53rd Annual Meeting at Fordham University

The 53rd Annual Meeting of MTSNYS will take place April 5–6 at Fordham University in New York City, featuring a keynote given by Clifton Boyd (New York University) and workshop led by Kristi Hardman (University of North Carolina at Charlotte).

You can view the program and register below. Visit the MTSNYS 2025 page to learn more about local arrangements for the conference.

Conference Program

Complete Program Booklet available at this link

SATURDAY, APRIL 5

8:00–9:00 am: Registration, coffee
9:00–10:30 am: Omar Special Session

  • Andrew Pau (Oberlin College & Conservatory), “‘Here We Have Our Place’: The Musical Construction of Omar’s African Identity”

  • Sylvie Tran (Oberlin College & Conservatory), “Musical Representations of Assimilation and the Antebellum South in Omar (2022)”

  • Christa Cole (Oberlin College & Conservatory), “The Role of the Chorus in Omar

9:00–10:00am: Chappell Roan and Joni Mitchell

  • Ash Mach (Eastman School of Music), “A Contextual Queering of Chappell Roan’s ‘Pink Pony Club’”

  • Rebecca Moranis (CUNY Graduate Center), “An Analysis of Joni Mitchell’s Vocal Evolution”

10:45–11:15 am: Poster session

  • Richard Ashley (Northwestern University), “Cognitive Processes in Music Analysis: An Investigation through Protocol Analysis and Eye Tracking”

  • Sarah Case (Mannes School of Music), “Leitmotif and Structure in the Prelude to Act III of Wagner’s Siegfried

  • Jonathan Lindhorst (Schulich School of Music, McGill University), “Tone-Clock Theory’s Expansion: An Analysis of Jenny McLeod’s Tone Clock Piece VIII

  • Bai Xue (CUNY Graduate Center), “Form and Structure in Ewe Music”

11:15 am–12:15 pm: Musicals

  • Hunter Hoyle (Northwestern University), “Theorizing the Broadway Overture: A Formal and Cognitive Investigation”

  • John Lawrence (University of Chicago), “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Form: Sondheim’s Early

  • Deviations from the Sentence-Period Paradigm”

12:15–1:45 pm: Lunch Break

1:45–3:15 pm: AAWM

  • Stephen Guerra (University at Buffalo, SUNY), “Harmonic Speciation in Brazil”

  • Lina Tabak (Indiana University), “‘Rhythmic Venom’ or Comfortable Groove? On Microtiming in Colombian Currulao’s Isochronous Dosillo”

  • Ruixue Hu (Eastman School of Music), “Understanding Non-Lexical Vocables in Music”

1:45–3:15 pm: Meanings

  • Ryan Krell, “Transformation, Narrative, and Cyclical Form in The Arcadian Wild’s Principium

  • Ryan Galik (Eastman School of Music), “A Framework for Tangled Diegetic Hierarchies Beyond Cinematic Music”

  • Cheng Wei Lim (Columbia University), “Pokémon, Interculturality, and Topic Theory”

3:15–3:30 pm Break
3:30–5:15 pm: Plenary Events
3:30 pm–4:00 pm: Business meeting
4:15 pm–5:15 pm: Keynote Presentation, Clifton Boyd (New York University), “Black Barbershop and Music Theory in the Age of Jim Crow”
6:00–7:30 pm: Dinner break
7:30–9:30 pm: Conference Workshop, Kristi Hardman (UNC Charlotte), “Considering Ethics in the Process of Analyzing Music”

SUNDAY, APRIL 6

8:30–9:00 am: Registration, coffee
9:30–11:00 am: Twentieth-Century Composers

  • Jacob R. Ludwig (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music) and Evan Martschenko (Eastman School of Music), “Uncovering Howard Hanson’s Proto-Set Theory Pedagogy”

  • Aidan McGartland (McGill University), “Britten the Serialist: Twelve-Note Thinking in the Music of Benjamin Britten”

  • Stanley Ralph Fink (Drake University), “The Doppelgänger as Musical Complement in Julia Perry’s The Cask of Amontillado

11:00–11:15 am: Break
11:15 am–12:15 pm: Form and Formalism from Lachenmann to Metal

  • Avinoam Foonberg (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music), “Screaming Forms and Formal Screaming: Timbral Transformations in Extreme Metal Verse-Choruses”

  • Zachary Bernstein (Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester), “Playing with the Net Down: Formalism and the Dialectic in Helmut Lachenmann’s Music and Thought”

Micah Roberts

Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award

We are excited to announce that the 2024 Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award goes to Micah Roberts (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music) for their paper “‘Ancient Voices’: A Hypermetrical and Orchestrational Analysis of the Theme Songs to Seasons of CBS’s Survivor.”

Congratulations Micah!

Members of the 2024 Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award committee included Alex Reed, (chair, Ithaca College); Kofi Agawu (CUNY Graduate Center); Tomoko Deguchi (Winthrop University); Kristi Hardman (UNCC); Kyle Hutchinson (Colgate University), Philip Stoecker (ex officio, Hofstra University).

Previous winners of the award are listed on the MTSNYS website: https://mtsnys.org/patricia-carpenter-emerging-scholar-award/

Theory and Practice

We are pleased to announce the publication of a double volume of Theory and Practice, with articles by Danielle Bastone Barrettara, James S. MacKay, Samantha M. Inman, and David Hier, and including reviews of new books on musical form by Caitlin Martinkus and of The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music by William O’Hara.

More details and digital versions of the articles can be found here.


“With a donation to MTSNYS you can support our workshop programs…”

— Philip Stoecker, Board President