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.)
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:55am EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Music as a Medium of Women's Power Session Chair: Rafael Torralvo da Silva, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany Discussant: Heather Hadlock | |
    | |
The Clubwoman as Musicologist: Women's Music Clubs and the Making of American Musicology Cornell University At the 1931 founding meeting of the New York Musicological Society—the precursor to the American Musicological Society—the women scholars present were infamously locked out of the room; Charles Seeger (1972) later recalled this exclusion as signaling that US musicology was not “women’s work.” Previous scholarship has shown that the founding of US musicology in the early twentieth century was shaped by exclusions along lines of race, class, and gender (Cusick 1999; Levitz 2018). However, scholarship has yet to fully reckon with the intellectual work these marginalized figures themselves produced—or, in a word, the “women’s work” that took place beyond the locked door of the discipline. This paper examines the intellectual work of amateur, women-led music clubs, showing how early US musicology defined itself in opposition to these institutions as rival sites of musical knowledge. It centers on Rose Fay Thomas—founder and honorary president of the National Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC)—and on the lecture programs, essays, and organizational writings through which she articulated a vision of music clubs as intellectual institutions. Drawing on published club journals, convention proceedings, and archival manuscripts, I show how Thomas promoted courses in musical analysis, historical papers, and lectures by both clubwomen and visiting speakers, framing these activities as forms of serious musical inquiry rather than ancillary cultural enrichment. Situated within the Progressive-era women’s club movement, these initiatives were directed toward the cultivation of a broader public: one understood not as a finished audience but as a civic body to be formed through sustained access to musical knowledge. This paper argues that women’s music clubs offered a public, pedagogical model of musical intellectual life, one later foreclosed by US musicology as it defined itself in opposition to these institutions. By reading the intellectual work of music clubs alongside pre-disciplinary visions of a public-facing musicology (Adler 1885; Seeger 1913; Pratt 1916), this paper reframes the history of US musical thought by recovering an intellectual tradition that once imagined a more expansive relationship to the public, later curtailed but not forgotten. | |