AMS/SMT After Dark 2025 Call for Papers Meetings & Events

Esteemed Colleagues,

Since 2016, we at #AMSafterdark have hosted an annual comedy panel to accompany the fascinating scholarship we encounter at AMS/SMT/SEM conferences.

Like any other panel, it begins with a CFP. Please send us your ideas/proposals, & we will review them. If chosen, you will be asked to deliver a 5-7 minute talk (about 3 pages). Afterwards, the audience will hopefully deliver the most delightful Q&A you have ever experienced.

The 2025 event will take place THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 8:30pm CST at the HYATT REGENCY in MINNEAPOLIS (see final AMS program for room details).

The event is FREE, & ANYONE IS INVITED. Awards will be given for categories like most esoteric, most likely to be a real conference paper in 50 years, & most self-indulgent question.

CFP: AMS/SMT AFTER DARK X: TOWARD A TRULY HISTORICALLY INFORMED NEW MUSIC THEORY

For our 10th annual AMS/SMT After Dark, we are embracing the most natural, rational, and enlightened system of them all: base 10. Building upon the seminal hand of Guido of Arezzo–and the fact that humans most often have 10 fingers with which to count–it stands to reason that base 10 is the most valid numerical system. We invite proposals that get us back into analysis again (Agawu 2004) via conversions of systems old (Pythagorean, Babylonian, medievalist duodecimal, etc.) and systems less old (dodecaphonic, neo-Riemannian, hexadecimal machine assembly code, and so forth) to sensible, imperial, metric decimal–or by elucidating new norms, types, and reformations within this most superior system. Equal consideration will be given to proposals that employ (socio-)historiographic methodologies and/or material culture artifacts, helping us get out of analysis (Kerman 1980) too. We encourage presenters to bring their scholarship to bear on a multiplicity of repertoires. To that end, we are especially interested in proposals that explore novel forms of lexical counterpoint–inventive phrasings that temper the sharper notes of current triadic mantras, attenuating the audacity of our present euphony.

Some examples…

• Cheaper by the Dozen: A Case for the Efficiency of Maintaining the Base-12 System
• Down with Dozens (and/or Upside Down, and/or Backwards with Them Too): Base-10 Analytical Approaches to Music of the Second Viennese School
• Hooked on Dodecaphonics, or Dodecaphony Was Always for Overachievers: A Critical (Re-)Evaluation of Twelve-Tone Reception History
• “Look, Ma, [one] hand!”: Curwen Solfa Hand Signs and the Circle of Fifths–A Five-Fingered Approach to Musical Motor Development in American Early Childhood Education
• Settling the Score: Why My Approach Eclipses That of My Respectfully Unnamed Colleague
• Spaceballs the Movie the Academic Paper
• A Tenth Too Far: A Digital Archival Case Study in Intervallic Re-Cataloging for the Decimal Age

This theme is just a suggestion. We also invite papers that satirize any aspect of music scholarship, so long as they do not cross the line into personal offenses.

Send hate mail & SUBMISSIONS to amsafterdark -at- gmail.com BY OCTOBER 6.

Follow our Twitter @AMSafterdark & see our full CFP at amsafterdark.neocities.org (or https://bit.ly/amsad2025cfp if you are the type to read the Chicago Manual of Style for funsies)

Cheers,

The AMSAD Committee