The Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group (MPSG) aims to provide a distinctive, long-term forum for those with an interest in music and philosophy to share and discuss work, in the hope of furthering dialogue in this area.

More about us


Latest stories

CFP | MPSG conference 2024

C

 9th Conference of the Royal Musical Association Music & Philosophy Study Group   Department of Music, King’s College LondonThursday and Friday, 11–12 July 2024 Keynote speakers to be announced The RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group warmly invites session and paper proposals for this two-day international conference, to be held in London on 11–12 July 2024. The...

Report on the MPSG 2022 Conference

R

Report by Dominik Ralph Mitterer (Durham University) The RMA Music & Philosophy Study Group can look back with great confidence to their smoothly run and meticulously planned annual conference, which took place at King’s College London from 7th-8th July 2022. The conference benefited not only from the inclusion of a diverse range of topics,spanning from Aesthetics, Ontology, and Epistemology...

Hybrid conference package #MPSG22

H

#MPSG22 hybrid package! Panels: popular music and philosophy, musical thinking, epistemic power of music,  @doctaj early careers session on publishing, epistemologies of musical practice, theories of music in history, keynotes. ;

Vernacular Philosophies of Music 20. April

V

MPSG affiliate online event under the auspices of the University of Oxford A Symposium in Connection with the ProjectComposing Philosophy: Aesthetics and Amateurism in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Music (funded by the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions of the European Commission) Convenor and Host: Jennifer Ronyak 20 April 15:30 Online (Zoom) More on the Event An Affiliate Event of...

Punk and Philosophy: Call for Chapters

P

Since the beginning of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ examining of youth cultures in the 1970s, there has been significant debate regarding approaches in how best one can unpack notions of formation, analysis and definition. This has led to the development of what is often termed as ‘post-subcultural studies,’ which has drawn upon a new lexicon of terms, such as ‘scene’...

Aaron Ridley: Song as a Whole

A

Wed, 29 September 2021 | 5:00 – 6:30 pm GMT+1 | Lecture Aaron Ridley: Song as a Whole Like many recent aestheticians, I find the view that song is a simple conjunction of words and music insufficiently holistic.  Here, I defend a strong version of holism against several of the weaker varieties to be found in the literature, and argue that only the strong version is able to do justice to the...

Our Call for Papers MPSG 2022

O

 8th Conference of the Royal Musical Association Music & Philosophy Study Group   Department of Music, King’s College London, July 2022 (dates TBA) The RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group warmly invites session and paper proposals for this two-day international conference. The event will offer an opportunity for those with an interest in music and philosophy to share and...

Sign up for periodic announcements via our Newsletter!