"Let me just share my screen": Perspectives on the Discipline through the Prism of Pandemic Online Conferences

Abstract

When asked to pinpoint the date that the full seriousness of the COVID19 pandemic dawned for me, personally, I tend to use the March 17, 2020, launch of Music Scholarship at a Distance (MSaaD or #MusicColloq for short)—a virtual daily colloquium series that I coorganized with fellow musicologist Will Robin. While just a few days prior I had been negotiating springbreak travel plans, the cascading announcements of institutional closures, travel and other restrictions, and conference cancelations led us to set up the series in just a few (frantic) days. MSaaD—though relatively small in scope and casual in tone—thus became an early harbinger and prototype for the myriad virtual conferences and other professional events that would be undertaken across the next few years. Music Scholarship at a Distance was an early instance of a wave of virtual programming that arose in the wake of the pandemic’s shutdown effects. It was originally envisioned as a replacement venue for scholarship that would have been presented at canceled spring 2020 conferences, like the annual Society for American Music conference. All told, it ran for seven weeks that spring and early summer, with 35 papers and presentations given, and a daily audience ranging from 30 to 100 scholars. Presenters ranged across the subdisciplines of music scholarship and included veteran senior scholars as well as earlycareer scholars