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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Writing about Music Otherwise
Time:
Friday, 07/Nov/2025:
9:00am - 10:30am
Location: Northstar Ballroom A
Session Topics:
African American / Black Studies, Gender / Sexuality / LGBTQ Studies, Indigenous Music / Decolonial Studies, AMS
Presentations
Writing about Music Otherwise
Chair(s): Martha Feldman (University of Chicago) , Elisabeth Le Guin (UCLA)
Presenter(s): Martha Feldman (University of Chicago) , Elisabeth Le Guin (UCLA) , Jessica Bissett Perea (University of Washington) , Ramona Naddaff (UC Berkeley) , Fumi Okiji (UC Berkeley)
What might musicologists do when a project seems to call for writing that exceeds or diverges from conventional academic norms of expository or argumentative prose? Or when writing against the grain of academic norms feels like an imperative?
The proposed roundtable gathers together writers with diverse experiences, each of whom has confronted these questions head-on: by calling on dialogue, verse, speculative excursus, or epistolary forms; through bullet-pointing or graph-making; through alternate citational practices; or by integrating personal experience or imagination with the documental, analytical, and critical modes more readily sanctioned by the academy (cf. Le Guin 2006, 2007; Chana 2019; Crawley 2020; Redmond 2020; Robinson 2020; Chua/Rehding 2021; Feldman 2021, 2025; Okiji 2018, etc.). Musicologists Elisabeth Le Guin (UCLA) and Martha Feldman (UChicago) will participate as co-chairs, joined by Indigenous studies musicologist Jessica Bissett Perea (University of Washington), classicist/editor Ramona Naddaff (UCBerkeley and Zone Books), and music-philosopher Fumi Okiji (UCBerkeley). Together we aim to open a society-wide discussion about the scholarly, ethical, and pragmatic challenges posed by writing otherwise . Without devaluing expository prose or endorsing a spirit of anything-goes, we will invite attendees to think with us about how writing matters, and why and how centering Black, Latinx, Indigenous, queer, trans, and differently abled voices transforms the writerly landscape of musicology.
Two conjoint factors will also shape the conversation. One concerns the intense demands being placed on early-career musicologists to be “innovative” even as conformity to traditional writerly norms is assumed, and even tacitly enforced, through automated submission protocols, outsourced editing, and accelerated production schedules. A troubling tension persists between the academy’s avowed aims of cultivating diverse voices and resistance to accommodating real divergence of expression in evaluating authors. Another factor concerns the broader problem of our inheritance of the master’s tools. How specifically might we reconfigure those tools when necessary, unmaking and then remaking our writerly toolkits when those of the master’s house no longer serve us?
Finally, we ask how the unique medium of music and disciplinary properties of musicology can themselves help us re-hear and re-write, in responsible ways, the fundamental interfaces between music, sound, and language.
