Just over 75 years ago, the Harvard Music Department hosted the 1947 Symposium on Music Criticism, which brought 800 attendees from across the country to hear reflections on the topic from prominent art critics, musicologists, and composers, as well as world premieres of works by many of the most successful classical composers of the era. At the time this symposium was conceived—an “adventurous undertaking,” as the organizers deemed it—the classical music critic was well-represented in the local, national and international press. This is no longer the case. And in the intervening decades, the landscape of music criticism has shifted dramatically, expanding in terms of musical genre, genres of writing, publication venues, access, and public interest, including the rise of popular YouTube channels, blogs and podcasts on music-related topics. 

As the organizers of the 1947 Symposium remarked, music criticism can never hope to be “a panacea to all our musical ills” (whatever those may be). But in light of the enormous musical, social and media developments since the mid-1940s, we take the opportunity of this anniversary to return to the topic of music criticism explored at Harvard 76 years ago. We seek to revisit existential questions about the practice and purpose of public writing about music, though with a critical eye, and ear, to the subsequent transformations in music, media, and the cultures that consume them, and to the many peoples and musical traditions the original symposium neglected.

The 2024 Harvard Graduate Music Forum Conference invites proposals for individual paper presentations (20-minutes) that engage with the history and practice of music criticism, broadly understood. We encourage submissions from both scholars and practitioners (music critics, performers/artists and composers), and welcome perspectives from the wide range of disciplines that intersect with music writing in the public sphere, with particular interest in contributions that address issues of the intersections of race, gender, and class, in the United States or elsewhere.

The conference will be an in-person event, and will take place at Harvard’s Music Building on April 12-13, 2024.

Possible topics of contributions include, but are not limited to:

• The historical musical press, in the US or internationally
• The contemporary musical press (broadly conceived), in the US or internationally
• The profession of the music critic today (in the US or internationally)
• The relationship of music criticism & musicology (historically & today)
• The music critic and power dynamics (intersectional issues of race, gender, and class)
• The responsibilities of the music critic (to which audience(s), performers, editors, powers that be, etc.), including: responsibilities of music criticism to local communities and cultures
• Music criticism as pedagogy 
• Music criticism and specialization (musical genre, audience, etc.)
• Criticism as a style of writing/interpretation/journalism
• Music critics’ role in the reception of particular musical works/styles/performers/etc.

**deadline extended**

Please submit abstracts (max 250 words) via this Google Form by January 22, 2024 (11:59pm EST). 

Notification of acceptance will be communicated by mid-February.

Please address any questions or concerns to: gmfconference2024@gmail.com.

Pictured above: Music critics converse at the 1947 Harvard Symposium on Music Criticism. From left to right, George Garner III of the Los Angeles Sentinel, Olga Samaroff (formerly of the New York Evening Post), Virgil Thomson of the New York Herald-Tribune, and Hilmar Grondahl of the Portland Oregonian. Virgil Thomson Papers, Yale University Music Library.