MGMC History

Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (MGMC) began as the Graduate Student Music Forum Symposium (GSMF). In the fall of 1996, a group of music graduate students from the University of Wisconsin–Madison initiated a graduate student symposium on music-related topics. The symposium, modeled on a similar graduate conference in the Department of French and Italian, held the same vision as it does today: it is an interdisciplinary conference "entirely organized and run by graduate students and is intended to provide participants with the opportunity to present their work in a collegial scholarly forum, and to offer the occasion for students from various institutions to meet their future colleagues."

The symposium grew fast. By the second year, University of Chicago had joined the venture as one of the organizing schools and the one-day conference had grown into a two-day event. When the University of Chicago hosted the third annual meeting in 1999, the program committee decided to add a concert for new music to the paper sessions and invited submission for scores. This dual paper presentation and new music concert conference format is followed till the present. In conjunction with the establishment of the conference format, the program committee of the third meeting also adopted MGMC as the official title of the conference. From 1999 to 2002 University of Wisconsin–Madison and University of Chicago took turns as host.

MGMC expanded once more during the 6th annual meeting in 2002, when Northwestern University joined as one of the organizing schools and hosted the 7th annual meeting. Since then the conference has been held on a rotating basis in one of the three aforementioned schools.

Information compiled and presented by
Cecilia Lo, Andrew Westerhaus, and Gregory Weinstein
September 2006

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Last updated March 13, 2007.
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