The Online Program of events for the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Music, Silence, and Social Action in an Age of Perpetual Crisis
Time:
Saturday, 08/Nov/2025:
9:00am - 10:30am
Location: Boundary Waters Ballroom C-D
Session Topics:
Philosophy / Critical Theory, Race / Ethnicity / Social Justice, AMS
Presentations
Music, Silence, and Social Action in an Age of Perpetual Crisis
Chair(s): Jenny Olivia Johnson (UCLA)
Presenter(s): Seth Brodsky (University of Chicago) , Michael Gallope (University of Minnesota) , Luis Manuel Garcia (University of Birmingham) , Kathryn Agnes Huether (UCLA) , Alisha Lola Jones (University of Cambridge) , Shayna Mei Silverstein (Northwestern University)
Since George Floyd’s 2020 murder in Minneapolis, a relentless series of social crises have fueled calls for political change, calls that have in turn spurred statements from universities, performing arts groups, and ACLS-affiliated societies like the AMS and SMT. Past AMS president Suzanne Cusick, for instance, urged music scholars to pledge the “tools of our trade” (2020) toward socially-engaged responses to racism. At the same time, social crises can result in positions of silence or neutrality (in the words of the University of Chicago’s “Kalven Report”) in which a scholarly organization remains merely “the home and sponsor of critics” and “not itself the critic.”
Music scholars occupy an arguably exceptional position when it comes to explaining social crises, given how our research centers material engagements with affect, voice, and noise, all associated with histories of protest, consciousness-raising, and social change. Yet, in the face of perpetual crisis, we may also find ourselves drawn to our disciplinary object’s most basic condition: silence, as the avoiding of controversy, pleading of ignorance, or assertion of music’s aloofness from the everyday. Are there discipline-specific reasons for this silence? Does a discipline that grapples with the complexities of music’s medium specificity—its materiality, abstraction, ineffability, technical demands, etc.—make it uniquely challenging to apply our expertise to historical and ongoing crises? Is music an especially useful alibi for silence and complacency in the face of social crisis?
This roundtable examines how philosophical, historical, and disciplinary factors in the fields of music studies can lead to varied responses of silence, action, and ambivalence in the face of social and political crises. It reignites questions raised by Naomi André’s call for an “engaged musicology” (2018) of meaningful, public-facing interventions as well as Imani Mosley’s (2024) critique of the way music scholars operate as “translators,” interpreting music for broader audiences without fully interrogating the social and political forces that shape it. Bridging these varied perspectives, this roundtable envisions a field that emboldens academic freedom, fosters collaboration and reflection in the face of disagreement, and works to bridge the gap between scholarly work and a world in perpetual crisis.
