2026 Conference

Welcome

Colorado College 2026

Join us at Colorado College in Colorado Springs for our biennial conference. Paper sessions and the keynote speaker, Berta Joncus, will be available both in person and online. We will also offer online coffee & tea breaks for online participants to socialise. There will also be opportunities to enjoy the beautiful Colorado landscape. More details will be coming soon.

Keynote Abstract

Protest and Appropriation: Abolition Song in Britain and the US, 1787–1830

Berta Joncus—Guildhall School of Music & Drama

If we hold something to be an inarguable truth, how do we argue for it? In particular, what arguments could we make to someone whose disbelief is seeded by lies and driven by self-interest? Should we deliver the truth in all its nakedness, even if this triggers a shocked rejection—or are we more likely to be successful if we appeal to our listener on their own terms, and address their existing structures of feeling, warped though these may be by their denial of the truth? Surely the latter course is more practical—but if we choose it, what are other believers in the truth to make of our equivocation with falsehood?

This is, roughly, the dilemma presented to us by 18th-century Abolition song, a corpus of about 80 works brought to light by myself and the US-based scholar Julia Hamilton over the past decade. Abolition song was conceived in protest against the slave trade, which Britain dominated and eventually abolished in stages, in 1807 and 1833. Abolition song sought to move its auditors to social, political and economic action against the slave trade. Yet it perpetuated stereotypes of the African that conformed to imperial interests, overlaying them with sentimentalism and regulating them through polite music in a way that seemed to absolve its white listeners of the crimes of slavery.

This paper treats the emergence, workings, and types of Abolition song in Britain, its export to the United States and local manifestations there, and its use of sentimentality as a palliative to audiences’ imperial self-understanding even as it sought radically progressive change against the most powerful interests of its day. I will conclude with some thoughts on how sensitive present-day performance of this work can, by embodying the convictions of its long-forgotten authors, redeem its representations from mere expropriation and allow audiences to hear again the passion for freedom with which much of this work was imbued.

Call for Proposals (Closed)

Submit a Paper / Panel / Lecture / Recital (hybrid)

The North American British Music Studies Association invites proposals for the Tenth Biennial NABMSA Conference, hosted by Colorado College. We welcome abstract submissions of no more than 350 words on any topic related to musical cultures of/in Britain and its empire from antiquity to the present day. We particularly encourage proposals that respond to the conference theme ‘Performance, Pedagogy, Participation’. We are interested in papers that reflect on how British music—in its widest sense—is performed, taught and participated in, and consider how British music is mediated and circulated on a global scale. Submissions on topics outside of the theme are also very welcome.

Please submit two copies of your proposal (one with your name and one without) and your preference for in-person/online presentation to nabmsaconference2026@proton.me by 16 February 2026.

The conference will be hybrid, with in-person and virtual options available for both presenters and attendees (more details will be forthcoming). Presentations will take a variety of formats, including twenty-minute individual papers, themed panel sessions, workshops involving group participation, roundtable discussions, lecture-recitals, and posters accompanied by a 5-minute ‘lightning talk’.

We welcome papers that engage with practice-as-research, performance practices, and participatory or collaborative practices. Colorado College houses several historical instruments that can be requested for performance; requirements should be discussed with the program committee. Instruments available are as follows:

• Fortepiano after Dulcken (1795) by Paul Poletti, tuned at A=430
• Double-manual harpsichord and a clavichord by Thomas Goff (1940s)
• A virginal
• A lute by Arnold Dolmetsch
• A full consort of viols (SSTBB)
• Two full consorts of Baroque and Renaissance recorders
• Two consorts of crumhorns and two cornetti

The program committee actively seeks submissions from scholars at all levels, including students, and those serving within and outside of academia. The Nicholas Temperley Prize will be awarded for the best scholarly presentation given by a graduate student, and all students with accepted papers are eligible to apply for the Byron Adams travel grant.

• Nuria Bonet (chair)
• Peter Kohanski
• Rebecca Thumpston-Gallagher
• Jason Rosenholtz-Witt

Conference Program

Provisional schedule

The program committee has drafted a provisional schedule for the four-day conference. Time-slot assignments may change before the program is finalised; the final version will be published here when ready.

Read the provisional conference program ↗ on SharePoint.

Conference Abstracts

Below is a list of accepted abstract titles and authors. Please view the full abstracts in this PDF ↗

• What Makes Who Beautiful? An Analysis of One Direction Fangirl Culture in the Age of Social Media - Lauren Adamow and Forrest Tucker
• Prayers for the Queen's most excellent Majesty: Sacred Songs in Praise of Elizabeth I in Metrical Psalmbooks - Samantha Arten
• Minstrel or 'Marvelous Musical Prodigy'? American Piano Virtuoso Thomas 'Blind Tom' Wiggins Tours the British Isles - Connor Austell
• "I Am the Resurrection and the life saith the Lord": An Explanation of "The Ordre for the buriall of the dead," from The Booke of Common Praier Noted (1550), by John Merbecke - Davis Badaszewski
• "[T]heir deeds have rais'd a monument": Ideas of Britishness in Musical Memorialization of the Terra Nova Expedition - Kirsten Barker
• Pub Pedagogy and Participation: Cornish Folk Musicking at the Intersection of Celtic and British (Workshop) - Nicholas A. Booker
• 'Purgatory starts ten yards from the front line': The Choral, Elgar, and Religion in the First World War - Joanna Bullivant
• "A great master of counterpoint": Bernard van Dieren's Diaphony, and its problematic premiere - David Byrne
• Between Popularity and Respectability: Orientalism in Liza Lehmann's In a Persian Garden (1896) - Lindsay Campbell
• Private music academies in late 18th- and early 19th-century London: their role in amateur music making - Catherine Crisp
• "Dreams that are true, yet enigmatical": sensing the divine in Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius - Tavish Daly
• Ephemeral Institutions: Precarious Woodwind Craft Knowledge Transmission in the British Early Music Movement - Patrick Connor Dittamo
• "Rescuing" British Modernism: Edward Sackville-West and the BBC 1943–47 - Hilary Seraph Donaldson
• Teaching and Performing Political Identity Through British Labour Songbooks in the Early 20th Century - Stewart Duncan
• The English Hymnal and Musical Communities - Daniel Galbreath
• "Death Leaves a Heartache No One Can Heal:" Musical Subversion and Othering in the Irish Caoineadh Tradition - Charissa Garrigus
• "I Hear a Wizard Music Roll": Musical Encounters with the Dead in Liza Lehmann's In Memoriam - Alison Gilbert
• Performance or Participation? The Long History of Non-Professional Song - Oskar Cox Jensen
• Share our Sounds: Exploring the Royal Northern College of Music's newly-digitised archive of student recordings - Rachel Johnson
• Protest and Appropriation: Abolition Song in Britain and the US 1787-1830 (Keynote Address) - Berta Joncus
• Jane Austen's Music Collection: Impacts on Her Life and Literature (Lecture Recital) - Laura Klein
• Tagore, Musical Hybridity, and the Transmutation of Opera - Anushka Kulkarni
• "Too Cosmopolitan": Gerald Finzi, Antisemitism, and the English Musical Renaissance - Zen Kuriyama
• The Generification of Gilbert & Sullivan - James Brooks Kuykendall
• Learning from the Lilliputians: Child Performers and the Education of Eighteenth-Century London Audiences - Erica Levenson
• The Troglodytes of Heddon Street: Music Meets Modernism at the Cave of the Golden Calf - Matthew Madeley
• Exploring a Concealed Rossetti Song Setting in the Music of Jane Joseph - Kathleen McGowan
• Tonic Sol-fa as Imperial Process: Control and Capital (Organized Panel) - Charles Edward McGuire, Panel Organizer
• Building a Better Subject: Tonic Sol-fa and the British Competition Festival - Charles Edward McGuire
• Sounds of Incarceration: Tonic Sol-fa in the Colonial Concentration Camp - Erin Johnson-Williams
• Tonic Sol-Fa as Interdisciplinary Process - Sophie Iddles
• Nationalist Processes: Tonic Sol-fa and Chinese Musical Identity - Ellan Lincoln-Hyde
• Some Watery Miracles: Marshland Listening in Britten's Curlew River at Blythburgh (2024) - Imani Mosley
• The Preservation Paradox: The Transformation of Scottish Traditional Music - Paul Moulton
• The Commonwealth Comes to Cardiff: Music, Spectacle, and the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games - Trevor R. Nelson
• "Seems like a Nice Boy": Nostalgia, The Good Old Days, and the Trappings of Respectability - Louis Niebur
• Sonic Cultural Identity in Thank Goodness You're Here! - Raynor Nugent
• From Contest to Classroom: The Pedagogical Dynamics of British Brass Bands - Charlotte O'Neill
• Identity, Otherness, and the Supernatural in Delius's Magic Fountain: Florida, Paris, and Wexford - Alexander Pott
• "Between two kingdoms the river flows": The Course of Britten and Plomer's Curlew River in the United States - Ryan M. Prendergast
• Agha Hashr Kashmiri's Safed Khoon and the Urdu Musical Afterlife of King Lear - Anisha Srinivasan
• 'Musical Hunters after Novelty': Critiques of Virtuosity in Avison and Burney - Tegan Sutherland
• Thomas F. Dunhill's Impact on British Chamber Music - Matthew Swope
• 'Her music never seemed so limitless, so universal': Ethel Smyth, Suffrage, and the Politics of Quotation - Kit Thickett
• Tunes, Verses, and Curses: The Pedagogy and Performance of Piety in Late 17th-Century English Women's Psalm Books - Vivian Teresa Tompkins
• "Over the green sea, mavourneen, mavourneen": How Claribel's "Come Back to Erin" Became an Irish Song - Whitney Thompson
• Pedagogy, Practice and Precarity: Reframing Approaches to Music Literacy in UK Higher Education - Rebecca Thumpston-Gallagher
• "For she is as healthy and wholesome a specimen of English young womanhood as has ever crossed the water": Envisaging May Mukle's "English" Concerts in the US - Anastasia Zaponidou
• Hindemith or Busoni? New Classicality and the Neoclassical Ideal in Alan Rawsthorne's Bagatelles for piano (1938) - Chen Zhu

Read the full abstracts document ↗ as PDF.

Travel and Accommodation

Getting to Colorado Springs

Travel

Colorado College in Colorado Springs, CO, is served by two major airports: Colorado Springs Airport (COS) and Denver International Airport (DIA). Colorado College has offered a limited number of shuttles to pick up and drop off conference attendees at both airports. If you would like to use these services, please indicate your arrival and departure times in the conference registration so that we can schedule them to accommodate the largest number of attendees.

If you choose your own transport:

• COS is approximately a 20-minute drive to the conference venue. It is served by public transit and private car services.
• DIA is approximately 90 minutes from Colorado Springs. Groome Transport offers regular shuttle services from the CC campus to DIA.
• Taxi, Uber, and Lyft services are available to and from both airports.

Accommodation

On-campus accommodations are available for $80/night for single rooms. Housing is suite-style, with individual rooms and a shared kitchen, living space, and bathroom for every four rooms. Rooms do not have central air, but standing fans are available at no extra charge; temperatures are generally moderate in the day and cool in the evening in Colorado Springs.

Meals are available to all attendees through the campus dining halls. Reserve both accommodations and meals through the conference registration form. Meals must be reserved by 24 June and are non-refundable after that date.

NABMSA has also reserved a block of hotel rooms for a discounted rate of $149 at the Hilton Garden Inn, which is walking distance from the conference venue. This rate includes breakfast. Use this booking link to secure the conference rate.

Code of Conduct & Technical Protocols

Standards for participation

NABMSA is committed to a respectful, inclusive scholarly community both in person and online. All attendees, presenters, and remote participants are expected to read and uphold the association's Code of Conduct and technical protocols before the conference.

Read the full Code of Conduct & Technical Protocols ↗ on Google Docs.