Offering vast wilderness and powerful evidence of human development, IMS2027 host city Stavanger is an eloquent symbol of the relationship between people and the ecosystem where they have flourished. An energy hub with a focus on sustainability, Stavanger will inspire us to reflect on cultural history and reimagine music in relation to the emergence of virtual, edgeless environments as well as to new forms of human-machine interaction and content generation. Showcasing some of the most representative work in musicology, the conference also marks the centennial of the International Musicological Society and invites us to reflect on the histories of our multi-faceted discipline and envision its future. This calls for approaches that engage critically with historiographical norms, archival regimes, and disciplinary formations that have shaped national identities as well as epistemic absences and understand music as a living and embodied practice — preserved and transmitted through gesture, orality, and ecological memory.

The IMS2027 Program Committee invites proposals from across the whole range of musicological disciplines to revisit the following questions:

• What role does music play in physical, cultural or digital ecosystems past and present?
• How should we think of music as relational and therefore constitutive rather than merely reflective of the web of relations and memories that ties humans to their socio-physical environments across time and space?
• What is the role of place, language, and ecology in shaping the musical traditions—including those of displaced and minority groups—, and how are those traditions sustained in the face of global changes and crises?
• How is language implicated in musical creativity, performance, and musicological discourse? This includes new instruments such as Large Language Models.
• In what ways does music partake of communication networks that cut across traditional divides such as human / animal, organic / inorganic and material / immaterial?
• Can we think of musicology not only as a discipline but as an ecosystem in which sound, body, temporalities, identities, and institutions intertwine in reciprocity, conflict, and creation?
• Can machine translation be harnessed to facilitate the consolidation of a multilinguistic and translinguistic community of music scholars and the remapping of existing institutional geographies?
• How is the burgeoning field of Artistic Research reshaping the study of music?

Categories of Presentation

Proposals are invited for free papers, roundtables, study sessions, and dissertation presentations. Only one proposal may be submitted for each of the four presentation categories. Proposals must not exceed 300 words for free papers and dissertation presentations, and 500 words for round tables and study sessions; they must be submitted via the respective online forms. For roundtables and study sessions, a single proposal must be submitted by the session convener. All free paper and dissertation presentation abstracts must be anonymized. For more information on submissions, see the FAQ page.

The program committee seeks free papers that reflect current research as broadly as possible and need not necessarily address the specific themes of the conference. Each free paper is allotted 30 minutes, with 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for Q&A.

Proposals for artistic research papers that include performances or demonstrations are to be submitted in the free papers category (subject to the 30-minute format).

Roundtables are to focus exclusively on topics relevant to the themes of the congress (see questions above). The length of each roundtable is 120 minutes (incl. Q&A and discussion).

Study sessions are more “informal” in nature, providing an opportunity for scholars to exchange ideas on the issues, methodologies, pedagogies, and research frameworks of a given topic while opening the discussion to all congress participants. The length of each study session is limited to 90 minutes (incl. Q&A and discussion).

For dissertation presentations, participants have 10 minutes to present the main argument of their PhD thesis. Only dissertations defended between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2026 are eligible.

We strongly encourage in-person participation by all speakers. IMS members with accessibility needs have the option to propose a pre-recorded presentation with live Q&A.

IMS2027 will also invite proposals for concerts, lecture-recitals, workshops and other types of performances, to be vetted by the Local Organizing Committee.

Languages

English is encouraged. Other languages are possible, but we request presenters to prepare accompanying slides in English.

Deadline

All proposals must be submitted online between 19 January and 15 June 2026 to be considered. Successful applicants will be notified by email no later than mid-November 2026.

Questions or Comments