How did medieval people learn music? The answer was not confined to treatises or classrooms. Musical knowledge passed from voice to voice and instrument player to instrument player, through listening, imitation, gesture, repetition, and varied kinds of participation – in worship, ceremony, dance. Music, as we know, was preserved and reshaped in manuscripts, but was also embodied in performance, devotional practice, memory, and the daily routines of religious and educational communities.
These processes of musical learning have often been studied within separate regional and disciplinary traditions. Histories of music education in Latin Western Europe do not always enter into sustained conversation with scholarship on Russian, Ukrainian, Balkan, and other Slavic cultures. Yet bringing these traditions together raises productive questions:
- How was musical knowledge made teachable?
- What relationships connected theory with practice, written texts with oral transmission, and technical instruction with spiritual formation?
- What can manuscripts, diagrams, rubrics, corrections, and performance traditions tell us about teaching as it actually occurred?
A hybrid session that I am helping to organize for the 2027 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo seeks papers addressing these questions.
Call for Papers
“Pedagogies of Sound: Medieval Music Education in Slavic and European Contexts”
International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 13–15, 2027
Hybrid session
The session explores music education across medieval and early modern European and Slavic traditions, focusing on the transmission of musical knowledge through pedagogy, performance, spirituality, and creative practice.
Possible topics include theoretical instruction, chant pedagogy, performance traditions, mystical and devotional approaches to musical learning, manuscript culture, and the relationship between theory and practice. We particularly welcome comparative and cross-cultural perspectives connecting Western Europe with Russian, Ukrainian, Balkan, and broader Slavic contexts.
The session comes at a moment of renewed scholarly interest in premodern pedagogy, cultural transmission, and global approaches to medieval studies. The forthcoming Russian translation of Music Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance also points to growing international engagement with the history of music education and creates an opportunity for broader dialogue between Eastern and Western European scholarly traditions.
By foregrounding Slavic and Russian-language perspectives alongside Latin European materials, we hope to foster conversation across disciplinary, regional, and linguistic boundaries. A designated translator will be available to help facilitate discussion.
Proposals are due September 15, 2026.
Submit through the Confex portal using session ID #8258:
https://icms.confex.com/icms/2027/prelim.cgi/Home/0
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