sound diverge in music by Guillaume Du Fay, Josquin des Prez, and their contemporaries, the book offers insights about the creative and ontological significance of notation. A 2024 Emerging Scholar Book Award goes to Emily Zazulia for Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing, published by Oxford University Press.

Wallace Berry Award

This book simultaneously offers a meticulous analysis of structures and aesthetics in African music and a sweeping critical reflection on the place of African music within music-theoretic discourses. In a series of essays on the minimalist impulse in African musical creativity, the challenges facing composers of African art music, the colonizing force of European tonality, and other topics, the author presents a complex picture of African musicology, irreducible to a single aesthetic priority or theoretical framework. This book invites the reader to engage with close musical analyses of traditional, popular, and art music practices from across the continent, it provides an incisive historical critique of rhythm-centric African music scholarship, it provocatively argues against ethno-theoretical approaches to African musics, and demonstrates why African music need be seriously considered in music-theoretical scholarship and how it could, in fact, help shape a richer, more nuanced discipline. The result is a scholarly tour de force, both detailed and broad-reaching, rigorous and eminently readable. A 2024 Wallace Berry Award goes to Kofi Agawu for On African Music: Techniques, Influences, Scholarship, published by Oxford University Press.

This book looks beyond the limits of earthly music theory to shine new light on what it could mean to listen to and study music. Readers are given multiple paths through a creatively curated romp, shuttled through the journey of the satellite Voyager’s Golden Record to a new frontier beyond assumed musical “universals.” Connecting posthumanist and postmodern philosophy with a meticulously researched account of humankind’s contribution to musical sounds beyond our pale blue dot, this book decenters human listeners and offers joyful new perspectives on familiar sounds by asking: how would a being outside of our planet encounter music? A 2024 Wallace Berry Award goes to the Intergalactic Music Theorists of Earth *ahem* Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding for their book, Alien Listening, published by Zone Books.

Citation of Special Merit

A Citation of Special Merit is occasionally awarded for editions, translations, reference works, and other types of publications and resources of value to the discipline, and the committee is pleased to present such an award this year. This year’s recipient makes accessible a foundational treatise of Baroque counterpoint, contextualized by a thoroughly researched and clear-eyed introduction that argues convincingly for its significance. Freely available online side-by-side with the original treatise, the translation is a model of open-access scholarship. The 2024 Citation of Special Merit goes to Introduction to and Translation of F. W. Marpurg's Abhandlung von der Fuge, edited by Derek Remeš and translated by Jane Hanes, published online as part of Between Chopin and Tellefsen. European Music Treatises: Universality and National Identity by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute.

Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award

This year had a particularly strong group of candidates for the Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award, and the committee chose four winners. I present them in alphabetical order by lead editor.

The first award goes to a pioneering volume that offers a remarkably coherent vision of how a hitherto under-represented genre might be analyzed. It takes in its scope not just a range of works across a broad historical span, but reflects critically on stylistic divergence within that field. By means of careful ordering of chapters, sensitive cross referencing and, above all, a shared love and respect for the subject matter, this is a serious, compelling, and eminently readable volume. Available by Open Access, it will doubtless become a landmark text in the field for teaching and research.  The first 2024 Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award goes to Here for the Hearing: Analyzing the Music in Musical Theater, edited by Michael Buchler and Gregory Decker, published by University of Michigan Press.

The contributors to the next book to receive this award both embrace and enact diversity in the classroom. The twenty-one chapters present a broad spectrum of music spanning two centuries and three continents, providing numerous practical and flexible lessons that theory teachers can adopt and adapt throughout the curriculum. A wealth of online supplementary material greatly enhances the utility of this collection. Further, many of the essays question long-held assumptions about what today’s students should study and guide readers in that questioning process for themselves. The second 2024 Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award goes to Expanding the Canon: Black Composers in the Theory Classroom, edited by Melissa Hoag and published by Routledge.

The next award goes to a pioneering volume that offers an imaginative, critical and, at times, welcomely provocative contribution to theory and analysis. Its twelve chapters feature the work of scholars working in North America, Europe, China, and Australia, ranging from deeply personal responses to texts, temporalities, and creative artists to eloquent reframing of canonic contributions to scholarship. Although dedicated to a single broad topic, the chapters model diverse approaches, all characterized by a questioning, critical, and self-reflective drive to open new perspectives, ideas, and histories. This volume marks a milestone in the coming of age of an increasingly vital current in our field. The third 2024 Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award goes to Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory, edited by Gavin S. K. Lee, published by Oxford University Press.

The final volume to receive this award focuses on the work of a composer whose work has only recently begun to receive the analytical attention it so richly deserves. Bringing together both music-theoretical and musicological perspectives, this collection reveals the harmonic inventiveness, rhythmic nuance, and linguistic sensitivity of her poetic settings, placing them in the context of the music, thought, and gendered realities of her time. We are pleased to award the fourth 2024 Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award to The Songs of Fanny Hensel, edited by Stephen Rodgers and published by Oxford University Press.

2024 Theory Pedagogy and Public-Facing Scholarship Awards

The SMT Music Theory Pedagogy and Public-Facing Scholarship Awards Committee—David Thurmaier (chair), Aaron Grant, Paula Maust, and Ash Stemke—presented four awards at the 2024 SMT Annual Meeting.

The Music Theory Pedagogy Awards, presented alphabetically by the author’s last name, were given to:

1. Patricia Burt and Philip Duker for their article “Student-Driven Music Theory: How the Question Formulation Technique Can Promote Agency, Engagement, and Curiosity,” published in Volume 22 of the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy. This piece outlines effective methods for teaching students to craft meaningful analytical questions that enhance critical thinking. Their approach, centered around the “Question-Formulation” technique, fosters active engagement and is adaptable to various musical examples. The committee found their work highly applicable and useful for sparking valuable classroom discussions.
2. Joseph Straus for his book, The Art of Post-Tonal Analysis, published by Oxford University Press. Professor Straus, a longstanding contributor to music theory pedagogy, presents succinct, insightful analyses of a diverse range of post-tonal works—many receiving such attention for the first time. The companion website, featuring video analyses synchronized with musical examples, enhances learning by providing visual and auditory context. This resource benefits both students and instructors as a model for post-tonal analysis. 

The Public-Facing Scholarship Awards, also presented alphabetically by the author’s last name, were given to:

1. Galen DeGraf for his YouTube video publication, “System and Symmetry: How to Compose like Arvo Pärt, Tintinnabuli Style,” which has amassed over 57,000 views. This engaging video demystifies Pärt’s often-enigmatic style with clear, step-by-step instructions and practical applications for theorists, performers, composers, and fans. Visually appealing and informative, it’s essential viewing for anyone interested in Pärt’s music.
2. Frank Lehman for his New York Times article, “How to Write Music for Rolling Boulders.” This piece, enriched by video and audio, draws on examples from John Williams’s music for the Indiana Jones films, revealing how the most intricate and compelling film music is often overshadowed by sound effects. Entertaining and insightful, Lehman’s analysis invites readers to revisit the films with a new appreciation for the music.

Updates to Editorial Teams

In 2025, SMT welcomes new members to three of its editorial teams:

• The editor of Music Theory Spectrum is now Laura Emmery, and the associate editors are Michael Callahan, Benjamin Levy, Victoria Malawey, and Jeffrey Swinkin.  Most of this team has already been in place for over a year, but the first issue to be published under their leadership will appear in 2025.
• The incoming editor of SMT-V is J. Daniel Jenkins, and the incoming associate editor is Táhirih Motazedian. The first issues under their leadership will appear in 2026.
• The new associate editor of the SMT Newsletter is Alexander Martin; Sarah Marlowe continues as the editor of the Newsletter.

Other news:

• SMT-Pod has expanded their Editorial Board and now has an expanded peer-review process; see the SMT-Pod web page for details.
• As has been the case for recent issues, Music Theory Spectrum is now distributed electronically; however, hard copies for upcoming issues continue to be available for an extra fee.

The Autographs and Archival Documents Interest Group (AADIG) held its annual meeting on Friday, November 8, during the 2024 SMT Annual Meeting in Jacksonville, Florida. The session began with a short business meeting, where we announced that Jamuna Samuel was elected the new co-chair of the AADIG and thanked outgoing co-chair Philip Stoecker for his leadership over the last three years. The meeting featured two lightning talks and a presentation by two librarians from Jacksonville. Zachary Bernstein (Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester) discussed “Pre-Compositional Rhythmic Structure and Dialectical Critique in Helmut Lachenmann’s Serynade” and Nathan Cobb (Shenandoah University) illuminated “L'étrangeté du son: Deconstructed Voices in Gérard Grisey’s Student Works.” In their presentation, Allison Crawford (Access Services Librarian at Jacksonville University) and Amy Feinstein (Librarian in the Special Collections Department at Jacksonville Public Library) shed light on the archival materials on Frederick Delius held in two collections in Jacksonville and on his connection to the city.

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 AADIG Facebook and AADIG Knowledge Commons pages, as well as our AADIG webpage with SMT, where you can sign up for our email list. 

At 2024 Annual Meeting of the SMT in Jacksonville, FL, the Composition Interest Group (Clifton Callender and David Temperley, co-chairs) presented the first ever concert of works by SMT composers performed by SMT musicians. The concert featured works composed by Richard Drehoff, Jr., Stephen Guerra, J. Daniel Jenkins, Jane Kozhevnikova, Victoria Malawey, Scott Murphy, and Dmitri Tymoczko, performed by Cynthia Folio (flute), Evan Jones (cello), Nathan Lam (clarinet), Paul Miller (violin), and Robert Wells (piano). The concert was attended by approximately 175 people. The CIG is very grateful to the Local Arrangements Committee for providing music stands, to the SMT Subvention Committee for financing the grand piano rental, to the Eastman School of Music's Theory Department for subsidizing printing of the program, and (especially) to Jennifer Diaz for her help and support with many aspects of the concert.

During our 2024 business meeting at the Jacksonville Annual Meeting of the SMT, the Dance and Movement Interest Group (DMIG) hosted a Baroque dance workshop run by Catherine Turocy (President and Artistic Director of the New York Baroque Dance Company) which was attended by approximately forty people and received wide praise. The attendees learned how to dance the minuet and sarabande, then engaged in Q&A and discussion about the benefits of embodied dance knowledge for understanding and teaching Baroque dance suites. Prior to the annual meeting, we elected Stefanie Bilidas as co-chair. In addition, this past June, we held an online meeting where we shared works in progress informally and built connections between dance and movement scholars. 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 and its events and resources, please visit our DMIG Knowledge Commons page and DMIG website, or email co-chairs Stefanie Bilidas and Rachel Gain at danceandmovement@societymusictheory.org.

The Film and Multimedia Interest Group met at the SMT Annual Meeting in Jacksonville to enjoy a session of lightning talks that considered the last ten years and the next ten years of musical multimedia, including presentations by Laine Gruver, Adam Rizzo, Austin Wilson, and Clair Nguyen. The session also included two invited presentations by the group's founders, Juan Chattah and Frank Lehman. Thank you to all of our wonderful presenters for their excellent scholarship and to all of those in attendance for making it such a wonderful evening!

We also announced our new co-chairs: Clair Nguyen and Chelsea Oden. Many thanks to them for being willing to take on this service. We are very excited about the future of our group with them in charge!

For more information about our group, please see our Film and Multimedia Interest Group page on Knowledge Commons. We encourage your active involvement, and we look forward to seeing you at our next event!

At this year’s SMT Annual Meeting at Jacksonville, the Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries Interest Group worked together with the Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group. A call was sent out for talks on modernist, experimental, and avant-garde musics that reflect intercultural influences beyond the Western canon. Three papers were presented:

Stephen Slottow, "Frontier Zen: Transformations of Japanese-Derived Zen Chanting in American Zen Groups"; Chenyu Xiao, "'Sheng But Not Quite': Manifestations of Hybridity in Unsuk Chin’s Šu for Sheng Concerto (2009)”; and Juan Patricio Saenz, "America Mágica: Identity, Migration, and Pan-Americanism in Ginastera’s Late Style" with responses from Dr. Yayoi Uno Everett and Dr. Chelsea Burns. 

The Improvisation Interest Group met jointly with the Music Theory Pedagogy Interest Group at the Annual Meeting of SMT in Jacksonville, FL, on Friday, November 8, at 12:30 p.m. The meeting featured seven ten-minute presentations on the theme of “Improvisation and/as Pedagogy." The presentations (by Stefanie Bilidas, Philip Duker, Collin Felter, Ryan Galik, Ben Geyer, Nancy Rogers, and Charles Weaver and Dani Zanuttini-Frank) spanned a wide range of repertoires and approaches and many included active participation from the audience of roughly 55 attendees. Following these presentations, each group held a brief business meeting.

Elections for a new vice-chair are being held online as our outgoing chair, Sean Smither (The Juilliard School, Mannes School of Music), rotates out, and Andrew Malilay White (The University of Texas at Austin) rotates from vice-chair to chair. Our next meeting will be at the 2025 Joint SMT and AMS Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, MN, with agenda details to be discussed in the new year. As always, we welcome news of any activities that might be of interest to our community, including theorization about or analysis of improvisation, improvisationally-oriented pedagogical models, and engagement with repertoires that prominently feature improvisation. For more on our group, visit our Improvisation Interest Group Website or the Improvisation Interest Group page on the SMT website, or reach out to our incoming chair, Andrew Malilay White, andrew.white@austin.utexas.edu.  

The SMT Jazz Interest Group held its thirtieth annual meeting at the 2024 SMT Annual Meeting in Jacksonville, FL. The meeting featured a productive roundtable discussion of Brian Kane’s (Yale University) recent book, Hearing Double: Jazz, Ontology, Auditory Culture (OUP 2024), which theorizes the ontology and aesthetics of jazz standards.

We also awarded Rich Pellegrin the 2024 Award for Excellence in Jazz Scholarship for his 2022 article, “Harmony versus Voicing: Modeling Local-Level Salience and Stability in Jazz after 1960,” published (in English) in Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 19 (1): 67–102. In his article, Pellegrin examines how stable underlying harmonies are realized as salient voicings in contemporary jazz practice, shedding light on a prevalent but underexamined improvisational concept. Pellegrin builds extensively on existing jazz research, putting neo-Riemannian approaches to voice-leading into dialogue with hierarchical theories of pitch structure, grouping, and meter to analyze the influential harmonic approach of pianist Robert Glasper. He also draws on his own experience as a pianist to highlight the creative potential of his approach. Congratulations, Rich! And many thanks to the award committee: Sean Smither (chair), Varun Chandrasekhar, and Dustin Chau.

In online elections held after the meeting, the group elected Sean Smither (Juilliard) to serve a three-year term as our new chair. Congratulations, Sean! We also voted to shift our leadership model to allow for one year of overlap between successive chairs; Ben Baker will remain as past-chair for a transitional year in 2025.

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 the Jazz Interest Group Knowledge Commons page. Our group page is private to maintain a space for respectful and productive discourse, but one of our chairs 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 Ben Baker (Eastman School of Music) or Sean Smither (Juilliard) with other questions about the group.

The SMT Mathematics of Music Interest Group held its annual meeting on Friday, November 8th, 2024, 12:30–2:00 p.m. EST during the Annual Meeting of SMT in Jacksonville, FL. After a short business meeting to open nominations for the two available co-chair positions, the following talks were featured: "Metrics on Chord Spaces Modulo Cardinality" by James R. Hughes (Elizabethtown College); "DOUTH2" by Nathan John Martin (University of Michigan); "N-Dimensional Ski-hill Graphs" by Kája Lill (University of St. Thomas-Houston); and "Families of set classes arising from a cellular automaton in mod-12 and other modular spaces" by Evan Jones (Florida State University). Thank you to all four speakers for their valuable contributions.

The Math IG also organized a table during the Interest Group Fair with a review of past and current offerings from our annual meetings.  Thank you to all the individuals who stopped by our table during the fair.

All interested individuals are invited to join the Mathematics of Music Interest Group. To join our listserv, please visit SMT Math Google group.  For more information about the Math IG, please contact outgoing chair Mike Hall (mh2468@aol.com) who will put you in contact with our new leadership.

SMT Music and Philosophy Interest Group Recap & Preview

The SMT Music and Philosophy Interest Group looks back on stimulating presentations and discussion in Jacksonville, welcomes its incoming co-chairs, and looks forward to seeing you at more remote meetings in the coming year! Follow our socials to stay in touch, or reach out directly to either the outgoing or incoming officers. The links are below; all are welcome and encouraged to think about music theory philosophically with us.

Meeting at Jacksonville

At the Annual Meeting of SMT in Jacksonville, the SMT Music and Philosophy IG hosted a panel of papers followed by a discussion on the question: "What does it mean to theorize the world beyond music in ways that remain distinctly music theoretical?" Dmitri Tymoczko, Derek J. Myler, and Lara Balikci presented papers that explored, respectively, a generalized theory of symmetries throughout human experience, transformational paths through the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, and how concepts of cosmic harmony are visualized in the surrealist paintings of Remedios Varo. The stimulating discussion that followed reflected, among other things, on the curiously atemporal nature of music theory's recent transformational methodologies, questions of perspectivism in space vs. time, and (as is prone to happen with any math-adjacent matter) the viability of Platonism.

Transition of Co-Chairs

After a two-year term, a period of nominations, and elections (thanks to all who participated), the outgoing co-chairs, Florian Walch and Audrey J. Slote (both University of Chicago), are happy to welcome our incoming co-chairs, Varun Chandrasekhar (Washington University in St. Louis) and Grant Sawatzky (University of British Columbia). The transfer will happen during the summer. Meanwhile, we'll work to create a smooth transition and continue our project of creating a space for deep and open reflection on music theory's fundamental assumptions, purposes, and philosophical resonances. Please reach out to get involved!

Upcoming Events & How to Get / Stay in Touch

After hosting a meeting to draft and vote on bylaws, and a book talk with Michael Gallope on Zoom in 2024, the SMT Music and Philosophy Interest Group looks forward to hosting more remote events in 2025. If you would like to discuss recent publications on music theory and philosophy (broadly understood) or would like to present your own work in progress, please get in touch! You can find us on the Music and Philosophy Interest Group Page on the SMT Website, the SMT Music and Philosophy Interest Group Facebook page, and the SMT Music and Philosophy Interest Group page on Knowledge Commons, or reach out directly to the co-chairs, whose emails are listed on the SMT Website.

For the SMT’s Interest Group on Music and Psychoanalysis’s 2024 meeting, we discussed two recent texts on psychoanalytic themes from outside of music studies by Anna Kornbluh and Alenka Zupančič. We began by discussing the introduction and second chapter (entitled “Imaginary”) from Kornbluh’s Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), the former of which discussed the author’s project of diagnosing a trend in contemporary artworks to embrace a style that disavows its own aesthetic and social mediation, and the latter of which developed psychoanalytic concepts borrowed from Jacques Lacan by drawing on the image economy of contemporary culture. In discussing these chapters, we addressed what types of music might fit under Kornbluh’s description of cultivating an “immediate style,” the relationship between style and musical labor, and Kornbluh’s relationship to theorists in the Western Marxist tradition, including Theodor W. Adorno’s discussion of Stravinsky’s imagistic “spatial” conception of time in Philosophy of New Music, and the parallels between Immediacy and Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernity. Participants addressed to what extent some of the broad changes addressed in the book could really be claimed to be unique to recent artwork, and wondered whether Kornbluh’s description of Immediacy should be understood as a normative critique and to what extent this is warranted and might be construed as a moral panic. Following this, we turned to the introduction of Zupančič’s Disavowal, a text that examines the prevalence of the titular psychic mechanism in contemporary political life by arguing that the closure of political horizons is accompanied by the necessity to acknowledge perpetual crisis while simultaneously defanging its urgency. Following a discussion of the potential musical implications of Zupančič’s suggestion that the form of contemporary crisis is essentially serial, we then proceeded to question the extent to which disavowal might be operative in our own methods of musical analysis by reference to a panel from earlier in the day on the relationship between racism and tonality. In other words, by ignoring the historicity of music-theoretical concepts, are we not complicit in disavowing the problematic history of the field? Or is there a sense in which the utility of some of these analytic methods might extend beyond their historical origins?

The Music Cognition Interest Group meet this at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the SMT on Friday, November 8. The interest group hosted four excellent talks covering empirical topics, “Majorness and Minorness and Analysis from Multiple Perspectives” by Michael Schutz & Jonathan De Souza;  “Some Crunches and Harmonic Hunches: An Evaluation of Perceptual Prioritization of Timbre” by Richard Drehoff & Jenine Brown; “Learning and Memory for Conventional vs. Characteristic Patterns” by Aditya Chander; and “Expectations of Texture in Popular Music” by Emily Schwitzgebel.

Additionally, the Interest Group elected two new co-chairs, Aditya Chander and Emily Schwitzgebel. 

The Music Theory Pedagogy Interest Group met jointly with the Improvisation Interest Group at the Annual Meeting of SMT in Jacksonville, FL, on Friday, November 8, at 12:30 p.m. The meeting featured seven ten-minute presentations on the theme of “Improvisation and/as Pedagogy." The presentations by Stefanie Bilidas, Philip Duker, Collin Felter, Ryan Galik, Ben Geyer, Nancy Rogers, and Charles Weaver and Dani Zanuttini-Frank spanned a wide range of repertoires and approaches, and many included active participation from the audience of roughly 55 attendees. Following these presentations, each group held a brief business meeting.

Our next meeting will be at the 2025 Joint SMT and AMS Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, MN. Anyone with suggestions for this meeting should contact timothy.chenette@usu.edu. For more information on our group or to sign up for our email list, please visit the Music Theory Pedagogy Interest Group Page on the SMT website.

The 2024 Jacksonville meeting of the Performance and Analysis Interest Group (PAIG) featured a workshop led by pianist, theorist, composer, and multidisciplinary artist Jocelyn Ho (Research Fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium), joined by special guest soprano Anna Fraser. Ho and Fraser introduced a collaborative, kinesthetic approach to analyzing early recordings, taking the recent trend of “emulation” (where historically informed performers imitate early recordings to assimilate old styles of playing) as a starting point to enquire about the kinesthesia of early recording performances. Ho and Fraser introduced a multi-stage methodology that begins from a performer’s perspective, demonstrating its application through recordings by two influential performers of their time: Yolanda Mero (1887–1963), concert pianist and impresario, and Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922), castrato and First Soprano of the Sistine Chapel Choir. Ho and Fraser’s presentation spurred engaging discussions that continued well beyond the session itself. 

Also at the meeting, forthcoming updates to the PAIG bylaws were announced, with the primary goals of expanding and specifying the mission of PAIG, specifying the process and revising the timeline for co-chair nominations, clarifying language around leadership eligibility, and updating the process through which amendments can be proposed and voted on.  

On the horizon, PAIG members will elect an interim co-chair to a one-year term that will begin at the virtual spring meeting. The nominating period will last for one month beginning in early March, with the election opening within a week after nominations are submitted (specific dates forthcoming via our listserv). Later in the spring, PAIG will hold its virtual spring session of lightning talks to supplement our in-person SMT meeting (CFP forthcoming). Anyone may request to join the PAIG listserv by emailing smt-paig@gmail.com or by writing to one of our co-chairs, Daniel Ketter (danielmketter@gmail.com) and Christa Cole (ccole@oberlin.edu). The PAIG Blog continues to host a wide array of resources for those interested in performance studies: a bibliography, discography, directory, pedagogy resource, and many fascinating blog essays.

This year the Popular Music Interest Group's Outstanding Publication Award winner is Lori Burns for her article “Female Subjectivities in the Words, Music, and Images of Progressive Metal: The Case of Tatiana Shmayluk (Jinjer),” published in Music Theory Online in 2023. In this article, Burns combines thorough analysis of text, timbre, and imagery to provide an in-depth look at three music videos by Jinjer. In doing so, Burns shows how Tatiana Shmayluk (the lead singer of the Ukranian band Jinjer) challenges gendered norms in heavy metal and creates space for other, namely feminine, perspectives.

This year’s Adam Krims award goes to Eron Smith for their video article “Flat 2 as Hotness in Post-Millennial Pop,” published on SMT-V in 2022. In this video, Smith explains how flat 2 is used in post-2000s pop to express hotness, defined as “confidence, sexuality, or both.” Drawing on their analysis of over seventy-five songs, and during an easily digestible eleven-minute video, Smith walks listeners through the unique sound and meaning of the “Hot Flat 2” and investigates its connections to musical eroticism.

The committee included Emily Milius (Peabody Institute), Olivia Lucas (Louisiana State University, last year’s winner), and Madison Stepherson (University of Oregon).

Congratulations Lori Burns and Eron Smith!

The Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group had about 20 members in attendance at our meeting at the Annual Meeting of SMT 2024 in Jacksonville, FL. For the scholarly portion of our joint interest group meeting with the Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries Interest Group, we hosted a session chaired by Gui Hwan Lee. The session had three 15-minute presentations by Stephen Slottow (University of North Texas), Chenyu Xiao (University of Leeds), and Juan Patricio Saenz (Harvard University). Afterwards, Yayoi Uno Everett (CUNY Hunter College) and Chelsea Burns (University of Texas at Austin) gave 10-minute responses to each presentation. During the business portion of our interest group meeting, we announced the 2024 winner of the Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group Publication Award: Antares Boyle’s “Gestural Temporality in Sciarrino's Recitativo oscuro” published in Music Theory Online Volume 29, Number 4 (2023). We also announced that Noah Kahrs is stepping down from the webmaster position, and at time of writing the election is in progress. Next year, we hope to collaborate with another interest group at the conference, and to nominate a new pair of co-chairs.

The Russian and Soviet Music Interest Group held its meeting at the SMT Annual Meeting in Jacksonville, Florida, on November 8, 2024. This year, the session presented four lightning talks in a variety of formats, including guided listenings and group discussion. 

The talks were: (1) "On Edison Denisov's First Symphony" by Anne Delfín; (2) "Vignettes for Structural Hearing in Three Preludes by Dmitri Shostakovich" by Trevor Hofelich; (3) "On Varvara Dernova's analytical system" by Lance Russell; and (4) "Collection-Chord Interactions in Rimsky-Korsakov's Kashchey The Immortal" by Jeff Yunek. 

Thank you to all of the presenters and to everyone who attended the meeting. We look forward to seeing everyone at the group meeting next year at the SMT Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

The 2024 Annual Meeting marked the 20th anniversary of the Scholars for Social Responsibility (SSRIG). For the occasion, SSRIG hosted a panel with many of the previous organizers and chairs of the group: Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, Deborah Burton, Anton Vishio, Robin Attas, Abigail Shupe, Miriam Piilonen, Sara Bowden, and Stephen Lett. Each of the panelists recounted what brought them to create or get involved with SSRIG, and shared a memory of their work with the group. Among the many stories, we heard about how the group first emerged as a response to the US-led invasion of Iraq and the group’s reemergence at the 2015 St. Louis meeting in response to the Black Lives Matter uprisings following the police murder of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, MO. To conclude, we talked about the role of SSRIG in the coming years, especially in light of the continued resurgence of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, xenophobia, and transphobia both within university administrations and national governments. With the panelists’ permission, I recorded the meeting and am working on compiling a transcript of the historical portion of the event as part of an ongoing project to document SSRIG history. 

SSRIG also co-sponsored a panel at the SMT Annual Meeting with the LGBTQ+ Issues Standing Committee and Project Spectrum called “Creating Spaces that Connect Community: A Workshop and Discussion.” Please see the LGBTQ+ Issues Standing Committee update for more information on that event.

Next, I wish to invite you to join our study group. We meet once a month to discuss short readings on various topics of interest to the group. Currently we’re a group of five, and topics we’ve explored include the ongoing genocide in Palestine, thinking about various forms of violence (and their flattening in liberal discourse), creating resilient organizing spaces, the history of divestment campaigns, and border abolition. Along the way we’ve had lovely conversations that have pushed us each to take action in our various contexts.

One of our actions has been to initiate a conversation with the SMT around its investments policy with the aim of having the SMT divest from its holdings in companies that profit from ongoing warfare, expanding prison populations, and making the climate unlivable. Rather than supporting companies (and an economy) based on the immiseration of the world, we look forward to exploring alternative approaches with the SMT that invest in human flourishing. 

If working on such projects and being in conversation about the above literature sounds like something you’d like to join, please send me an email (s.e.lett@gmail.com) with a sentence or two (or more) letting me know what topics of study and kinds of actions you’re interested in pursuing with the group.

The Music Theory Society of New York State (MTSNYS) will hold its 53rd annual meeting at Fordham University (Lincoln Center Campus in NYC) on April 5–6, 2025, with Sevin Yaraman in charge of local arrangements. Clifton Boyd (New York University) will give the meeting’s keynote address, and Kristi Hardman (University of North Carolina, Charlotte) will lead the MTSNYS workshop. The Program Committee is Gilad Rabinovitch (Queens College, CUNY), chair; Yayoi Uno Everett (Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY); Sean Smither (The Juilliard School and Mannes School of Music, The New School); Stephanie Venturino (Yale School of Music); and Philip Stoecker (Hofstra University), ex officio. The deadline for proposals has passed, and the Program Committee will announce the conference program soon. Conference updates will be available on the MTSNYS website in January 2025.

Theory and Practice is now in an open-access format, with articles published online and freely accessible on the Theory and Practice website as well as a print version provided to MTSNYS member subscribers. This change began with volumes 47/48 and will remain in effect for all subsequent volumes. The double issue, volumes 47/48 (2022–2023), of Theory and Practice was published in spring 2024. Work continues on volume 49 (2024) with early 2025 as the expected publication date. Submissions to Theory and Practice are accepted on a rolling basis, and the editors especially encourage shorter submissions within the range of 1,500 to 3,500 words (which corresponds roughly to the length of a spoken conference presentation). Please visit the Theory and Practice submissions page to review the guidelines and information for submitting manuscripts, or simply contact the editors at theoryandpractice@mtsnys.org. 

I am thrilled to announce that the MTSNYS webpage (mtsnys.org) has been updated and has a fresh, new look. Brian Moseley (University at Buffalo, SUNY) has done a splendid job, and I encourage you to thank him for his ongoing efforts to improve the MTSNYS website. Past MTSNYS programs are more accessible now, and members no longer need to use the membership dashboard.

Graduate Student Conference Grants help graduate students defray the costs of attending annual MTSNYS conferences. Up to eight grants are awarded yearly, to be used to reimburse travel, lodging, and meal expenses. Each grant is for a maximum of $200 and also includes a waiver of the conference registration fee. Any student currently enrolled in a graduate program is eligible to apply. Applicants need not be members of MTSNYS. Awardees will be selected by lottery; students awarded a grant will be ineligible to receive one the following year. All decisions made by MTSNYS regarding conference grants are final. To apply for a 2025 conference grant, send an email with your name, mailing address, email, phone, name of institution and degree program, and proof of enrollment (scan of student ID or other documentation) to: Anna Stephan-Robinson, MTSNYS Treasurer (anna.stephanrobinson@westliberty.edu); Deadline: Friday, March 7, 2025.

The spring 2025 elections will include candidacies for President (two-year term), Secretary (four-year term), and two Members-at-Large (two-year term); those elected will begin their roles after the spring 2025 MTSNYS meeting. Self-nominations are welcome and encouraged. The deadline to receive nominations is January 15, 2025. 

The current MTSNYS officers are Philip Stoecker (Hofstra University), President; Loretta Terrigno (Eastman School of Music), Vice President; Sarah Marlowe (Eastman School of Music), Secretary; Anna Stephan-Robinson (West Liberty University), Treasurer. Board Members at-Large are Ruka Shironishi (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Lukas Perry (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Nathan Lam (Eastman School of Music), and Stephanie Venturino (Yale University). 

The Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic will hold their 2025 annual conference on February 21–22 at Gettysburg College (Gettysburg, PA). Gretchen Horlacher (University of Maryland) will deliver the keynote address and will conduct a professional development workshop open to all attendees. I am grateful to Bill O’Hara for coordinating local arrangements and Anna Stephan-Robinson 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 four new executive committee members: a vice president, two members-at-large, and a student representative. New committee members will be announced at the 2025 meeting. The deadline for nominations has passed.

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 Joseph Siu (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
• Members-at-Large
  • Kim Loeffert (Virginia Tech)
  • Paula Maust (Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University) 
  • Judith Ofcarcik (James Madison University)
  • John Peterson (James Madison University) 
  • Dan Zimmerman (University of Maryland)
• Student Representative Richard Drehoff Jr. (Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University)

Music Theory Southeast (MTSE) will hold its annual meeting on March 7–8, 2025 at Furman University (Greenville, SC). The conference will include scholarly presentations, a concert by Society members, and a graduate student workshop led by Jane Piper Clendinning (Florida State University) on the topic of opening music theory to world and traditional musics. Michael Buchler (Florida State University) will deliver a keynote address “(Non) Semper Idem: Some Challenges to ‘All er Nuthin’’ Approaches to Methodology, Hierarchy, Register, and Cadence.” The program committee, chaired by William Ayers (University of Central Florida), includes David Geary (Wake Forest University), Shannon Groskreutz (Stetson University), J. Daniel Jenkins (University of South Carolina, ex officio), and Audrey Slote, 2024 Irna Priore Prize for Student Research Winner (University of Chicago). Local arrangements will be coordinated by Megan Lyons (Furman University).

Greetings, colleagues! The 2025 meeting of the Northeast Conference of Music Theorists will take place at Williams College on April 4–5, 2025. The program committee for this upcoming event consists of Brent Auerbach, Liam Hynes-Tawa, Giulia Accornero, and me (ex officio). Past our January deadline, we have begun putting together our program for April.  Many thanks to the committee members, as well as our Secretary Miriam Piilonen, Treasurer Sarah Iker, and web guru Geoff Edwards for their excellent work!

Please continue to monitor our website NECMT.com for our program, local arrangements, and further information.

Dear Colleagues,
 

The Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory (RMSMT) is pleased to announce our 2025 Annual Meeting, which will take place Friday and Saturday, March 21 and 22, at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. This will be a joint meeting with the Rocky Mountain chapter of the American Musicological Society.  For more information, please consult the RMSMT website.

The Annual Meeting of the South Central Society for Music Theory (SCSMT) will be from March 14–15, 2025, in New Orleans, Louisiana on the campus of Loyola University.

In addition to paper presentations and lightning talks, the conference will feature two workshops: “Rhythm (Sometimes) without Meter” led by Dr. Mitch Ohriner, and “Timbre in Aural Skills” led by Dr. Timothy Chenette. There will also be an open discussion on the use of artificial intelligence in music theory research and pedagogy. Although the deadlines for proposal submission and workshop registration have passed, participation in the AI discussion remains open to all registered attendees. You will receive a link that allows you to contribute to a Google Doc that will be used to guide the discussion after you register for the conference.

On the 2025 SCSMT conference webpage, you can browse the program, local arrangement information, and register for the conference. This year, we are pleased to offer a roommate/rideshare partner locator service. Just fill out the form that is linked to the conference webpage, and someone will reach out with more information.

For questions about the 2025 conference program, please email the Program Committee Chair, Stefanie Dickinson (sdickins@uca.edu). For questions about the South Central Society for Music Theory, please email us at scsmt@yahoo.com.

We look forward to seeing you in New Orleans!

The Texas Society for Music Theory (TSMT) will hold its 47th annual meeting on February 28–March 1, 2025, on the campus of Baylor University, with Amy Fleming serving as local arrangements coordinator. Jennifer Snodgrass, Professor of Music Theory and Director of the School of Music at Lipscomb University, will deliver the keynote address. Rachel Mann, Cynthia Gonzales, and Amy Hatch will lead a plenary pedagogy keynote on Latin American music in the music theory classroom. The conference will be held in person and streamed online for free. The Society encourages instructors to stream sessions on Friday, February 28 for their music theory classes.

The CFP attracted a large pool of attractive submissions this year. We are excited to have a robust Poster Session and dedicated Undergraduate Lightning Talks. In addition to eighteen traditional paper presentations, ten scholars will feature their research as posters. The Society will present an award for Best Student Paper and Best Research Poster Presentation. The Undergraduate Lightning Talk session will feature four outstanding students presenting ten-minute talks in a round-table discussion format; at the end of the presentations, audience members will be able to engage with the presenters to help develop their work further. This is the undergraduate program's second year and serves as a vital platform for fostering emerging scholars and broadening access to music theory research.

A big thank you is extended to the program committee for their excellent service reading proposals and providing comments! The program committee consists of Ann Fronckowiak (Texas A&M University, Kingsville), Devin Guerrero (Texas Tech University, winner of 2024 Colvin Award), Amy Hatch (University of Texas at Arlington), David Heetderks (University of North Texas), and Lucy Liu (Texas Tech University). The official program will be uploaded to the TSMT website soon.

Current TSMT officers are Jennifer Beavers (University of Texas at San Antonio), President; David Forrest (Texas Tech University), Immediate Past President; Kevin Clifton (Sam Houston State University), Secretary; Andrew Davis (University of Houston), Treasurer; Members-at-Large: Damian Blättler (Rice University), Justin Lavacek (University of North Texas), Rachel Mann (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), and Andrew Vagts (Baylor University).

For questions or additional information about TSMT, please contact Jennifer Beavers (Jennifer.beavers@utsa.edu) and/or consult the TSMT website.

We recently learned of the passing of composer and music theorist, Stephen John Heinemann (1952–2025). His obituary is available online for those who would like to read about his life and career.