We welcome proposals involving all facets of musical life throughout the Americas, and American music and aspects of its cultures anywhere in the world. We especially welcome proposals addressing the following themes:

• Musical life in the American South, from the colonial period to the globalized New South
• Musical representations of the American South
• Fieldwork in American music, past and present
• Southern Rock
• Milton Babbitt and postwar American composition

Research Poster Sessions
The poster format provides an opportunity for SAM members to meet informally with authors and discuss research. Each author attends her/his respective 90-minute session, distributes abstracts, and answers questions. Supporting sound and/or video examples (on personal computers and utilizing battery, rather than A/C power) will be coordinated with other presenters once the Program Committee has formed sessions. Learn more about creating posters.

Interest Groups
Interest Groups with a guaranteed slot for 2012 are requested to convey a brief description of their plans to the Program Committee using the online submission system not later than August 1 to ensure proper scheduling and room assignments. Interest Groups without a guaranteed slot for 2012 may submit panel proposals via the online submission system if they wish, but acceptance or rejection of these proposals will be at the discretion of the Program Committee.

Concerts and Lecture-Performances
Proposals for concerts and lecture-performances of music from anywhere in the Americas are particularly welcome.

Seminars
Of the proposals submitted in February 2011, the two selected by the Program Committee for the 2012 conference in Charlotte are:

1. "American Music and Television"

In an assessment of over a half-century of music on television, screen media scholar Jon Burlingame highlighted its significance by calling it “the soundtrack of our lives.” Indeed, for many Americans, television has played a decisive role in our lived experience of music, whether through children’s programming, MTV, or the various Idol franchises and clones, just to mention the most obvious points of contact. This seminar topic aims to provide a forum for bringing into discourse the myriad ways through which music in television has impacted lives, while reflecting and helping to shape broader trends in American culture since 1950.

Scholars began to look seriously at the role of music in television starting in about 1990, but the last five years have brought an explosion of interest in the topic among researchers in such diverse fields as historical musicology, popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and music media studies. The most recent literature includes three books: a groundbreaking OUP monograph by Ron Rodman about the theory of television music (2010), a Routledge collection of essays about music in television edited by James Deaville (2011), and an Ashgate collection of articles about music in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2010). These new studies reflect the growing recognition that music in television has had a greater impact upon the American cultural scene than has been previously recognized, ranging from the appearances of rising artists on variety programming (such as Elvis and The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show or Carrie Underwood on American Idol) to the use of music as “hidden persuader” in televisual contexts (whether to sell products in commercials or to promote political positions in attack ads and news programs).

The annual conferences of SAM have featured individual papers on topics that would fall under the rubric of “television music studies,” but there has been no attempt (either in SAM or elsewhere) to create a forum for the coordinated discussion of research in the field. This seminar topic seeks to redress that gap by creating conference sessions that will address television music from the perspective of Rodman’s three “semiotic spaces of television music”: the diegetic (musical performances on television), the intradiegetic (underscoring for television programming), and the extradiegetic (music used by the network or station, “televisual flow”).

close

2. "Music and Disability"

In recent years, musicologists and music theorists, as well as other scholars, have created a considerable body of scholarship examining the intersection of music and disability. Music and disability studies, drawing heavily on pioneering work done in disability studies (which seeks to identify and interrogate social, political, and cultural constructions of disability), has developed into a robust but still expanding sub-discipline within musicology, music theory, and other areas of the humanities. Music and disability is a complex and broadly construed topic, encompassing research from several scholarly approaches. The musicological/historical perspective can be represented by recent work focusing on narrativity and disability in music (Honisch, 2009), the performance of disability, or musical significations of disability (Rogers, 2006). Ethnomusicological research includes studies on cultures of blindness (Rowden, 2009) and Deaf/deafness as well as other groups and communities of disabled individuals, including disability activists, the disability arts movement, and bands comprised of disabled musicians or whose music focuses on disability. Theoretical approaches to music and disability are exemplified by analyses of disability and late style and disability and “normalizing” (Straus, 2006, 2008); pedagogy/academia, which includes the examination of teaching techniques and approaches for universal access such as discussed in the context of popular music by Challis (2009) and the practices and experiences of faculty and staff with disabilities; and scientific inquiry, represented by research on amusia, autism and pitch (Brown, et. al., 2003), and the neurology of music perception and creation (Marin and Perry, 2009). Americanists have also taken up disability studies as a method of understanding our cultural and political heritage as members of both U.S. (Longmore, 2003) and North American or Pan-American societies. While disability interest groups have made presentations and sponsored sessions at other music conferences, we have not yet seen such events at the national SAM meetings. This seminar will help fill that need and speak to the many SAM scholars who have interests in the field.

close

All seminar proposals should be submitted in the usual way by the regular SAM deadline, except that the specific seminar topic should be clearly specified. Unless the author specifies otherwise, abstracts not accepted for either of the two seminars will be considered by the program committee for one of the regular sessions.

Although papers for the seminars will not be "read" in the traditional sense, the act of participating in the seminar as a presenter and defending the ideas of one's paper constitutes the same level of participation in an academic conference as would a normal paper.  For this reason, those submitting abstracts toward a seminar cannot also submit toward a regular session. Learn more about the seminar format.

General Guidelines
Accepted presenters must be members of the Society and are required to register for the entire conference (membership is not required in order to submit a proposal!). The committee encourages proposals from those who did not present at the 2011 Cincinnati meeting, but all proposals will be judged primarily on merit. An individual may submit only one proposal. All proposals must be submitted through the online electronic submission process.

Proposers for all except concerts or lecture-performances must specify whether the proposal is for 1) paper, 2) poster, or 3) either presentation format, the latter to be determined by the Program Committee as it builds sessions. Individual or joint papers should be no longer than twenty minutes. Concerts and lecture-performances should be no longer than thirty minutes. For complete session proposals, the organizer must include an initial statement explaining the rationale for the session, in addition to proposals and abstract files for each paper.

Include the following for all submissions:

1. Proposer’s name, e-mail address, and institutional affiliation or city of residence
2. 250-word proposal
3. 100-word version of your proposal suitable for publication in the conference program (.doc, .docx, .txt, or .rtf format). Include proposer's name and email, and the proposal title in this file.
4. Audio and visual needs: CD player, DVD player, digital projector. Due to logistics and the high cost of renting this equipment, we cannot accommodate AV changes once a proposal is accepted.
5. Specify whether you are a student (and therefore eligible for certain student grants or awards) or are eligible for the Cambridge Award

For concerts and lecture-performances please include the above-mentioned materials, plus:

6. Six copies of a recording related to the proposed concert or lecture-recital (CD or DVD; links to online resources are acceptable)
7. An addressed, stamped mailer if you would like the recordings returned
8. A list of special needs (e.g., piano, music stand, space for dance demonstration, choral risers)

All materials must be electronically date-stamped by June 15, 2011. W. Anthony Sheppard, Chair, SAM 2012 Program Committee, 54 Chapin Hall Dr., Department of Music, Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267. Questions about the submission process may be sent to: w.anthony.sheppard@williams.edu.

 

Please report any technical problems with the submission page to Glenn Pillsbury (gpillsbury@csustan.edu)

• Page Updated 16 June 2011
• Privacy Statement
• Copyright 2011 Society for American Music
• Society for American Music
• Stephen Foster Memorial
• University of Pittsburgh
• Pittsburgh, PA 15260
• email: sam@ american-music.org