Jennifer Oates (Carroll College), Christina Fuhrmann (Baldwin Wallace University), Charles McGuire (Oberlin College & Conservatory), Brooks Kuykendall (University of Mary Washington), and Deborah Heckert (SUNY-Stonybrook)
In the summer of 2003, five American graduate students leaned against a stone wall during a tea break at a conference at the University of Leeds and asked “Why do we always have to come to the UK to talk about British music?” They decided to plan a conference but ended up founding a society: the North American British Music Studies Association. Twenty years after that first conference in Oberlin, Ohio, in June 2004, the organization returned to Oberlin for the 11th biennial conference. At that meeting, the membership surprised the five founders by naming them lifetime members of the society, including UMW Professor of Music Brooks Kuykendall. And, in a development that the founders of NABMSA could not have anticipated, one participant of this year’s conference–faculty at the Royal Academy of Music in London–wondered “Why does it feel like we have to come to the USA to talk about British music?”
