Boston University Music Society

The BU Music Society is a student organization that includes graduate students in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. BUMS (as it is affectionately known) broadly represents the student government of the Musicology and Ethnomusicology Department, and organizes social outings, paper sessions, and an annual conference.

The following is a message from the BU Music Society.

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The Boston University Music Society unites graduate students in musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. The group facilitates scholarly discourse on music and provides sympathetic support for the unrelenting challenges of graduate school. And we do this in many different ways.

We host a nationally-recognized musicology conference every spring, where up-and-coming scholars present research ranging from South African hip-hop to Byrd motets. The BU Music Society also holds “Turbo Talks,” which feature strictly-timed ten-minute papers followed by five minutes of rigorous questioning: six breathtaking sprints of scholarship in the span of ninety minutes.

The Society also offers a release from the daily academic grind. We gather regularly in the Musicology Department and in less formal venues, where conversations morph from the rigors of graduate work to far less related topics. The BU Music Society provides a platform to express your concerns while bridging the graduate student community with the musicology faculty and the larger academic community.