Presented by Penn's Department of Music

The graduate students of the Department of Music at University of Pennsylvania are delighted to welcome attendees to For(u)m: Re-forming Value, Re-valuing Form in Music Studies, a two-day conference taking place February 13-14, 2026 in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. The conference will feature a keynote address by Dr. Eric Drott (Professor of Theory, Virginia L. Murchison Regents Professor in Fine Arts, Butler School of Music, The University of Texas at Austin), whose work on music, politics, and the political economy of streaming continues to shape conversations across music studies.

In the midst of global turns to populist authoritarianism, “vibe” politics, technofascism, and regimes of post-truth writ large, which urge us to acknowledge the place of rhetoric and style in shaping our lived experiences, we seek to examine form, and how value is constituted in close dialogue with form. Rather than defining how to think of form and value, we hope to provoke diverse responses by posing the following questions and exploring the ways prefixes modify definitions of form and value as illustrated in our accompanying graphic:

• Historical Flows and Re-Performance: How can we trace the historical flows of forms and their contemporary re-valuation? We are inspired by Black music studies which has sought to examine the circulation of West African aesthetics to the Americas, and today across the Black Atlantic (Floyd et al. 2017). We are also inspired by the turn to recognize the Global Middle Ages, and how questions of form have been important in understanding dialogue and transmission between cultures of the past (Raphael 2002) and creating and critiquing historically informed per-formances today.
  
  
• Transforming Value: How do musicians and scholars re-value musical forms through deliberate revivals and re-incorporations? We are inspired by scholarship and artists who take processual approaches to form and value and explore how aesthetics can play a key role in restructuring established ways of being (Rancière 2010). We invite scholars and artists who work, interrogate, and theorize experimental and popular musical forms and registers.
  
  
• Social and Economic Value: How do economic systems influence the social value ascribed to musicians? We seek to explore form and value as analytical tools in challenging the traditional separation between culture and economy (Clammer 2014), and the historically liminal position of musicians (Butler Brown 2007). We are interested in economic and cultural anthropological inquiries into the concepts of value and form.
  
  
• Materiality and Circulation: What are the material dimensions of musical form, and how does value circulate through them? We seek to engage with the material production and circulation of music through formats and channels of dissemination, broadly-construed (Manuel 1993, Sterne 2006). We want to challenge established hierarchies of forms within which music is valued, and those forms that music values, complicating the ontologies of “music” through interdisciplinary interventions, such as media studies, sound studies, more-than-humanisms, and disability studies.