CMSC

[REDACTED]: 2026 Columbia Music Scholarship Conference (April 10)

The information for the conference is superimposed over a black and white photo of a man in a very tall room that is covered in white fabric. He's holding a cord attached to some sort of pulley system.

The Organization of Music Graduate Students at Columbia University is pleased to announce the [REDACTED]: 2026 Columbia Music Scholarship Conference held on Friday, April 10, 2026.

Registration Link

Program

Conference Schedule

We are broadly interested in exploring silences—intentional and imposed—that expand conventional understandings of how both sound and society are organized. The chilling of speech and brute coercion of academic norms toward self-censorship, driven by populist and reactionary thought, have forced us to consider these issues. How is silence produced, aestheticized, enforced, or endured, and what might attention to silences reveal about censorship and political economy, compositional aesthetics, violence, memorialization, and other key questions in music and sound studies? 

The keynote address will be delivered by Alejandra Bronfman, Professor of History at SUNY Albany. Dr. Bronfman’s research interests include the production of knowledge, racialization, and technology's role in the amplification of marginalized voices with a focus on the Caribbean in the 20th century.

Questions regarding the conference can be emailed to [email protected].

Sponsored by the Arts and Sciences Graduate Council.