The 19th Annual Graduate Students in Music conference (GSIM), for which I was a co-chair with Tom Johnson, was held this past weekend (April 22–23). The conference is entirely organized by graduate students within the department of music at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
“Music and Radicalism, Radicalism in Music” was the theme of the conference, and our keynote speaker was Jonathan Pieslak of City College of New York. (View the full schedule here.)
I live-tweeted the conference in an effort to publicize the event and the presentations via social media (#GSIM2016). It was my first attempt at live-tweeting a conference and it was quite the learning experience! The 140-character limit means that you have to distill each talk to its most essential points, which are only sometimes laid out clearly by the presenter. I tried to @ people whenever I could to include them in the digital conversation, but a surprisingly small minority of people have Twitter handles.
Here’s a best-of from #GSIM2016.
About Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis, “The Hard Cashless Society: Radical Economics and the Music of Hip-Hop Collective Cashless Society”:
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723599513613664256
Oksana Nesterenko, presenting on the works for feral choir by Phil Minton:
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723620863262789632
From a lecture-recital, “Suffering Serene Waves: Radical Ecology of the Interior in Nono’s Late Period” by pianist Jade Conlee:
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723639293676269568
Composer Alec Hall presents on the state of composition of “new music”:
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723894526499270659
Unsurprisingly, a talk on Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer by Allison Smith provoked lively discussion:
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723902321869107200
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723902523778695168
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723904284308451328
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723904834294951936
Here is a taste of Jonathan Pieslak’s keynote talk, “The Sonic World of the Islamic State”:
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723910302379741184
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723913111347015680
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723913651560820741
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723915791402438658
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723916050383908864
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723917291772100608
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723920833522094080
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723919225933467648
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723919356963467264
And finally, the GC’s own Elise Steenburgh presented on the relationship of Khmer-Rouge-era Cambodian song with present day Cambodia:
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723970412611276800
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723972675392163840
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723973014161887234
https://twitter.com/meganlavengood/status/723974499759206400
And finally….
"I don't know what 'radical' means anymore." seems about the right point in #gsim2016 for that…
— Dr- Paula Harper (@pch9857) April 22, 2016
Overall I think it was an excellent and successful conference, made possible through the collaboration of dozens of students. The topic managed to embrace composition, musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and performance, thus representing all the subdisciplines of music within the Graduate Center’s music department—this is no small task!