News & Updates

A program of informational workshops, called Council Workshops, has been instituted to further educate Council members on AMS operations and to increase transparency. Members of the AMS Council are invited to attend these workshops to deepen their knowledge of the Society’s operations and prepare for higher office within the AMS. This AMS Council Workshop on AMS Governance will be held online on Thursday, 8 October 2026 at 3:00 p.m. ET. By invitation only.

The AMS Pacific Southwest Chapter welcomes submissions for its Fall 2026 chapter meeting at California State University, Fullerton on Saturday, October 10, 2026. This meeting will feature a keynote address by the eminent scholar and long-active PSC-AMS member Walter Aaron Clark on developments in Latin American and Iberian music research across the last few decades—a topic with special importance to the chapter and the Pacific-Southwest region. The program committee welcomes abstracts of 350 words on any musicological topic, but especially on topics related to Latin American and Iberian music. Completed papers should require no more than 20 minutes for full delivery, followed by 5–10 minutes for questions and discussion. Please e-mail the title and abstract of your proposed talk in an anonymized Word document to Stephen Hudson (shudson@oxy.edu) by 11:59pm PDT on Wednesday, September 16. In your email, please include your name, any A/V requirements, and either your institutional affiliation or city of residence. After a blind review by the program committee, the chapter officers plan to notify authors whose proposals are accepted by September 21. We encourage anyone submitting a proposal to become a member of the local chapter or update their membership. For more details, visit our the “membership and dues” tab on the chapter website. Feel free to contact PSC-AMS Vice President Stephen Hudson <shudson@oxy.edu> or PSC-AMS Secretary Joao Martins <duartemj@uci.edu> with questions.

In this AMS/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Lecture to be held 15 October 2026 at 7:00 p.m. ET, Alex Blue V and Kyle DeCoste reveal the inner and outer workings of the genre, making a case for country rap’s centrality in understanding the politics of race and place in the United States. Country rap, also known as “hick-hop,” is a genre performed primarily by white people in the Southern US. It encapsulates many seeming discrepancies, offering images and sounds associated with rural, white working-class identity while also drawing from a sonic vocabulary derivative of–and associated with–Black urban experience in the US Country rap crafts a self-contained aesthetic world. As opposed to simply being a blending of rap and country genres, country rap is a distinct generic formation shaped by mutually enforcing and contested notions of the rural and urban, Blackness and whiteness, the authentic and the inauthentic. Within the highly racialized discourses that hold country music and hip-hop in opposition, country rap is frequently heard as an unwelcome outlier. RSVP