First, a disclaimer. I am a bad role model. I am a drop-out. I will never get a tenure track job, and that doesn’t bother me. I work in two insanely different subdisciplines. I no longer wear suits. I like Ingrid Michaelson, to whom I am listening as I type this. I post on Facebook about politics and use the word “fuck” too much. I think alt-ac careers, like the one(s) I’ve had, are very cool, often cooler than all those regular academic jobs. I drink at conferences, and once in a while I bum a cigarette from Ruth Solie. I’m a terrible singer. I am not a good role model for most grad students, really.

My co-blogger here is a GREAT role model. She was a diligent student. She has a TT job; in fact, she’s snagged two of those. She started a really important interest group (pedagogy) in the AMS. She’s won an NEH grant. She’s a terrific role model.

That all said, I will now offer comments on and for students at AMS, as sort of a corollary to her post. I’m feeling like Ms. Mentor here, whose words of wisdom every student should read before getting too far along with a degree.

Use common sense. If you know you don’t have any, you will need to acquire some in order to succeed as an academic. The first person to go to with questions is always your advisor, unless your advisor is Professor Meanyfrown and doesn’t like you. If that’s the case, you also need a new advisor. I’m not kidding. You need to work with someone will to shepherd you a bit through the maze, but not let you lean on them every single step of the way. Questions about how to ask a question after a paper, who pays if you ask Dr. Seniorscholar to coffee, what to wear to a study group meeting, how to introduce yourself? Your advisor knows, because s/he’s been there. ASK. Questions about when you should eat, how to tell people you need to go pee? You need to be able to work those out for yourself. Be adult.

Be polite and professional. This seems like common sense, but apparently isn’t. Don’t interrupt, talk with food in your mouth, ask people you’ve just met for money or drinks, or say, “Hey, nice to meet you–I have no idea who you are.” That last bit may be true, but it’s rude. If you meet someone and don’t know what they do, the right question is, “What are you working on these days?” not “So, what kinda shit are you into?” Speak like a member of the community. Dress (for the most part) like a member of the community. You may think it’s ok to wear your “Fuck the 1%” tee-shirt to the opening reception, but you’re going to be surrounded by people who may one day vote on your tenure, your publications, your promotions, and even if they agree that the 1% sucks, they’ll remember your bad judgement even more. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to appear professional; nice jeans and a pressed shirt are perfectly acceptable. Three-day old dandruffy beard scruff, yoga pants, and the hat your brother wore all through Outward Bound are not. Old shoes can be polished. I have multiple piercings and a tattoo, many of which are on display at conferences; but I’m not showing them through ripped tights or wearing safety pins in them.

Party-crashing is a great way to meet new people, students and those who are finished, in your geographical area or area of disciplinary interest. But do know at least one person at the parties you crash; showing up and not knowing anyone is a little awkward. “So, are you interested in British music?” “No, man, I just heard you had some good beer. I’ll do anything for a free beer.” No. Remember that thing about future colleagues who will have influence over your career? Yeah.

Practice your elevator speech. This is the talk you give if you only have from the ground floor to the 5th to pitch yourself and your ideas. While you’re not selling your diss or a screenplay, this is a good guideline for introductions. “Hi, I’m Sally Sibelius. I’m doing a dissertation on nationalism at West Finland U.” Perfect. I now know who you are and what you do, and, probably, at least one person teaching at your school. If I’m interested, we can have a conversation. If I’m busy or not interested, I can be polite before going elsewhere. “Hey man! I’m Yuri Janacek, nice party! Who are you? Oh, ok, yeah, well, I’m a student, yeah, and I love dissonance! You know that place in Jenufa, you know, that big orchestral chord, yeah, it’s intense. It’s like, man! Hey, today I met the guy who wrote that book on Stravinsky! I almost died! I HAD to tell him how much I like dissonance, yeah, I think he was like trying to have lunch, but wow! It was that guy!” No. Just no.

Keep in touch with new contacts, but remember they’re not your mom, or a replacement for your common sense. I love hearing from students I’ve met on Facebook; it’s casual, non-obligation-causing, and easy. It’s appropriate to friend people you meet at conferences if you had a good chat with them that went beyond the elevator speech. I’ll friend students doing interesting research or who seemed nominally intelligent when I met them, who who are working with faculty who are my friends. But there are limits. If you email me before the conference is even over and ask me where I think you should go to grad school, or for a letter of recommendation for a scholarship, that’s not appropriate. If you’ve just met me (or another scholar), you should probably get to know me before you get super chummy, ask me for letters of recommendation, or ask me to be on your panel. Not every scholar you meet at AMS or anywhere else thinks we should be sending students to grad school for musicology with the current job market. Not everyone will have the desire, time, or ability to help you. This is why you have an advisor: so you don’t ask fairly random people for help in what may be inappropriate ways.

Also about Facebook. Your profile may be as super-private as you can lock it down, but if you friend colleagues–and this includes other grad students–you need to watch what you post. Remember about what people remember? If you and Anna Arensky are FB buddies and you post about not being able to finish papers or not understanding basic analysis, having trouble getting to class on time because you can’t figure out the bus schedule or aren’t disciplined enough to get up, or other things in this nature, you open yourself up to Anna remembering you as a nincompoop should you ever apply for a job at the same school as her, have her as your grants committee chair, etc. (And seriously, if you have problems like this, academia is probably not for you. Reconsider before your student debt grows.) Be yourself, but think of what others will think. Put your most intelligent persona forward. “Ugh, I have a cold,” is fine; “Wow, my toenail is gross! It has all of this pus coming out of it and it’s kind of green,” is TMI. In general, if you wouldn’t say it to a search committee, and be able to discuss it intelligently with them, don’t post it.

Finally, go to papers and sessions. I overheard far too many students talking about how they only went to one paper (!) or one session. Conferences are business: you’re going to participate as a professional in your chosen field. Yes, socializing is important too, but if you don’t get to any papers, or you don’t learn anything new, then you’re wasting time and money by going. When you’re a senior scholar, and your conference schedule is full of meetings for committee work, meetings with your publisher, etc., then you can think about skiving off. Til then, your job in going to conferences is to hear new research, watch how people give papers, think about what you’ve learned, prowl the book exhibit and see what’s hot. Don’t think of it as a junket to a cool city: do your job.

Look for good role models. Who gives papers that are well-written and make sense? Who handles tough questions well? Who asks tough questions in non-offensive ways? Who’s doing a lot of service work and what are they doing? Who is willing to talk to junior scholars and students at the parties? Who is publishing a lot in your area? Who has great new books out? Who looks and behaves professionally? Who will be your role models, and how will you emulate them and interact with them, and your colleagues?

(Cross-posted at academicronin)

I heard some great papers at AMS. But I also heard some papers that were so bad I wanted to hand the presenters books and tell them to go read. No, that’s not true. I wanted to tell them to leave the profession, because they were embarrassing themselves and their schools. There seemed to be a lot of flaky presentations this year, and wow were some of them out there. The bad wasn’t limited to grads or junior scholars or senior scholars or any particular genre or era. After one, I heard a senior scholar say that if that was what Harvard was producing these days, he was glad he taught somewhere else. I heard one presenter make claims that someone he’d interviewed for his research had said were completely inaccurate. I heard conspiracy theories from a senior scholar, and I heard a (newer, gentler?) Taruskin ask one student why she didn’t know that the argument she was making had been made more than thirty years ago in a book she claimed to have read for her work. It was distressing to hear so much uninformed scholarship.

I also heard papers that were interesting but didn’t really have a point, or argument, or that showed anything new. They were just….nice. That was disappointing, too.

I don’t want to me nice. I want to be mean and name these authors whose scholarship was so riddled with error and stupidity. I want to tell several grad students that they should stop now, before they might take on more debt, to go do something else; I want to tell some senior scholars that while once they were contributing, now their memories or cognition are not so good, and it’s painful to watch them grope their ways through papers that make little sense.

But I’m nice.  So I won’t name them. But I hope someone tells them. Advisors, maybe; research assistants; long-time friends. it would be nice if someone did.

(Cross-posted at http://academicronin.wordpress.com/

Another AMS, another opportunity to explain why I cringe when self-identifying as a musicologist. This was the first year, after many unsuccessful attempts, that I presented a paper at the national meeting, but I felt that the quality of the papers overall was uneven. (Yes, more so than usual.) Am I just not wanting to belong to a club that would have me as a member?*

Some axioms and rarely-heeded lessons on writing, fashion, and social discourse for AMSers:

1. “Filmic” is not a desirable adjective, no matter how many times you repeat it.

2. Having a reception for self-aggrandizing musicologists in a room of floor-to-ceiling glass constitutes acoustical malpractice.

3. Juxtaposition is not analysis.

4. Orange shirts are acceptable attire for prisoners, playwrights, and the people who rip the guts out of fish. Orange socks are acceptable for academics, but mustard yellow is preferred.

5. Silence is better than peacocking.

6. Presentations should have the same entrance policy as the film Psycho: no late admittance. Otherwise presenters must field questions like, “What happened to Janet Leigh?”

7. Women who wear colorful tights to AMS do indeed plan things that way.

8. Tweed is no longer a professorial alternative to wool. Its reputation precedes it.

9. If you want to interrogate someone, join Scotland Yard. If you wish to interrogate something, stop.

10. Session chairs may only arrive late if they enter wearing a pink feather boa and a “Wagner is my co-pilot” button.

And let’s be clear about one thing: there is no time before the time-space problem.  You might as well look for the time before there was a “time before time” problem.

*See Groucho Marx, telegram to the Friar’s Club, paraphrased in Woody Allen, Annie Hall, originally Anhedonia (1977).

I’m NOT surprised that the meeting is going on. A big chunk of money had been spent already, and I can see that the organization’s leadership might have felt that they could not simply write off that kind of investment. I can even see that they would think that it was important to some of the putative presenters’ careers to give papers at the meeting, although at this point, I doubt it would have affected anyone’s funding for travel.

What I AM surprised at, and what really guts me, is that the letter, written by committee or not, expressed absolutely no reference to the laws that those of us who opposed holding the meeting in Tempe objected to, except as some sort of bullshit “collective political action.” This upsets me, I think, because to me, the laws are clearly wrong in a moral sense (and in a constitutional one), and are not at all “political.” And to a certain extent, because I am acquainted with a couple of the members of the Executive Committee, I feel a little sick at not knowing if they willingly characterized racial discrimination as ‘political’ or if they were somehow argued down. It’s not a good feeling.

I’m also upset and, perhaps naively, surprised at how this entire thing has been characterized by some, especially in the Inside Higher Ed comments, as being a ‘leftist’ issue, or a case of ‘political correctness.’ I don’t know how people who have read the US Constitution and know anything about US history can see a support of equal rights and equal protections as being ‘leftist’. Admittedly, I have a dog in this fight — my family includes people of color who are Southeast Asian, African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino. Some of my family members are also gay. But of all of those people, only the Latinos are likely to be personally affected by SB1070. This is a big country, though, and it’s not all about my family — it’s about anybody. I don’t see that this is any different morally than making ethnic minorities wear identifying clothing or denying people of a certain skin color the right to eat with Anglos. Shouldn’t we have reached a point where civil rights are seen as patriotic, rather than partisan?

So that’s why I’m saddened. Not so much about the decision to go on, but about the apparent unwillingness of the leaders of an organization to which I belong to publicly recognize that this is a moral issue at all, or even, at the very least, to publicly recognize that this is a moral and ethical issue for a fair number of the membership. This lack of acknowledgment of something clearly very meaningful to at the least a sizable and vocal majority minority comes across as a lack of respect and a dismissal that is entirely unwarranted and at best, very uncollegial.

I just emailed Sabine Feisst about this, saying that I was sorry that I could neither submit to nor attend Feminist Theory and Music 2011 because of the conference location. Sabine works at Arizona State University, as does her co-organizer of the 2011 meeting, Jill Sullivan. I know that their employer is opposed to the legislation, and I know that both women want to have a good, meaningful conference. So on one hand I’m a little sorry to say no to her about coming to her conference, because running a conference on your campus does often count as service and can be a good thing for tenure and general departmental kudos. On the other hand, with a year to spare, perhaps she and Jill could still work with a colleague elsewhere to relocate the conference and still been in charge of the vast majority of arrangements.

Sabine raised the point that if we boycott Arizona, we should also not go to California (Prop 8 ) or Oklahoma? Nope, we shouldn’t. States where members of the organization holding the conference or presenters at the conference are not welcome shouldn’t get to host academic events. But part of the problem, too, is that while some states have odious laws on the books, they aren’t enforcing those laws. When the AMS met in Texas, the state still had anti-sodomy laws  in place, but they weren’t arresting anyone on them. In Arizona, that’s not quite the case: just look at Arpaio in Maricopa County.

If the FTM and IAWM would issue statements about their decision, and condemning the laws in Arizona, it might make a difference to those of us who would normally like to attend. But with no reassurances and nothing addressing the issue on the conference websites, there’s no way to know what their stances are. As ADM writes, it’s sad. Very, very sad.

Cross-posted at http://academicronin.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/more-on-az-the-maa-and-conferences-on-women-music/.

WTF is with these supposedly feminist, women-positive academic societies that are holding meetings in Arizona? Do they not realize what’s going on there politically? Do they not care?

IAWM, move your conference!

The Medieval Academy of America is meeting in Arizona this year. In an eloquent open letter posted by Quod She, QS’s friend The General explains why not only will she not be attending, but also why she’s boycotting the MA. It sums up my feelings exactly, so I’m going to repost it here in its entirety.

Dear Medieval Academy,

I just read your recent announcement about your decision to proceed with the 2011 meeting in Arizona. I am deeply disappointed and rather stunned at your decision. As one of the few medievalists of color in the profession and on your membership roster, your decision means that anyone of color (or any shade other than white) will be under surveillance, put in the category of second-class citizen, and generally thought of as a person of suspicion if they even attend the Arizona meeting. As someone who has served for several years on a board of directors that managed a revenue stream of 70 million dollars, I understand the directive of fiduciary responsibility quite well. But I also would like to point out that your choice means that you have chosen monetary gain over human value for your organization. You have decided that diversity and encouraging students and faculty of color to go into Medieval Studies is not a core value of the Academy. Rather, the fiduciary bottom line of the endowment is more important.

Your letter states that you feel that you were not in a position to make a “collective political statement” for the entire group, but yet you have. Your decision means that a minority of your membership will be excluded, treated as alien others, and asked to constantly carry “papers” during their trip. You are asking me and every other member with a skin shade not deemed “American” or an accent not considered “standard” to accept this treatment and see it as just another political issue. When were basic civil rights a partisan political issue rather than an ethical and moral one? It would be one thing if you wanted not to hold a meeting in a state or location because it had voted Democrat or Republican; that would be a partisan “collective political statement.” But you are asking me and any person of color to walk into a state and pretend that being a second-class citizen is fine. When did basic civil rights become a partisan political statement? I was under the impression that all the members of the Medieval Academy believed in civil rights. Or had I and other members been wrong? Is the Medieval Academy still an ivory tower institution that excludes, women, people of color, and the disabled? Is the Academy not interested in supporting their members and equity? For me, these were the issues at stake in your decision. And your answer to these questions were shattering.

Your decision and letter tells me that I should find it acceptable to come to a professional academic meeting and wear a figurative star on my lapel and have my papers potentially checked at every turn. What you are saying to me and every scholar (domestic and international) of color is that discrimination is fine, that equitable treatment in our field is not a priority or an inalienable right. This is the very opposite of community building. You say in your letter that it is about the work that people have done, yet the meeting’s presence in Arizona is going to overshadow the work. I would be queasy discussing Lateran IV’s restrictions and injunctions against Jews and Saracens in a state that is enacting their own version of these laws. The conference will not be an exercise in political free speech; rather it will condone the behaviors that put members of the academy under scrutiny.

Several blog comments discussing this decision have said it would be OK to have the meeting and just organize for political action. I completely disagree because this is not “just” a political issue; you are asking people to be comfortable with other members of the Academy being stopped, asked for papers, possibly arrested, and held for questioning. You are asking that our personal rights be assaulted, abused, and trampled on all to attend a professional meeting.

You are asking too much and therefore I plan to boycott the Medieval Academy and encourage anyone else to do likewise. I do not want to be part of an organization that feels it is acceptable for me to be discriminated against.

Sincerely,
The General

At Unlocked Wordhoard, Richard Scott Noakes writes that no one “imagines that the citizens of Arizona will hear of the dozens of medievalists clamoring for a boycott of their state and say to themselves, “You know what? Now that I know these medieval scholars are unhappy, I think I’ll vote for completely open borders.”” He also thinks that by creating a petition to send to the MAA, scholars are unjustly jeopardizing the professional futures of those who don’t sign the petition. I think Noakes missed the point here. The point isn’t whether anyone signs a petition to the MAA. The point is that no organization, particularly a scholarly one, with real or assumed purposes of education and free thought for all, should be supporting  the economy of a state with unjust laws.

As a delegate to the ACLS, I completely understand what it means to make a committment to a location for a conference. Moving a conference after hotels and other spaces have been booked can mean an enormous loss of money for the hosting organization. However, FTM, unlike larger groups like the AMS or SMT, usually do not commit to blocks of hotel rooms or have to put up large amounts of cash up front for their meetings. Even the AMS moved its annual meeting out of Cincinnati in 1990 when the city indicted the Contemporary Arts Center and its curator, Dennis Barrie, for obscenity for putting on an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography.

FTM 11 , I urge you to reconsider holding your next conference in a city where a significant portion of attendees risk discrimination and, as the General says, second-class treatment. Feminist theory has long grappled with race, class, status, and justice. Would you really discount all of that work to hold a meeting in Arizona?

Cross-posted at http://academicronin.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/no-az-for-me/.

• The huge turnouts for the “alternative format” sessions, which were really sessions of committees and interest groups that are usually relegated to the 8-11 slot of death.

These sessions ended up being standing-room only in a lot of cases. I attended the session on the Committee on the Status of Women, during which several past chairs of the CSW spoke about what the CSW had achieved in the past and where it should be headed now. I feel very strongly that the AMS still needs the CSW, and that the CSW needs to do some research into how women are represented in the profession and at the annual meeting. AMS President Jane Bernstein noted that 45% of the presenters at AMS 2009 were female, and that’s great but we don’t know a lot of other important things. What kinds of institutions women are working at? Is the parity between teaching colleges and R1s? What is the rate for tenure among women in musicology? What kind of publication rates are there for women? Is research on women in music still considered a niche by tenure and publication committees? (I hope not; that’s where I live.) What kind of support are women getting for research and pedagogical projects? Judith Tick brought up the issue of greater internationalism in the AMS, which led to the questions of how to address race, class, and cultural difference. How can the AMS work with groups like the IAWM (which had a terrible turnout the last time it hosted an AMS reception, for reasons I don’t understand at all) to better support women in the field?

[During the CSW session I wondered whether the AMS should hold meetings in states that do not allow same-sex marriage. The AMS once dropped a conference in Cincinnati because of the city's censorship of a Maplethorp exhibit. I would fully support not giving conference business to states with anti-gay marriage laws on the books, and I imagine many AMS members would also do so. Why should AMS members travel to and spend money in states that do not recognize their equality?]

This just touches on a small amount the session’s discussion. I’ve asked ALCS member societies about their committees on women in their disciplines, which I’ll send along to Susan Cook and incoming CSW chair Bonnie Gordon in a week or so.

I know that the Pedagogy Study Group session was also very popular. The PSG has gone from a small interest group to a major entity in its few years of existence, and it’s no surprise to see it draw such a big crowd. The role of pedagogy within the discipline is here to stay, to the great benefit of instructors both new and veteran.

In sum, the “alternative format” sessions seemed hugely popular. I know that conference spaces are booked 3-4 or more years in advance, and so I expected crowded rooms for a while yet. But when it comes time to book future venues, I hope the AMS will be able to get bigger rooms for these important panels.

• The AMS on the internet

As a member of the AMS-L moderating team, I attend the Committee on Communications meeting. What struck me this year was the online interest in AMS-related events and information, and the AMS’s plans for more online stuff, including podcasts of interviews with members, winners of AMS prizes, etc. The Library of Congress lectures are getting 1600-200 hits each, which indicates that members and the interested public are watching. There are also great resources for teaching on YouTube and iTunesU that the AMS may link to. My students, at least, love short video clips, so I can’t wait until the day I can begin my Intro to Musicology course with podcasts of Susan McClary or J. Peter Burkholder or Mark Evan Bonds talking about musicology.

• The results of the 2008 meeting survey & the Council meeting

Ok, it wasn’t really a survey, but the open invitation to write to the meeting planning committee with preferences, suggestions, and complaints about the annual meeting. While Honey Meconi, who presented on this at the Council meeting, didn’t have statistics, she did provide a great overview of the comments, which were predictably all over the map. I’m not comfortable disclosing all of the discussion that went on, but I’m pleased that the committee really took the feedback seriously and is looking at making changes to make the annual meeting more dynamic and inclusive.

I was new to the Council last year and observed the STFU rule then (although I certainly don’t think it’s necessary for new members), just learning how it worked, but I felt comfortable speaking up this year and asking questions and making comments. I wish more Council members participated actively in the meeting–there are an awful lot of folks who I’ve now seen go through two years of meetings without ever voicing an opinion or bringing up a concern. Maybe those folks were the ones who didn’t talk in class, either. AMS members who are not on the Council should be able to go up to Council members with concerns and ideas and trust that the Council member will pass those things on; for Council members to be effective, obviously, they have to be involved. It’s not just the first step in serving in other AMS roles–it’s an opportunity to influence policy in ways you believe in. So Council members, speak up!

I think that covers it, except for fashion, which I’ll get to in a later post. Really, see-through tops and dandruff are not your friends at these meetings, people.

I would like to see more transparency in the planning process. Currently, members not privy to the paper and session acceptance process know only what we are told by the committee and by Bob Judd on the AMS site: that there are “144 daytime papers in 45-minute slots, with 120 chosen on a blind reading and 24 added with authors’ names revealed; panel discussions in the evening, etc.” We do not know how the decisions are made: is there a scoring process? Do you make three stacks: Yes, No, and Maybe, and then reduce from there? How much discussion is involved? How is the program committee chosen? Are particular topics and approaches more heavily weighted than others? Does the existence of other societies mean that topics handled by those societies are not as frequently accepted? Why are its members almost exclusively from PhD-granting institutions? I think members need to know exactly how the business of creating the national meeting is conducted.

Transparency is also needed in regard to several committees related to the annual meeting: What does the Committee on Diversity do the rest of the year? Why doesn’t the Committee on the Status of Women address the disparities found within the program of national meeting itself? When the AMS CFP writes that a successful paper is “typically creative, original, eloquent, and well-written,” to what papers and abstracts are they referring? We have all heard bad papers at the national meeting, and, given the lack of diversity on the program, I think many of us wonder if a truly “creative” paper or approach would be noticed. Kate van Orden has made pleas for more creative and diverse articles for JAMS; the AMS national meeting needs to make clear that it too embraces a similar broadness in approach, topic, and methodology.

We need more statistics to show who and what is accepted—not just a breakdown by topic era, but statistics that show how many minority presenters there are, how many women, what kinds of institutions they come from (are they from community colleges, 4-year colleges, universities, or independent scholars?), and what kinds of topics are being accepted, with greater specificity than “Renaissance.” We need to know this because women and minorities are disproportionately unrepresented among junior and untenured faculty; papers also seem to come predominantly from scholars at PhD-granting institutions. There seems to be an agreement that work by scholars from smaller schools is inferior to those at R1s, when this has been shown untrue. There is a catch-22 at work here; women and minorities tend to get tenure less than their rest of their cohort. In order to get tenure, they need to be on the program, yet untenured women and minorities appear on the program less frequently, again, than their cohort.

I would recommend ending the practice of taking 120 papers “blind” and selecting the rest from identified papers. To my knowledge, this practice was instituted in order to give lesser-known scholars a chance to present while not alienating “big names” if their papers were not accepted—the “big names” could be chosen when the papers’ authors were identified. This has, in actuality, resulted in serious resentment by “unknown” scholars who view the practice as catering to big donors and scholars with more power within the discipline. It also results in the programming of “big names” during the same time slots as up-and-coming scholars; at AMS 2008 in Nashville, Carolyn Abbate was scheduled in a small room while a lesser-known scholar was put in a ballroom. Abbate’s paper had an audience that overflowed into the hallways; every session scheduled against her presentation was virtually empty, including the poor guy left alone in the big ballroom. If AMS wants to feature its well-known scholars fairly, then they should be given plenary sessions that do not compete with other sessions. Plenary speakers could be (self-)nominated or invited by the program committee.

I would also like to see a return to the 250-word abstract and 20-minute paper. Thirty-minute papers are too long; too often they delve into minutia and speakers are discouraged from presenting clear and concise material. I have been at many sessions in which the paper was stretched beyond reason to meet the 30-minute mark and there were few or no questions afterwards. If the program returns to a 20-minute presentation/10-minute question format, there will be time for more papers to be presented, and will encourage crisp, succinct writing.

Evening sessions could also benefit from rescheduling and timing. There is an enormous loss of audience after 5 p.m.; evening sessions are ghettoized in a slot from 8-11 p.m. that is, for many, difficult to attend. Evening sessions appear to have gained momentum in the last several years; surely some of the sessions scheduled for this slot could be “mainstreamed” into the daytime program? The same applies to special interest groups; what makes a session on Broadway or prima donnas so much more valuable than one on diversity in the classroom or popular music (to draw but two examples from the Nashville program)?

Tamara Levitz has written a report on this year’s selection process, but it focuses mostly on how papers were categorized or not categorized. Levitz indicates that the “hot topics” of the ’90s seem to be fading when she writes that

I also noticed a distinct patriarchal frame to the composer list: there are very few women on it. When women were forefronted in the abstracts, they were often cordoned off in their own category of research, or considered primarily as singers and pianists. I used the rubric “Women in Music” to describe this category in the newsletter, because the authors within it discussed just that, women who make or compose music, rather than feminist theory of any kind. Similarily, there were only a tiny handful of abstracts submitted on issues of gender and sexuality, or LGBTQ history. The list was also very circumscribed in terms of race and class.

Indeed it is, and Levitz notes that while “that people who submitted abstracts felt relatively relaxed about what might constitute a “canon” in musicology,” this occurs “within a certain frame.”  This apparent lack of concern about promoting or keeping to a canon, however, doesn’t come across in the program. Levitz raises a number of intriguing issues in her report: that there “was little attempt to move beyond the work into the realms of performance, production, society, or music-making”; and that a “carefully circumscribed and limited geographical frame” has surpassed the “Western canon” in terms of serving as a limiting factor for acceptable and accepted work. I wonder, though, how much of these two issues is the perception that the AMS isn’t the best conference to try to place work on studies that are anything but composition-centered; as well, if you work on African music, the AMS has not traditionally been the place to submit that work. I’m curious to see whether, in the days before the SAM split off from the AMS, if there were more or fewer American music sessions as there are now. If other organizations are covering wider topics of music and wider geographical territories, why should the AMS take those papers/why should scholars submit to the AMS? Clearly this goes both ways in perception of what the AMS usually accepts–what is “acceptable”–and what the program committee might feel is better presented elsewhere.

Thoughts?

And, finally, on a personal note, there’ll be a reception at AMS to celebrate the publication of my new book, Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations, on Thursday, November 12, at 8 pm in the Philadelphia Ballroom North. Consider yourself invited for cake, champagne, and music from great Shakespeare movies.

To introduce myself: I work on women in French and American music in the 20th century and its environs; and music and film. I’ve published two books and some articles, and I adjunct at Westminster Choir College, where in the spring of 2010 I’ll be teaching Intro to Musicology and a graduate seminar on American Opera Since 1950. I’m also the editor of the SAM Bulletin and am currently on the AMS Council. My current research focuses on American composer Louise Talma and her works and musicking Shakespeare’s transvestite women.

More to come!