Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation project Music in Gotham: The New York Scene 1862–1875 co-hosts a groundbreaking event alongside it’s neighbor the Music Department at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the New York Philharmonic, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Music and Recorded Sound Division and the Neely Bruce Music Foundation.

With support from the Society for American Music (SAM)

The kickoff event for the exploration of our country’s rich musical heritage will be Forging an American Musical Identity in the Long Nineteenth Century, a diverse and exciting multidisciplinary conference in New York City (28–30 January 2026). It will culminate with a concert at Carnegie Hall by the American Symphony Orchestra (Leon Botstein, conducting), including the modern premiere of George Frederick Bristow’s Symphony No. 5. Niagara. For more information, the conference program, and registration information, follow the links below.

Symposium Website

The Spanish presence in the Americas spans from the Early Modern period to the age of mass Atlantic migrations from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Likewise, interest in Spanish culture and arts led people from the Americas to travel and establish links and alliances with Spain, and many Spanish musicians and/or intellectuals went to work in the Americas for a time or permanently. In recent decades there has been a major development in musicology’s understanding of sonic exchanges between Spain and the Americas thanks to scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. Research has largely focused, though, on musical exchanges between Spain and Latin American countries due to their shared and strong historical ties, as well as their common language. Cultural and musical transfers between Spain and the United States have been addressed to a lesser extent and need more attention. On the other hand, studies have usually favored case-study topics on the mobility of musicians, music sources, and musical genres, sometimes with less emphasis on broader concepts and subjects. This bicontinental symposium in Barcelona and New York seeks to study musical transfers between Spain, North America, and Latin America focusing on the concept of the exchange of musical knowledge, understood in the broadest way. The notion of musical knowledge exchange has been at the very center since the first contact between these three geographical areas. Music of European origin taught by sixteenth-century Spanish missionaries to Native Americans included Spanish music, and Spanish clerics were among the first to provide descriptions of Native American music. The movement or circulation of human beings has been recognized as a required element of the transfer of valuable knowledge. Waves of migration between Spain and the Americas and vice versa started with the first Spanish settlers in the Americas but continued after colonial times. Between c. 1880 and the first decades of the 20^th century (the so-called age of mass Atlantic migrations), around four million Spaniards arrived in the Americas, a big proportion to the Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, but a substantial number also made their way further north. Another wave of migration towards the Americas ensued with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Contacts between Spain and the Americas resulted in exchanges both ways of musical knowledge through a wide range of people: musicians, clerics, ethnographers, intellectuals and scholars, travelers, writers, teachers and students, and other ordinary people who brought with them musical knowledge through a variety of cultural artifacts such as music scores, recordings, musical instruments, scholarly literature, and texts of any kind. The core question of this bicontinental symposium is how the geographical mobility of people, ideas, practices, and cultural artifacts between Spain, North America, and Latin America has had an impact on the epistemic systems of musical knowledge within these territories. We invite scholars from all disciplines, whose work engages with music in both specific and broad ways, to send their contributions exploring topics like:

·        Types of musical knowledge exchanges (e.g., academic, popular, pedagogical, religious, ethnomusicological, others) between Spain and the Americas (North America and/or Latin America)

·        Changes through time and territories in the exchange of musical knowledge between these three geographical areas

·        Musical and musicological knowledge created in the context of displacement and exile between Spain, North America, and Latin America

·        The role of exiled intellectuals and scholars in the exchange of musical knowledge

·        The role of women, indigenous populations, and other underrepresented social groups in the creation, dissemination, and exchange of musical knowledge

·        The influence of migration and exile experience on academic, popular, pedagogical, and other types of musical knowledge and thought

·        The role of intellectual networks for the creation, dissemination, and exchange of musicological knowledge between these geographical areas

We welcome proposals for individual papers and whole panels in English or Spanish. Individual paper presentations must be kept to 20 minutes (followed by 25-minute discussions).

Abstracts should be sent through this form https://forms.gle/3NjBa4tsj3x2uw6a8 by 15 March 2024 in English or Spanish. Participants must indicate whether they want to participate in the Barcelona symposium in 2024 or in the New York symposium in 2025. For individual papers: abstracts of c. 350 words; for panels: abstracts of c. 300 words of the proposal as a whole and c. 200 words on the contribution of each participant. Applicants will be notified by 1 June 2024.

Symposia Programs