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, breakfast
The Plaza Level
9:00–10:30 am: Session 1A, Special Session: Constructing Identity in Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’s Omar (2022)
Room 523
Andrew Pau (Oberlin College & Conservatory), “‘Here We Have Our Place’: The Musical Construction of African Identity in Omar”
Sylvie Tran (Oberlin College & Conservatory), “Musical Representations of Assimilation and the Antebellum South in Omar”
Christa Cole (Oberlin College & Conservatory), “The Role of the Chorus in Omar”
9:00–10:00am: Session 1B: Chappell Roan and Joni Mitchell
Room 524
Stephen Spencer (Hunter College, CUNY), Chair
Ash Mach (Eastman School of Music), “Towards a Contextual Queering of Chappell Roan’s ‘Pink Pony Club’”
Rebecca Moranis (CUNY Graduate Center), “An Analysis of Joni Mitchell’s Vocal Evolution”
10:30-10:45 AM: Break
10:45–11:15 am: Session 2: Poster Session
The Plaza Level
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”
Bai Xue (CUNY Graduate Center), “Form and Structure in Ewe Music”
11:15 am–12:15 pm: Session 3: Musicals
Room 523
Poundie Burstein (Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY), chair
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: Session 4A: AAWM
Room 523
Panayotis Mavromatis (New York University), Chair
Stephen Guerra (University at Buffalo, SUNY), “A New New-World Harmonic Schema”
Lina Tabak (Indiana University), “‘Rhythmic Venom’ or Comfortable Groove? On Microtiming in Colombian Currulao”
Ruixue Hu (Eastman School of Music), “Understanding Non-Lexical Vocables in Music”
1:45–3:15 pm: Session 4B: Meanings
Room 524
Gilad Rabinovitch (Queens College, CUNY), Chair
Ryan Krell (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music), “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, 12th-floor Lounge
3:30 pm–4:00 pm: Business meeting
4:15 pm–5:15 pm: Keynote Lecture, Clifton Boyd (New York University), “Black Barbershop and Music Theory in the Age of Jim Crow”
5:15–7:30 pm: Dinner break
7:30–9:30 pm: Conference Workshop, Kristi Hardman (UNC Charlotte), “Considering Ethics in the Process of Analyzing Music”
Room 523
SUNDAY, APRIL 6
8:30–9:00 am: Registration, coffee, breakfast
The Plaza Level
9:30–11:00 am: Session 5: Twentieth-Century Composers
Joseph Straus (The Graduate Center, CUNY), Chair
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: Session 6: Form and Formalism from Lachenmann to Metal
Landon Morrison (Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester), Chair
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”
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