Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory

RMSMT is the professional society for music theorists serving the Rocky Mountain region, which covers the U.S. states of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, as well as the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

---

Rocky Mountain Scholar's Conference 2020

With great regret, the planners of the Rocky Mountain Music Scholars announce that, due to concerns over the corona virus, we cannot go forward with our planned conference in Greeley, March 27–28. An increasing number of institutions are refusing to support travel for academic reasons and/or banning such travel entirely (as an example, our institution has declared all student travel “non-essential”). Moreover, we understand that our participants may well have legitimate health concerns about travel at this time. While the decision to cancel has been painful, we believe it the prudent one, one that will help protect people in our communities who may have a greater risk of complications than ourselves.

Moreover, we have received an email from the American Musicological Society asking for all chapters to hold their spring meetings virtually. We are not yet ready to address whether this is even possible for us, or whether some other form of sharing our research would be better suited to our situation.

Another issue we need to address is refunding conference fees. We will certainly make sure this happens, once we figure out the necessary procedures. We hope to have a clearer picture on all these things (and more) in the coming days. Please stay tuned. 

Finally, we would at least like to provisionally offer to host the Rocky Mountain Music Scholars’ conference in spring, 2021—of course, pending dates, availability, agreement among the three societies, and so on.  But we’re hoping we can welcome everyone to our campus then!

The Rocky Mountain Music Scholars Conference will be held on March 27 and 28, 2020, in the Campus Commons of the University of Northern Colorado, in Greeley, CO. This conference is the annual, joint meeting of the Rocky Mountain Chapters of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Theory, and the Southwest Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology.   For registration, transportation, and housing information, please follow this link to UNC's Conference website.

Registration for the conference is now open.

Call for Papers

The Program Committee invites proposals from scholars and students for individual papers (20 minutes in length, with 10 minutes for discussion). Proposals should be sent electronically (as pdfs attached to an email) to society president, James Bungert (jim.bungert@rocky.edu). The name(s) or affiliation(s) of anyone involved in the presentation must not appear in the title or abstract.  For more information and detailed instructions, please download this pdf of the call for papers.

Submission deadline:  5 p.m. MST, January 15, 2020.

Best Student Paper Award

Students who wish to be considered for the Best Student Paper Award (BSPA) must declare their interest in the body of the proposal email. The student will then be additionally required to submit an electronic copy of the paper itself—the version to be read at the conference (i.e., not an entire dissertation chapter)—along with any tables, figures, or musical examples by Friday, March 20, 2020 (to the same email address: jim.bungert@rocky.edu).

---

2018 Conference

The Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory (RMSMT) held its 2019 Annual Meeting on Friday, March 1st and Saturday, March 2nd t the University of Texas at El Paso.. This was a joint meeting with the Rocky Mountain chapter of the American Musicological Society and the Southwest Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Best Student Paper was presented by Nathan Pell, "Tempo as Form: Orchestral Recordings from 1910–1940 in Light of Earlier Sources"

Past Conferences

• 2018

  2018 Conference Schedule

  2018 Best Student Paper:  Jacy Pedersen of Texas Christian University, "A Theory of Closure in the Late Works of Sergei Prokofiev"

• 2017

  2017 Conference Schedule

  2017 Best Student Paper:  Dale Tovar for his paper entitled "Berg's Romantic Rhetoric." Dale is a Master's student in Music Theory at the University of Oregon

• 2016

  2016 Conference Schedule

  2016 Best Student Paper: Jesse Kinne (University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music), "Temporalizing the Play of Recognition and Surprise in Boulez' Incises."

• 2015

  2015 Conference Schedule and Abstracts

  2015 Best Student Paper: Thomas W. Posen (University of New Mexico), "More than a Tritone: A Set Theoretic Analysis of Leonard Bernstein's 'The Rumble' from West Side Story (1957)," and Kristen Wallentinsen (University of Western Ontario), "Fuzzy Family Ties: An Examination of Familial Similarity between Contours of Variable Cardinality."

• 2014

  2014 Conference Schedule and Abstracts

  2014 Best Student Paper: Scott Schumann, "Distorted Topics in Stravinsky's Violin Concerto, Mvmt. 1 (1931)," and Gabriel Venegas, "Formal Reinterpretation in Schubert's Works for Piano Solo."