EVANSTON, Ill. —- Northwestern University will host the 16th annual meeting of the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium on March 2nd and 3rd, 2012. Co-sponsored by The Bienen School of Music and The Graduate School of Northwestern University, the two-day event will include presentations by graduate students as well as a special Friday night concert of compositions by graduate students from the participating schools. All events are free and open to the public.

The event’s keynote speaker will be Dr. Timothy Taylor, who will speak late Friday afternoon on “Music and Neoliberal Capitalism.” Dr. Taylor is a professor of ethnomusicology and musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of numerous articles and books, including Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Duke University Press) and Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (Routledge).

MGMC is a joint venture organized by graduate students from The University of Wisconsin-Madison, The University of Chicago, and Northwestern University. Conferences allow graduate students in various fields of music to come together and share ideas on a vast array of topics in a professional and collegial atmosphere. Conferences are held annually on a rotating basis in Madison, Chicago, or Evanston. The sixteenth annual meeting will be held at Northwestern University, under joint sponsorship of their Bienen School of Music and Graduate School.

For further information, including a full program of events and the concert as well as abstracts of the scheduled presentations, visit the MGMC web site at http://mgmc2012.org.