Conference reports illuminate intellectual history with a window on a particular moment. Since conference papers present the most current scholarship, a collection from a single conference provides a glimpse of the state of research on many topics at that time.
RILM recently published the papers from our first conference in Music’s intellectual history, and our retrospective coverage of conference reports, Speaking of Music: Music conferences, 1835–1966, was issued in 2004. The preface to the latter book provides an overview of this publication type.
The photo above is from the American Musicological Society‘s International Congress of Musicology in 1939. Standing: Harold Spivacke, Otto Kinkeldey, Otto Gombosi, Knud Jeppesen, Fernando Liuzzi, Gustave Reese. Seated: Edward J. Dent, Carleton Sprague Smith, Curt Sachs, Alfred Einstein, Dayton C. Miller.
