The 56th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association will be hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London, between 8th and 10th September 2020.

There will be two keynote events at the conference:

The Peter le Huray lecture will be delivered by Dr Marie Thompson. Dr Thompson’s research centres on the gendered, affective and sociopolitical dimensions of sonic media and auditory culture. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She is the academic lead of the University of Lincoln’s Extra-Sonic Practice research group and the co-lead (with Annie Goh) of the Sonic Cyberfeminisms project, which critically examines the intersections of gender, sound and technology.

The Edward Dent medal award lecture will be delivered by the 2019 award winner Dr Gundula Kreuzer. In both her writing and her teaching, Dr Kreuzer approaches music from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, such as social, cultural, and political history as well as theories of technology and multimedia. Her award-winning first book, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 2010), examines the changing impact of the popular Italian composer on German musical self-perception and national identity. Her second monograph, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera (University of California Press, 2018) addresses how composers since the late eighteenth century increasingly tried to control certain aspects of staging by embracing specific stage technologies. Focusing on the cultural resonances and hermeneutic potentials of the titular technologies of the curtain, the tam-tam, and steam before, in, and beyond Wagner, the book develops a deeply contextualized practical perspective on the nature and ephemerality of staged opera as well as its legacies in contemporary culture. Dr Kreuzer’s first monograph won the 2011 Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society, the 2012 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, and the inaugural Martin Chusid Award for Verdi Studies (2013). Among other grants and awards, Kreuzer has received the Paul A. Pisk Prize (2000) and the Alfred Einstein Award (2006) from the American Musicological Society, as well as the RMA’s Jerome Roche Prize (2006).