Call for Papers - Symposium 'Musical Exile, Migration and Cultural Mobility' in Melbourne, Australia, August 15, 2025

Former MMM team members Nils Grosch and Norbert Meyn are co-convenors of this symposium, hosted by the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne. The Royal College of Music’s mobile exhibition ‘Music, Migration and Mobility’ will be shown at Melba Hall, alongside a special display about migrant musicians from Nazi Europe in Australia. In addition, Norbert Meyn will perform his lecture recital 'Émigré Cabaret'.

CFP: Musical Exile, Migration and Cultural Mobility

Melba Hall, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Friday 15 August 2025

When musicians become migrants, they often exert a profound influence on their new environment: transforming concert life, creating or reshaping music institutions, and contributing to music education. This symposium considers the significance of migration for music-making, examining themes such as identity and belonging; the transfer of repertoire and skills; stylistic hybridity and multicultural music-making; and music’s relationship to nationalism, xenophobia and protectionism.

The symposium builds on the work of two recent projects: The Research Initiative Music and Migration at Salzburg University/Mozarteum, which aimed to advance theory and methodologies in research about music and migration and produced the recently published Routledge Handbook of Music and Migration; and the recent AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project Music, Migration and Mobility at the Royal College of Music in London, which investigated the legacies of migrant musicians from Nazi Europe in Britain and developed sheet music editions, performances and recordings. Hosted at the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia, the symposium also aims to build on growing scholarship on the contributions of displaced persons, refugees, and other postwar migrants to the musical life of postwar Australia.

We welcome proposals for roundtables (ninety minutes) and paper presentations (twenty minutes plus ten-minute Q&A) on any aspect of the topic of exile, migration and musical mobility, including (but not limited to):

• The cultural interaction of migrant, refugee, and exiled musicians with new environments;

• The influence of migrant and refugee musicians on local music institutions and concert life;

• Negotiations of identity and belonging in the lives of migrant, refugee, exiled musicians and receiving cultural milieus;

• The role and meaning of migrant music-making within multicultural societies;

• Theoretical interventions that challenge state- or nation-centric constructions of musical mobility and identity.

The focus of the symposium is not limited to any geographic area or disciplinary approach. Please upload proposals by 4 April 2025 using the online submission form. Presenters will be notified by late April, with a preliminary schedule to follow soon after.

Conveners: Nils Grosch, Salzburg University; Norbert Meyn, Royal College of Music; Nicholas Tochka, University of Melbourne University; Peter Tregear, University of Melbourne. Please direct queries to nicholas.tochka@unimelb.edu.au. 

The symposium coincides with the 80th anniversary of Musica Viva, one of Australia’s leading presenters of chamber music, founded by the Viennese émigré Richard Goldner in 1945. Musica Viva will be hosting a celebratory concert with the specially commissioned ‘Sonnet of an Emigrant’ by Cathy Milliken, performed by the Takács Quartet and Angie Milliken, at the Melbourne Recital Centre the evening before the symposium.

During the symposium, the Royal College of Music’s mobile exhibition ‘Music, Migration and Mobility’ will also be shown at Melba Hall, alongside a special display about migrant musicians from Nazi Europe in Australia.