AMS Allegheny Chapter

   Allegheny & Capital Chapters of the American Musicological Society

– Spring 2026 Joint Meeting –

Saturday, February 28th & Sunday, March 1st

Gettysburg College (Gettysburg, PA)

Majestic Theatre

25 Carlisle St, Gettysburg, PA 17325

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28:

11:00–12:30 PAPER PANEL 1: Screen, Stage, & Sound

• Michael Baumgartner, “Motion and Rhythm: René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924) and ‘the Melodious Clowning of Satie’ as a Blueprint for a Modernist Audio-Visual Aesthetic
• Lauren Adamow, “Ave Maria” is Aqua: A Synesthete’s Handbook for Music (Color) Theory”
• Avery Faust, “‘A song to fix what’s wrong’: Diegesis and Hope in Hadestown”

12:30–1:30 Lunch Break

1:30–2:30 MUSICOLOGY & PRACTICE COLLOQUY*

Moderated by Gretchen Carlson

2:30–3:30 PAPER PANEL 2: Text & Act

• Miranda Bartira Tagliari Sousa, “Nineteenth-Century Influencers: Music and the Press in 1880s Rio de Janeiro”
• Davis Badaszewski, “This is the Record of John by Orlando Gibbons: A Guide to Performance and Registration Practices”

3:30–3:40 Short Break

3:40–5:10 PAPER PANEL 3: Visions of Musical America

• Douglas Bomberger, “‘Winter Wraps his Grimmest Spell’: Edward MacDowell’s Seasonal Compositions”
• Codee Spinner, “Pedagogy, Healing, and Eroticism in the Spiritualist Piano Lessons of May Wright Sewall”
• Gretchen Carlson, “Jon Batiste’s American Symphony: Pursuing a More Perfect Union”

5:10–5:20 Short Break

5:20-6:50 KEYNOTE: Dr. Rodrigo Sigal

“The Art of Sound and Technology at the Mexican Center for Music and Sonic Arts”

7:00– DINNER

SUNDAY, MARCH 1:

9:00-10:00 LECTURE RECITAL

• Icy Nguyen, “‘What about the space in between?’–– A lecture recital on Liminal Space in Schumann’s Kreisleriana”

10:00-10:10 Short Break

10:10-11:10 PAPER PANEL 4: Musicology, Methodology, & Pedagogy

• Jessica Grimmer, “From Product to Process: Rethinking Credit in Music DH”
• Matthew Franke, “Decentering Genre and Promoting Critical Thinking in Pop Music Pedagogy”

11:10-11:20 Short Break

11:20-12:20 CHAPTER BUSINESS MEETINGS

* all conference attendees are invited to participate in the Musicology & Practice Colloquy. This session will primarily focus on the following questions:

1. What are the primary goals of musicology programs, and how can we design our programs to align with our primary goals?

2. How do we engage and contend with the current AI/tech revolution?

3. What unique challenges/crises are musicology programs currently facing, and what solutions can we offer?

4. How do we continue to effectively communicate the value/importance of musicology to current and future generations of students (and their parents)?

Jorge Rodrigo Sigal Sefchovich ​(Mexico City – 1971) 

Composer, cultural manager and full time professor since 2017 at ENES, UNAM, Morelia, where he co-founded the Music and Artistic Technology undergraduate program (www.enesmorelia.org). Interested in new technologies especially in the electroacoustic music field. Since 2006, Sigal has been the director of the Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts (www.cmmas.org) where he coordinates numerous initiatives of creation, education, research and cultural management in relation to sound and music. In 2024 he received the Bellas Artes Medal in Music from INBAL. He studied at CIEM in Mexico and then earned a doctorate degree from the London City University and completed his postdoctoral studies at UNAM. He has a diploma in cultural management from the UAM-BID and has continued his studies and creative projects with the help from various scholarships and support from institutions like Fulbright, FONCA (SNCA member 2011-18), Pride C (UNAM) and the DeVos Foundation for cultural management, among others. He is  a member of the National Researchers System Level 1 from SECIHTI and for 20 years he has taken part in the Luminico project (www.luminico.org), he is the director of the “Visiones Sonoras” festival (www.visionessonoras.org) and editor of “Sonic Ideas” journal (www.sonicideas.org).

CALL FOR PAPERS

Allegheny & Capital Chapters of the American Musicological Society

– Spring 2026 Joint Meeting –

Saturday, February 28th – Sunday, March 1st

Gettysburg College (Gettysburg, PA)

The Allegheny and Capital Chapters of the American Musicological Society are excited to announce a joint conference to be held Saturday, February 28 and Sunday, March 1, 2026, at Gettysburg College. The conference will feature guest speaker Dr. Rodrigo Sigal (composer and sound studies specialist) and a colloquy on musicology pedagogy today. The program committee invites proposals for individual papers, lecture-recitals, seminar panels, or other presentation formats on any subject of musicological interest. Preceding the conference, participants will have the opportunity to attend a Friday night concert by the Gettysburg College Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Dr. César Leal, featuring music by Sigal.

We invite faculty to participate in a Micro-Colloquium titled Musicology and Practice, a one-hour session focused on sharing innovative, practical approaches to teaching undergraduate music history. We welcome brief, four-minute presentations on topics such as curricular innovations, performance-informed teaching, communicating musicology to younger generations, and navigating the “new normal” in today’s higher education crisis. Proposals should be around 100 words. No full papers are required, just fresh ideas and lively discussion.

We encourage proposal submissions for a number of scholarly presentation formats:

1. Individual papers: a 20 minute presentation with 10 minutes of discussion.
2. “Lightning” sessions papers: individual 8-10 minute talks with additional discussion or media. The entire session will fill a one-hour slot.
3. Video presentation: a presentation of variable length with 10-minutes of discussion. Abstracts should include information on the goals, format, and length of the presentation. Additional guidelines will be distributed with acceptance.
4. Seminar panels: 3-4 papers that will be distributed ahead of the conference and comprise an extended discussion of the topic followed by questions.
5. Additional formats (workshops, roundtables, lecture-recitals) should fill an hour timeslot. Please identify session format, musicological significance, and participant roles in your abstract.

Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words along with the proposed title and presentation format via This Form by January 20.

All submissions will be evaluated by a blind peer-review process from the applicant’s respective chapter. Submissions from a committee member’s immediate colleagues or students will not be evaluated by that member.

*Student members of the AMS Allegheny Chapter are eligible for the annual Deane L. Root Student Paper Award, sponsored by the Center for American Music in the University of Pittsburgh Library System. The Chapter also offers limited support for travel and lodging to student presenters. Details can be found on the AMS Allegheny website.

**Student members of the AMS Capital Chapter are eligible for the annual Lowens Student Paper Award. For more information on the award and submission requirements, please visit http://www.ams-net.org/chapters/capital/lowens-award/

For information on the AMS Allegheny Chapter please visit https://allegheny.ams-net.org/

For information on the AMS Capital Chapter please visit http://www.ams-net.org/chapters/capital/

Saturday March 1, 2025
West Virginia University
Evansdale Crossing Building, Media Innovation Center (floor 4)

11:00–12:00pm Paper Session 1

Avery Faust (University of Pittsburgh)

The Shawshank Redemption: Hope and Reintegration Through Music

Richard Anatone (Prince George’s Community College)

Troping and Narrative Foreshadowing in Hitoshi Sakimoto’s Soundtrack to Final Fantasy Tactics (1997)

12:00-1:30 Lunch

1:30–2:30pm Paper Session 2

Claire Weydt (West Virginia University)

Symbolist Continuities in Ravel’s La Valse: Hearing Post-War Symbolism in Parisian Salons

Jamie Blake (Capital University)

Remaking the Wedding: Bronislava Nijinska’s Le Noces and the Politics of Revival

2:30–3:30pm Chapter Business Meeting

7:30pm VOCES8 Concert, Lyell B. Clay Concert Theatre

Hotel Options:

Hotel Morgan 

Hampton Inn

Euro Suites 

Marriott at Waterfront Place

Please complete this form to apply for student travel funds for AMS Allegheny meetings: AMS Allegheny: Student Travel Fund Application

Held at Gannon University, School of Communication and the Arts, Room 207

Saturday March 16, 2024

Program of the Spring Chapter Meeting

10:00–12:00pm Paper Session 1

Jacob Hunkins (Gettysburg College): “You Can’t Raise a Caine Back Up When he’s in Defeat:” Civil War Memory in “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down” and the Vietnam War

Allie Mohn (Denison University): Defining Tradition: Appalachian Folk and Bluegrass Music as Constructions of a Commercial Folk Revival

Marcelo Rebuffi (Case Western Reserve University): Waters on Fire: Post-War Trauma, Disability, and Multi-Narrative Strategies in Prog Rock

Grigorios Mathioudakis (University of California, Irvine & Los Angeles): Keeper of the Seven Keys: Fantastical Themes of Ironic Ambivalence at the Birth of Power Metal

12:00 Lunch

1:00–3:00pm Paper Session 2

Philip Bixby (Yale University): Backward Masking and Eerie Intentionality in 1980s Anti-Rock Discourse

Mark Ferraguto (Pennsylvania State University): Mozart and/as A.I.

Emily Laurance (Oberlin Conservatory): A Band of Their Own: Harpists in Women’s Orchestras and All-Girl Bands, 1870–1955

Laura Farré Rozada (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire): Conceptual Simplification: Changing the Paradigm of How Post-Tonal Piano Music is Analysed, Learned and Memorised

3:15 Chapter Business Meeting

For those of you who are planning to attend the meeting, hotel information can be found at this link: https://www.gannon.edu/about-gannon/erie-pennsylvania/hotels-and-accommodations/

passcode: ulscam

Program of the Spring Chapter Meeting

Allegheny Chapter of the American Musicological Society

Saturday, March 25^th  

University of Pittsburgh, Hillman Library, Room 340

10:00–12:00: Paper Session

Matthew Wood (Louisiana State University): Perpetual Purgatory: Lamennais’s influence on the philosophy and music of Franz Liszt

Ryan M. Prendergast (Carnegie Mellon University): Richard Strauss, Count Seebach, and the Rosenkavalier Dispute Reconsidered

Miranda Sousa (University of Pittsburgh): There is no Audience Without Ladies: Gendered Participation in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janiero Concert Culture (1860–1900)

Diogo Salmeron Carvalho (Marywood University): “Open the Bruise Up”: Identity and Memory in Steve Reich’s Music

12:00: Lunch

1:00: Keynote Address

Mark Burford, R.P. Wollenburg Professor of Music, Reed College: Charles H. Pace and the Sound and Institutions of the Early Gospel Movement

2:00–2:30: Chapter Business Meeting

3:30 Ceremony in honor of Charles and Frankie Pace

            Frankie Pace Park

            901 Centre Avenue

            Pittsburgh, PA 15219

5:00 Pace Exhibit and Reception

            Ebenezer Baptist Church

            2001 Wylie Avenue

            Pittsburgh, PA 15219

7:00 Concert featuring the Heritage Gospel Choir and Dr. Alton Merrell

            Ebenezer Baptist Church Thanks are extended to Megan Woller, Christopher Lynch, Anna Stephan-Robinson, members of the Program Committee, the University of Pittsburgh Library System, the Historic Hill Institute, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. Herbert V.R.P. Jones, Dr. Alton Merrell, the American Musicological Society, the Center for American Music, the Hill District Community Engagement Center, Lower Hill Redevelopment, and Dr. Kimberly C. Ellis for their work in organizing today’s events

CALL FOR PAPERS

Allegheny Chapter

of the

American Musicological Society

Spring 2023 Meeting

Saturday, March 25^th  

University of Pittsburgh, Hillman Library, Room 340

The Spring 2023 Meeting of the Allegheny Chapter of the American Musicological Society will be held on Saturday, March 25, 2023 on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh; there will be a virtual attendance and presentation option. This event will be held in conjunction with the American Musicological Society’s Many Musics of America Series.

In a tribute to Pittsburgh’s rich gospel-music history, the American Musicological Society, in partnership with the AMS Allegheny Chapter and University of Pittsburgh Library System’s Center for American Music will present a public concert exploring the music of composer, arranger, and publisher Charles Henry Pace. With his wife Frankie, Charles ran one of the nation’s earliest and most successful independent black music publishing businesses out of Pittsburgh’s Hill District neighborhood from the mid-1930s to the 1960s. Charles’s music was distributed and performed across the nation and became an important force in Frankie’s community organizing and activism, yet much of it has been inaccessible to performers for decades, surviving only on the printing plates and negative photographs that Charles used to publish his music. The Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh Library System is where the Pace archive is housed.

In conjunction with the concert, on the same day the University of Pittsburgh Library System will host the AMS Allegheny Chapter’s spring meeting, with a keynote lecture featuring Mark Burford. Mark Burford is R.P. Wollenberg Professor of Music at Reed College. His research and teaching focuses on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music and twentieth-century popular music in the United States, with particular focus on African American music after World War II. His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Current Musicology, Musical Quarterly, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and other edited collections. His article “Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs” received the Society for American Music’s 2012 Irving Lowens Award for the outstanding article on American music. His book Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field (Oxford, 2019) received multiple prizes, including the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for the outstanding book in musicology by a senior scholar. He is the editor of The Mahalia Jackson Reader (2020), an anthology of writings on Jackson for Oxford’s Readers on American Musicians series.

Presenters are invited to submit a proposal for individual papers, video presentations lecture-recitals, seminar panels, or other presentation formats on any subject of musicological interest. While this is an open call for papers, we are especially interested in submissions related to gospel music.

An abstract of max. 350 words for all proposal types, along with the proposed title and the presenter’s preferred mode of presentation (in-person or virtual) should be submitted by Saturday, February 25^th.  Please identify proposal type in submission.

We encourage proposal submissions for a number of scholarly presentation formats. In accordance with AMS policies, please follow these guidelines:

1. Individual papers should be no longer than 20 minutes with 10 minutes of discussion.
2. “Lightning” sessions consist of individual 8-10 minute talks with additional discussion or media. Entire session will fill a one-hour slot.
3. Video presentation abstracts should include information on the goals and format of the presentation. Additional guidelines will be distributed with acceptance.
4. Seminar panels will distribute written papers ahead of the conference and include extended discussion of the topic. See AMS Seminar FAQ for additional information on proposing a topic and why to choose this format: https://www.amsmusicology.org/page/MinneapolisSeminarFAQ
5. Additional formats (virtual workshops, roundtables, lecture-recitals) should fill an hour and 20-minute slot. Please identify session format, viability for virtual presentation/participation, musicological significance, and participant roles in the abstract.

Please submit abstracts for both individual proposals and alternative sessions to: jennifer.walker2@mail.wvu.edu

All submissions will be evaluated by a blind peer-review process, and those from a committee member’s immediate colleagues or students will not be forwarded by the chair to that member.

Jennifer Walker

Program Committee Chair

Assistant Professor of Musicology

West Virginia University

jennifer.walker2@mail.wvu.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS

Allegheny Chapter

of the

American Musicological Society

Fall 2022 Meeting

Saturday, October 15^th  

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

The Spring 2022 Meeting of the Allegheny Chapter of the American Musicological Society will be held on Saturday, October 15, 2022 at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Presenters are invited to submit a proposal for individual papers, video presentations lecture-recitals, seminar panels, or other presentation formats on any subject of musicological interest.

An abstract of max. 350 words for all proposal types, along with the proposed title should be submitted by Thursday, September 15^th.  Please identify proposal type in submission.

We encourage proposal submissions for a number of scholarly presentation formats. In accordance with AMS policies, please follow these guidelines:

1. Individual papers should be no longer than 20 minutes with 10 minutes of discussion.
2. “Lightning” sessions consist of individual 8-10 minute talks with additional discussion or media. Entire session will fill a one-hour slot.
3. Video presentation abstracts should include information on the goals and format of the presentation. Additional guidelines will be distributed with acceptance.
4. Seminar panels will distribute written papers ahead of the conference and include extended discussion of the topic. See AMS Seminar FAQ for additional information on proposing a topic and why to choose this format: https://www.amsmusicology.org/page/MinneapolisSeminarFAQ
5. Additional formats (virtual workshops, roundtables, lecture-recitals) should fill an hour and 20-minute slot. Please identify session format, viability for virtual presentation/participation, musicological significance, and participant roles in the abstract.

Please submit abstracts for both individual proposals and alternative sessions to: jennifer.walker2@mail.wvu.edu

All submissions will be evaluated by a blind peer-review process, and those from a committee member’s immediate colleagues or students will not be forwarded by the chair to that member.

Jennifer Walker

Program Committee Chair

Assistant Professor of Musicology

West Virginia University

jennifer.walker2@mail.wvu.edu

Spring Meeting

American Musicological Society, Allegheny Chapter

April 23, 2022

https://wvu.zoom.us/j/98581869010?pwd=dC9RZWdXQ3ZNa0J0YXFxaVd6c3NJdz09

10:00 AM: Individual Paper Session 1 (Jennifer Walker, Chair)

Gabriella Saporito-Emler (Florida State University): ‘Music Without Prejudice’: Big & Rich Perform Marginalization

Rachel Hottle (McGill University): The Magic is in the Doing: Ritual Performativity in Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells

11:00 AM: A Conversation with Deane L. Root

Moderators: Megan Woller and Christopher Lynch

12:00 PM Lunch

1:00 PM: Individual Paper Session 2 (Jennifer Walker, Chair)

Jingyi Zhang (Harvard University): Yuval Sharon’s Twilight: Gods (2020): Site-Specific Reimagination of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung

Lacey Golaszewski (State University of New York at Fredonia): A Diamond Among Coal: The Valenciennes Conservatoire and its Far-Reaching Wind Music Tradition

Miranda B. Tagliari Sousa (University of Pittsburgh): Arthur Napoleão: The Concert, the Popular, and the Building of a Music Scene in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janiero

2:30 Coffee Break

2:45 Chapter Business Meeting