The Stony Brook Department of Music announces its Sixth Annual Graduate Music Symposium, to be held February 19-20, 2016. 

In recent years, ritual has reemerged as a valuable analytical tool in the study of music.  Diverse work on this topic spans the musical subdisciplines, including two new edited volumes: Michael Bull’s Ritual, Performance, and the Senses (2015) and Jeffers Engelhardt and Philip Bohlman’s Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual (forthcoming), as well as Martha Feldman’s Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (2010).  Approaches initially theorized in anthropology many decades ago have again been applied in a wide variety of contexts, including the use of ritual theory as a lens for understanding not only for music primarily made for ritual practices, but also concert-going practices, electronic dance music festivals, and other traditional musics.  This symposium aims to foster dialogue between and among researchers working in music, sound, and related disciplines concerned with music and ritual.

We welcome the Symposium participants to explore these various conceptions of ritual and how they relate to historical, social, philosophical, and technological manifestations in music.  The topics may include, but are not limited to:

• music used in religious settings;
• reimaginings of what ritual could be in new media, immersive technologies, distribution technologies, digital listening, and online spaces;
• the role of acoustics and aural architecture in ritual;
• music’s facilitation of trance and possession;
• secular ritual in spaces such as festival culture and EDM;
• the hero-worship and sacralization that often accompanies fandom;
• old and new concert conventions, performance practice, and the academy;
• the ritualizing potential of music in politics, protest, resistance, and power.

The symposium will feature a keynote address by Jeffers Engelhardt (Amherst College). We invite submissions of 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers.  Please submit proposals as .doc(x) files to sbugradsymposium@gmail.com by Friday, December 4, 2015.

Stony Brook is easily accessible via JFK and Macarthur airports, Penn Station, and the Bridgeport/Port Jefferson ferry.  Housing with Stony Brook graduate students will be available for presenters staying overnight.