Upcoming IMS Events

On 23 October 2026, 10:30 EST, the Florida State University (FSU) College of Music in collaboration with the International Musicological Society (IMS) will host the inaugural “Musicological Brainfood Symposium” on the topic, “Studying Music in the Post-Truth Era.” The symposium will be held in the Longmire Recital Hall on FSU’s Tallahassee campus, and it will be live-streamed on the FSU Libraries YouTube page for music scholars and students around the world to participate. The stream is open to everyone—feel free to share it widely.

The Mediterranean Music Conference Matera 2026 will take place in Matera (IT) from 30 October to 1 November 2026 and is held thanks to the joint effort of four “Mediterranean” IMS Study Groups. The deadline for submitting abstracts is 25 September 2026.

The 92nd Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) will be held on 14–15 November 2026 and 19–20 November 2026. The meeting will be held online as well as streamed from various locations around the world, and will include sessions and performances organized by the IMS Regional Association for Latin America and the Caribbean (ARLAC) and the IMS Regional Association for East Asia (IMSEA). The call for proposals can be found here.

IMS members are entitled to a reduced registration fee rate.

The IMS Study Group “Comparative Perspectives on Genetic Criticism in Music,” founded in 2025, invites proposals for its first international conference at the DHI Rome. The conference seeks to take stock of current research questions, methodological approaches, and terminological frameworks in genetic criticism and sketch studies in music, while explicitly exploring their comparative potential across composers, repertoires, and research traditions.

Twenty years ago, the IMS Study Group “Musical Iconography” was founded at the landmark congress “Musical Iconography in the XXI Century: Mapping European Art for Context and Meaning” (Ravenna, 2006). The meeting brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and academic traditions, united by a shared interest in musical iconography—explored in diverse fields of research such as musical archaeology, Renaissance iconology, oral traditions, twentieth-century synaesthetics, text-image studies, performing arts iconography, and many more. To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the study group invites colleagues to Vienna for a three-day international conference.

In 2026, the IMS Study Group “Musical Iconography” will celebrate its twentieth anniversary with the international conference “Musikgeschichte in Bildern 2.0,” hosted by the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (AT), 2 to 4 December.

The IMS Study Group “Global History of Music” invites proposals for its forthcoming Study Day, to take place online on 21 January 2027 with the theme “Technology and Agency in Global Music History.” This event will consider musical and sonic technologies in their broadest sense, asking what role they have played in global histories of music and sound, how they shape methodological and theoretical approaches to the field, and what their implications are for understandings of human and nonhuman agency.

The ninth biennial conference of the IMS Regional Association for East Asia (IMSEA) will be held at the Kyushu University, School of Design, Ohashi Campus Fukuoka (JP) from 5 to 7 March 2027.

IMS members are entitled to a reduced conference registration fee.

The IMS will hold its 22nd Quinnquennial Congress in 2027: Five days of fresh research, inspiring keynotes, magic concerts, and a world of musicology at our centennial jubilee! The congress theme is “Musical Ecosystems,” and you can read the full call for papers on the website along with information on categories of presentation, languages, deadlines, and the venue. The submission portal will be active from 19 January to 15 June 2026.