SMT 2011 - Minneapolis

This weekend was the 2011 conference of the Society for Music Theory. You can read about the previous two years' conferences here: 2009 parts one and two, 2010.

I didn't take a single picture this year, but I thought I'd share this old one from Nashville/2008, along with some non-academic highlights of the conference.





















1. Minneapolis seems pretty cool. It was sunny and about 50 degrees, and there was a farmers market right outside the hotel on our first day. You can walk forever in the skyways without having to go outside - a useful plan, given their winters. Like always, I wish I'd seen a little more of the city, but there are only so many hours.

2. Here's my favorite line from conversation that two anonymous theorists had over dinner:
Theorist A: I went to ______ a while back and it lasted forever, like 2 hours.
Theorist B: Two hours for that?! You could have watched all of Jurassic Park!*

3. I went to the Yale reception to hang out with my friend Tim, who gave a great Schubert-related paper. In some kind of ninja moment, he moved to shake hands with a person across the table and the blade of his hand virtually sliced through the stem of a wine glass, knocking a total of two wine glasses in opposite directions, and spilling wine all over both of our pants. By then I'd had enough wine not to care, and they were dark jeans, so no harm done. Just a lot of laughing.

4. I got to hang out with a lot of my favorite people, a lot of IU folks (like Jason and Victoria), and my new UWO friend Katie, a masters student in my program. Now I'm twice as excited for next year when the conference is in New Orleans, jointly with American Musicological Society (AMS) and the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM. John is calling it AMSMTEM, and the rest of us are calling it the Trifecta (though the Holy Trinity would be more regionally appropriate). I'm hoping my good friend Mark will be able to attend that one, since this conference was a little lonely without him - even though Tim tried to make up for it by putting candy corn in my water glass during the keynote.

5. I got to spend a lot of time with the thoughtful and enthusiastic Committee for the Status of Women and its associates. I'm the student rep for that committee now, and I think the CSW discussions are some of the most useful parts of the conference for me. Thank God, too, because the meeting is usually from 7-9:00AM.



*Also funny because one of the theorists looks so much like Sam Niel.