CFP: The Sound of Empire: Rethinking History through Music, Two Symposiums, Due 1 November 2025 Call for Papers Meetings & Events

Call for papers extended to 1 November 2025:
1. Culminating ERC’s grant, The Sound of Empire in 20th c. Colonial Cultures, MusiCol’s first international symposium, “Music as Relation,” invites rethinking history through music. What does learning music, collaborating in ensembles, building repertoire, and contributing to religious ceremonies and theatrical spectacles tell us about empires, especially when all populations are studied in tandem? We encourage approaches that valorize the agency of musicians in urban cities, despite colonial asymmetries, and investigate how musical practices enabled and embodied relations across differences of ethnicity, class, religion, and national origin, unveiling the dynamic nature of colonial existence. Nice, 13-15 April 2026.

2.  MusiCol’s second international symposium, “Music and Media in 20th c. Empires,” encourages researchers to consider how recordings and music on colonial radio brought new dimensions to music-making in colonial contexts and created careers. Moreover, dependent on local participation while transgressing social and geographic boundaries, how did these shape listeners’ identities? document the evolution of both indigenous and western aurality? Recordings and radio programming present opportunities to explore colonial governance, imperial rivalries, trade, and tastes across regions and empires, and how colonial coexistence was negotiated and from which post-colonial identities evolved. Paris, 16-18 April 2026.

Let’s exchange, collaborate, and foster discussion with scholars from throughout the world in papers, group seminars, and listening sessions. We seek to generate interdisciplinary debate and in-depth comparative analyses across all the modern empires–—whether French, British, Portuguese, Dutch or other–to better understand the history of cultural relations in today’s diverse societies.
Papers possible in English and French. Visit this link for details and submission form: https://musicol.ucsd.edu/wp6b/

Jann Pasler
Principal Investigator, ERC advanced grant MusiCol,
The Sound of Empire in 20th-c. Colonial Cultures: Rethinking History through Music, (2019-2026)
Distinguished Professor Emerita of Music
University of California, San Diego