The IMS Study Group “Decentering Topic Theory” will bring together scholars who are expanding topical analysis beyond the repertoire for which it was devised: chronologically, geographically, and by genre. Examples include, but are not limited to, the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries; the art musics of the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, East Asia and elsewhere; and film and video game music.

The study group will address the methodological questions these expansions raise: the constitution and validation of local topical universes; the circulation and re-signification of mainstream European topics outside their original contexts; and the relationship between topical analysis and the historiographical categories—nationalism, exoticism, originality—through which repertoires outside the canon have traditionally been read. It will encourage international cooperation among researchers, with particular attention to scholars working in and on regions at a remove from the discipline’s established centers, among them East Asia and the Global South, and will maintain relations with the IMS Regional Associations and with IMS Study Groups pursuing related agendas.

Melanie Plesch (AU)