Call for Submissions: Issue 113 on Sonic Renaissances, from Charlemagne to Beyoncé
May 14, 2026
Current Musicology invites submissions for a special issue on Sonic Renaissances, from Charlemagne to Beyoncé. The term renaissance first acquired its modern association with the broad social and cultural changes of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy after Michelet and Burkhardt’s influential nineteenth-century writings. This kind of historiographic periodization—in which renewed attention to the past transforms cultural practice—has since been applied to various historical and musical developments, including:
- The Carolingian Renaissance and the push for liturgical reform that spurred the standardization of early chant and chant musical notation;
- The Italian Renaissance and the rise of humanistic inquiry that drove technical and stylistic development in music and the rise of genres like monody and opera;
- The Harlem Renaissance of the early twentieth century and the use of the arts to present Black history and culture in all its beauty and nuance toward racial uplift and the repositioning of Black people in the United States and beyond;
- The Hawaiian Renaissances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the reemergence of Kanaka Maoli language, hula, and slack key guitar as practices of Indigenous self-determination.
We are interested in both the aesthetic elements that are resignified during a cultural revival and the ways that sound relates to political and social change. We welcome alternative periodizations, geographies, and stylistic considerations of past and present renaissances, whether engaging with the concept directly or interrogating its deployment in historical study. Authors are encouraged to consider perspectives beyond the United States and Europe, as well as larger interdisciplinary discussions that exchange ideas between sound, music, and other domains.
Possible avenues for exploration include:
- The role of sound in broader cultural movements, for instance: the Great Awakening, The Paris Black Renaissance, the proletarian arts movement(s), the global 60s, Chicago Black Arts Movement, the American Indian Movement, poptimism;
- Genre-specific revivals, for instance: folk revival movements, Bebop, Neo-Classicism, post-punk, neoperreo, nueva canción, Serbian turbo-folk;
- Reevaluations of disciplinary and intellectual histories;
- Transformations in notation, recording technologies, and archives;
- Intermedia relationships and musical meanings across visual, auditory, and material cultures (film, gaming, contemporary art music);
- Resignifications of musical and sonic discourses, topoi, and narratives.
Article submissions should be submitted via the online portal by October 1, 2026. All submissions must conform to the Current Musicology Submissions Guide. Please contact the Editors at current-musicology@columbia.edu with any questions.