Overview

These days, the purpose of higher education is often cast as a dream unfulfilled. Whether taking the metaphorical form of an ivory tower under siege or an escalator to nowhere, sundry institutions have been confronted about their investment in “real world” issues and questions abound regarding the material and political value of an individual academic’s contributions. Adding music and sound to the mix only intensifies the need for a defensive posture that adequately protects knowledge, practices, and experiences whose value is often located in their bespoke, ephemeral nature. Is the descriptive and often speculative nature of music studies simply indulgent in times such as these? Do we need to just sacrifice moments of interpretive ambiguity in the name of clearly defined political messages or tangible deliverables? What role is even there for music and dreaming in a world where the very boundaries of what counts as reality are increasingly unmoored?

Bringing together leading scholars to share their diverse historical, cultural, and disciplinary perspectives, we intend to collectively investigate the relationship between music, sound, and dreams beyond the act of interpretation. While acknowledging interpretation as hegemonic modus operandi when considering dreams, its predominance has led to an over-reliance on rationalizing epistemologies that limit our broader understanding of their productive work in allowing real world issues to be worked through freely. Thus we hope to find strategies to better navigate our climate by tending to questions such as: What ontological status does music have in dreams? How do music and dreams intertwine to become a form of alternative worldmaking? In what ways are power structures confronted and transformed through sensory experiences of music and dreams? What possibilities for cross-cultural or cross-identificatory exchange exist in dreams that are not viable in the “real world”? And finally, what methodological challenges are faced by those who wish to theorize music, sound, and dreams together?

Furthermore, this symposium also continues a conversation started at 10th Conference of of the Royal Music Association Music & Philosophy Study Group with an online panel devoted to the top of “Liminal Musicking.” This panel, held concurrently with with the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society gathers contributions from a group of international scholars who are specifically questioning musicking as a liminal practice – one that hovers between rational thought and intuition; between phenomenological empiricism and speculative imagination. Through the lens of liminality, musicking is hypothesised as a mode of thought in its own right; differing from and raising challenges to a normative phonologocentrism of (Western) traditional rationality. They ask: Can musicking be considered a distinct form of thinking? How is music imagined, what are the relationships between music and imagination? And what epistemological and philosophical consequences does such a questioning of music as dreams have for the aesthetic consideration of musical practices?