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Conference Agenda

The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.

Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)

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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:02am EDT

Daily Overview

Session

Medieval Models of Musical Transmission
Session Chair: Barbara Haggh-Huglo

Presentation 3

Tune Family Trees: A View from Behind

Peter Jeffery

Emeritus at University of Notre Dame and Princeton University

Comparative study of medieval Byzantine and Latin chant melodies suggests an alternate approach to the study of "tune families" in folk music and other traditions of orally-transmitted melodies. The "tune family" concept in folk music studies has been useful as a way of classifying multiple related melodies, but it has not proved useful at establishing "family tree" relationships, such as "ancestor/descendent" or "sibling/cousin." Medieval chant studies, in which melodic history can sometimes be traced over many centuries, point in a different direction. Instead of focusing on the note-to-note melodic "foreground," we should consider that the datum of transmission was not the melody, but a more abstract "background" or deep structure. Parallel examples from medieval chant and more recent folk and popular music will be used to illustrate four types of background structures that can be found in orally transmitted vocal song.

(1) Modal matrix, which is not the same thing as modal assignment, refers to the region of the overall gamut that a melody inhabits. Multiple melodies can share the same modal matrix, or overlapping matrices, even when they are officially assigned to different modes.

(2) Formal congruence occurs when different melodies, set to the same text, also share the same form, such as A A' B C A, even though the sequence of musical pitches is completely different. The sense that a musical section should be the same or different was passed on even when the "foreground" melody was not.

(3) Sometimes the unit of transmission seems to be a melodic contour, which is elaborated differently in each performance. Evidence from the Music Cognition field can support this, and it is relevant that the earliest medieval neumes functioned as a "contour" notation rather than a pitch notation.

(4) "Cross references," or deliberate quotations from other songs, have been ignored since the discrediting of "centonate" as a term for formulaic chant. But they actually exist.

The way forward in "tune family" studies, then, would be to focus more on "background" structures like these than on the surface, note-to-note "foreground" tune.