CFP: Fifth Biennial Yale Graduate Music Symposium, Sound Limits: Music and Its Borders

The graduate student community of Yale's Department of Music welcomes submissions for the Fifth Biennial Yale Graduate Music Symposium, to be held Friday, 4 March–Saturday, 5 March, 2016. We are pleased to announce that the Symposium will feature a keynote address by Prof. Ana María Ochoa (Columbia University), as well as a workshop led by Prof. Brian Kane (Yale University).

The theme for this year's conference is Sound Limits: Music and Its Borders. We invite graduate students to submit abstracts, of up to 300 words, for 20-minute papers that engage critically with music at its limits. The deadline for submission is Monday, 7 December, 2015. Abstracts should be sent to ygms@yale.edu.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Movements of music across boundaries—temporal, geographical, national, disciplinary, sensory, generic, religious, multimedial, and others
• Ways music has been employed in the service of structures of power, and/or the limits placed on musicality or expression by such forces
• Boundaries drawn between sound and music, musical genres, modes of musical performance, and other questions and problems of musical ontology
• Relationships between music and language, and how those relationships have been, or might be, understood
• The expansion of traditional analytical techniques and theoretical paradigms to accommodate wide-ranging repertoires (popular musics, folk musics, etc.)
• Formal and/or generic expectations, and how they condition interactions with music
• The (in)efficacy of importing humanistic or scientific discourses into the study of music
• Roles that sound studies, voice studies, and other new interdisciplinary fields forming around music and sound might play in music studies in the coming years

Please make sure to visit our website at ygms.yale.edu