CFP: Music and Philosophy 2014

4th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group in collaboration with the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the American Musicological Society

Department of Music and Department of Philosophy, King’s College London, Fridayand Saturday, 27-28 June 2014

Generously supported by King’s College London and the British Society of Aesthetics.

Keynote speakers include:

• Professor Carolyn Abbate (Harvard University)
• Professor Philip Kitcher (Columbia University)
• Professor Dmitri Tymoczko (Princeton University)

The RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group warmly invites paper submissions for its two-day international conference, to be held in London on 27-28 June 2014. The event, the fourth of an annual series of conferences run by the Study Group, will offer an opportunity for those with an interest in music and philosophy to share and discuss work, in the hope of furthering dialogue in this area. Departing from the practice in previous years, we will not have a conference theme in 2014, in order to allow engagement with the widest possible range of interests. As such, paper submissions on all topics relating to the area of music and philosophy are welcome. Collaboration between persons from different disciplines (including music studies, philosophy, performance, composition, psychology, history, literary studies, art history, anthropology, and others) would be especially welcomed.

Topics of interest might include (but are not limited to):

• Intersections and tensions between different approaches to music studies (historical musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology) 

and to philosophy (continental, analytic) • Sound and affect
• Differing musics
• Music, rhythm, and time
• Conceptual composing
• Performance, authenticity, and interpretation
• Musical meaning and language
• Music and ethics
• Music and ontology
• Empirical approaches to music
• Collaboration and the poetics of musical decision making
• Digital media and new forms of musical literacy
• Philosophy and sound recording
• Theories of music and mass culture in the twenty-first century
• Philosophy, music, and the future of the culture wars
• Music, transcendence, and spirituality
• Wagnerism in twenty-first century culture
• Film sound, film music, and philosophy
• The philosophical implications of corpus studies, quantitative methods, and geometric modeling  

Proposals are invited for:

• Individual papers (20 minutes) – up to 350 words
• Collaborative papers (up to 30 minutes) – up to 500 words
• Themed paper sessions of three or four individual (20 minute) papers – up to 350 words per paper plus 350 words outlining the rationale for the session.
• Lecture recitals of 30 minutes – up to 350 words

Please submit proposals by email in a word document attachment:

[email protected]

The deadline for proposals is Friday 7 February, 2014.

All paper submissions will be considered by the programme committee:

• Professor Stephen Downes (Royal Holloway, University of London)
• Dr Michael Fend (King’s College London)
• Dr Michael Gallope (University of Minnesota)
• Dr Tomas McAuley (Indiana University)
• Professor Bence Nanay (University of Antwerp & University of Cambridge)
• Dr Nanette Nielsen (University of Nottingham)
• Professor Nick Zangwill (University of Hull)

Reasonably priced university accommodation will be available.  

Any questions, please e-mail [email protected]

More information is available on the conference website: