The Yale Graduate Music Symposium (YGMS) is a biennial event hosted by the Yale Department of Music that provides an opportunity for graduate students engaged in various fields of sonic research to participate in an intensive exchange of ideas. The organizing committee of the ninth YGMS is pleased to welcome submissions on any topic relating to music and sound. We welcome submissions from those in music studies as well as outside of music studies proper, including but not limited to English, Film and Media Studies, American Studies, Religious Studies, Medieval Studies, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Ethnicity Race and Migration Studies, and History of Art. We hope to receive proposals for a wide range of papers, lecture-recitals, sound art installations, and other kinds of thoughtful work on music and sound. See submission guidelines below.

We are excited to announce that Dr. Diane Oliva, Assistant Professor of Music at University of Michigan, will be our featured keynote speaker. Dr. Oliva is a musicologist who engages with history of science, sound studies, and Atlantic history to write transatlantic histories of music and listening in the eighteenth century. The symposium’s workshop will be led by members of our own department faculty.

While our symposium has no set theme for submissions, we have invited our keynote speaker and workshop facilitators to elaborate on a set of keywords concerning temporality and spatial crossings. These include: musical time, duration, repetition, performance history, history, historical performance practice, diaspora, circulation, movement, memory, ritual, tradition, change, queer temporality, crip time, and the temporalities of Black, Indigenous, or other communities of color.