Event Description

The Analysis of World Music Interest Group and Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries Interest group will co-host a symposium at SMT 2020 in Minneapolis entitled “Counterframing Music Theory: Minorities and Marginalities.” Building on the momentum of the powerful papers on race and ethnicity by Yayoi Uno Everett and Philip Ewell in the SMT 2019 Plenary Session, this symposium seeks to envoice myriad scholars in various career stages who were represented by the papers in that plenary, but who themselves were not heard. “Counterframing Music Theory” will enrich and amplify the message of the 2019 Plenary by giving space to music theories and theorists of minoritized cultures, illuminating musical and social paradigms that are otherwise obfuscated, overshadowed, or oppressed by what Ewell has called music theory’s “white racial frame” and, following Everett, by “counterframing” how music theory is currently practiced and represented. Everett and Ewell will serve as respondents to the papers presented at this session.

We are soliciting papers of fifteen minutes in length (with five additional minutes for questions) which perform one or more of the following tasks:

• Explore the intersection between musical and cultural theories of minoritized cultures
• Engage colonial and post-colonial, global, and/or critical race theory
• Examine strategies for expanding the range of musics attended to in North American music theory
• Examine the problematics arising as music institutions abroad–which are often centers of expertise in world musics–model their curricula on North American music education and music theory
• Illuminate the experiences of individual minority theorists within our discipline

Proposals are due on July 15, 2020 and should consist of an abstract of no more than 200 words, as well as the presenter’s name, affiliation, and technology needs. Abstracts should be sent as word documents and should not contain self-identifying information. Please send proposals and/or questions relating to this symposium to Anna Yu Wang (anna_wang@g.harvard.edu) with the subject heading “Counterframing Music Theory Proposal.”