Midwest Graduate Music Consortium Conference 2024

The 28th annual meeting of the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (MGMC) will be hosted by the University of Iowa on April 6-7, 2024. This conference will feature paper presentations, a new music concert by the University of Iowa New Music Center, and a keynote address by Dr. Eric Saylor, Professor of Musicology at Drake University. 

MGMC is a joint venture organized by graduate students from the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. This year's conference theme, "Global and Local," is meant to encourage discussion of the complex relationships between people, music, place, and the dissemination of ideas. How do locations shape musical practices? How have the shifting dimensions of the global and local world influenced musical study, both historically and in the present day? What unique perspectives can either a global or local perspective offer? 

This year's conference is graciously funded by the University of Iowa School of Music's Hank Feir Excellence in Music Fund, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, and the Office of Community Engagement.

Eric Saylor is Professor of Music History at Drake. He received a bachelor's degree in Violin Performance from Drake University, an M.A. in Musicology from Arizona State University, and a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan. 

Dr. Saylor's area of specialization is British art music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing particularly on the life and works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and on pastoralism in music. He is the author of Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 2022), named a 2022 Book of the Year by the Presto Music Awards and the Financial Times, and English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955 (University of Illinois Press, 2017).  He is also the co-editor of two essay collections: The Sea in the British Musical Imagination, with Christopher Scheer (The Boydell Press, 2015) and Blackness in Opera, with Naomi André and Karen M. Bryan (University of Illinois Press, 2012). His articles and reviews have been published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, The Musical Quarterly, The Musical Times, Musik-Konzepte, The Journal of Musicological Research, Music and Letters, the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and he has presented his research at conferences throughout North America and Europe. Dr. Saylor is also the author of the Vaughan Williams entry in Oxford Bibliographies Online, contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Benjamin Britten in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and was a contributor to the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of American Music (Oxford University Press, 2013). 

Dr. Saylor has received several grants and awards, including the Outstanding Teacher of the Year award from Drake's College of Arts and Sciences (2004), the Drake Humanities Research Scholar award (2018-21), and a Visiting Research Fellowship from Merton College, Oxford (2019). His other areas of interest include historiography, intersections of music and politics, and shape-note hymnody. He also served as President of the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA) from 2016-2020.

Let us know if you'll be attending!

 Contact us at: MidwestGraduateMusicConsortium@gmail.com