Musicological Brainfood Symposium: Studying Music in the Post-Truth Era

On 23 October 2026, at 10:30 EST, the Florida State University (FSU) College of Music in collaboration with the International Musicological Society (IMS) will host the inaugural “Musicological Brainfood Symposium” on the topic, “Studying Music in the Post-Truth Era.” The symposium will be held in the Longmire Recital Hall on FSU’s Tallahassee campus, and it will be live-streamed on the FSU Libraries YouTube page for music scholars and students around the world to participate.

In the twentieth-first century, a global situation unsettled by technological, climatic, and geopolitical change is prompting us to rethink what we thought was true—including how scholars understand truth itself. To explore what these changes mean for music research, this symposium will gather a roundtable of experts from across musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology to reflect on how we might approach the study of music in the post-truth era.

After an introduction laying out the symposium’s theme, the roundtable will feature a pair of position papers by Paula Harper (University of Chicago) and Andrew Chung (University of North Texas), followed by a response from Gary Tomlinson (Yale University), author of A Million Years of Music:

• Paula Harper, “A Preliminary Taxonomy of (2020s) Musical Misinformation”
• Andrew Chung, “Inconvenient Truths and Peculiar Institutions: The Climate Crisis, The Colonial Plantation, and Music”
• Gary Tomlinson, Response

Finally, the event will open up to a discussion with the audiences in-person and online, moderated by the editors of Musicological Brainfood and FSU faculty, Erol Köymen and Dylan Principi.

True to the founding mission of Musicological Brainfood, this event “may delight or possibly perturb you,” promising a discussion “cooked up by leading musicologists to advance, refresh, or reinvigorate … to prod, needle, and pinch your brain.” We hope you will tune in and join us!