The Jacobs School of Music’s Graduate Theory Association and Graduate Musicology Association will host the 32nd Annual Symposium of Research in Music on Feb. 6 and Feb. 7 in various rooms around the Simon Music Building. All the symposium events are free, and attendees of any education level at IU are encouraged to attend.
Beginning around noon Feb. 6 and ending around 5 p.m. Feb. 7, the symposium is two full days of workshops and presentations from keynote speaker Susan McClary of Case Western Reserve University, newly appointed IU faculty members and graduate students from across the country.
Originally a biennial event run solely by the Graduate Music Association, the symposium’s first installment was in 1980. In 2021, the symposium became a collaborative event shared between the associations.
The symposium will begin with a presentation from Matthew Blackmar, an IU assistant professor of music, called “Attribution Engines: Twilight of Forensic Musicology?”
After Blackmar discusses how musicology will change if artificial intelligence dominates the music licensing world, Graduate Theory Association President Drake Eshleman will begin the first session. The first session will bring in graduate students from Florida State University to discuss the soundtrack to the video game “Risk of Rain 2,”and University of Oklahoma students to discuss the study of counting systems within music.
McClary will then begin her workshop titled “Analysis for Historians/Historiography for Theorists.” McClary’s studies mainly focus on gender and musical culture, and she has published several books that integrate feminist theory with musical criticism, including her 1991 book “Feminine Endings.”
Eshleman credits McClary with helping to define a movement called “New Musicology,” which applies more consideration to sociological and psychological issues in the field. Her book is a crucial part of the “New Musicology” movement, Eshleman said.
“If you’re a musicologist or even a music theorist, if you’re interested in graduate music research, you often wind up reading ‘Feminine Endings’ at some point,” Eshleman said. “It’s just that important of a book.”
McClary’s workshop is not on her feminist musicology research specifically but instead expands on historiography for music theorists.
Ending the first day of presentations and workshops, Calder Hannan, an assistant professor of music theory at IU, will present “Nü Complexity: Systems, Labyrinths, and Walls in Recent Metal.”
Hannan has been interested in metal music since he started playing guitar in middle school, continuing to play and later beginning to research the genre from an academic perspective. The presentation gathers material from his other research on the experimental fringes of metal music and organizes it into a 40-minute presentation on the often unintentional complexity of metal music.
Hannan said he thought music theorists could learn about metal artists from an academic standpoint. He said it is interesting how many of the artists are creating complex music without notation and with different mindsets than twentieth century classical composers usually studied.
Early in the morning Feb. 7, the second session will begin with graduate student Albert Wheeler from Florida State University discussing how the musical “The Bridges of Madison County” (2013) weaves together genres like pop and classical to capture both American and Italian cliches.
Later in the day, Bess Xintong Liu, an assistant professor of music at IU, will hold a workshop titled “Uncovering ‘Skeletons in the Closet’? Rethinking Family and Family Archives in Music History.”
Liu’s workshop will focus on the methodology she’s developed while working with a family archive of Asian Americans in the 20th century. The workshop will share how to navigate the past family archive and what kind of historical narratives attendees may want generated based on their own privately held archives.
“I’ll be sharing some of the surprise and/or struggle or difficulty,” Liu said. “And, also, how do we navigate the past in family archive or privately held archive?”
After Liu’s workshop there will be seven more presentations and workshops to end the event, including another by McClary titled “In Defense of ‘The Music Itself.’” The symposium will end around 5 p.m. Feb. 7 with closing remarks from the Graduate Theory Association and Graduate Musicology Association leadership.
Eshleman encourages all interested to attend a lecture or workshop. Prospective attendees can visit the symposium’s blog post for information about registration, parking and more.
“I think that there’s really valuable potential for graduate student conferences like this to be a very on the ground way of reaching a broader audience,” Eshleman said.
