Call for Presentations

Proposal Requirements

No individual should submit more than one proposal or be involved in more than one proposal in any capacity. 20-minute presentations by graduate students are eligible for the Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award, which includes a cash prize and publication in Theory and Practice. Posters and special-session presentations shorter than 20 minutes are ineligible for the Carpenter award.

Proposals for papers given at national conferences or previously published should not be submitted.

Individual Papers and Posters: Submission for individual papers or posters should include a proposal of no more than 500 words, including any footnotes or endnotes, submitted as a PDF file. The proposal may be accompanied by a maximum of four pages of supplementary material (such as musical examples, diagrams, and bibliography), not to be counted within the 500-word limit, and compiled together with the proposal into a single PDF file. Note that any supplementary text (e.g., example captions and analytical annotations) should not appreciably add to the word count of the proposal. Proposals must not include the author’s name and should be purged of any indications of the author’s identity (references to the author’s own work must occur in the third person). Author tags must be removed from electronic files. If you are submitting a poster proposal, please indicate so clearly in your proposal.

Special Panels : Submissions for special sessions should include a rationale of no more than 500 words for the entire session submitted by the session organizer, including the titles of all individual segments; in addition, individual presenters should submit full proposals for their individual segments according to the paper guidelines above.

Proposal Submission

Proposals should be submitted digitally at this link.

You will be asked for your name, email address, institutional affiliation (if any), academic status, and a list of technical needs such as A/V, electronic keyboard, or piano. Submissions with more than one author must include identification information for all authors. Special session rationales should be submitted by the organizer, with each presenter submitting their identifying information and individual proposal separately. We reserve the right to accept only individual papers out of a proposed special session. Demographic information will be used for statistical purposes only—the committee will not have access to this data, nor will decisions be based on it, but it is requested to help the society with its long-term goal of achieving equitable representation. Questions may be addressed to Program Committee Chair Gilad Rabinovitch.

Recommendations

The program committee will be looking for submissions that include:

1. Clearly articulated arguments and conclusions

2. New approaches or fields of inquiry, and/or novel extensions of existing approaches

3. Strong writing and clear presentation of ideas

4. Examples, if needed, that illustrate the main ideas of the project.

The committee encourages submitters to take advantage of the following resources, from the Society for Music Theory:

1. The SMT’s Professional Development Committee’s advice for preparing a conference proposal.

2. The SMT Committee for the Status of Women’s Proposal Mentoring Program.

3. The SMT Committee on Race and Ethnicity’s Mentoring Program.