2025 IAWM International Conference

Partnering with the

College Music Society

June 15-23, 2025

Bogotá and Medellín Colombia, South America

The 2025 IAWM and College Music Society International Conference, held from June 15–24 in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, brought together scholars, educators, and performers from across the globe. A resounding success, the conference was a memorable event for all attendees. CMS President Brian Chin and IAWM President Christina Rusnak opened the conference and spoke about our respective organizations’ missions and visions for the future with a shared focus on advocacy, collaboration, and making a difference in our respective musical realms. Many CMS members were unaware of IAWM, so the opening remarks provided an opportunity to elucidate our ideals and activities for CMS attendees. Jeff Loeffert, CMS Executive Director, stated that this conference had the largest attendance of any CMS International conference ever with 150 attendees. Thirty-two IAWM members and eighty-two CMS members performed and/or presented papers on diverse topics.

With the IAWM theme “Women in the World,” the conference introduced lesser-known works by female composers, opening dialogues and discussions regarding female musicians and music educators. Most presentations integrated South American composers, scholars, and performers, with a number of papers addressing social change and social justice.

The ten-day conference was balanced between presentations and excursions. It began in Bogotá, at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Xavier Pontifical University), founded 1623, with two full days of performances and presentations. After four days, a chartered plane delivered us to Medellín for the second half of the conference at EAFIT University, founded in 1960, where we enjoyed two and a half more days of presentations and concerts. Nearly two-thirds of all presenters, performers, and composers were women, and the presentations and recitals included profiles and works of remarkable women whose histories have been marginalized. The sessions featured women composers from across the globe; the works of some of them had nearly been lost.

Highlights included presentations on Ernestina Lecuona, Alba Potes, Colombian women composers Carolina Calvache and Amparo Angel, female twentieth and twenty-first century pianists–composers from Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba, Teresa Carreño, Graciela Agudelo, and Stefania Turkevych, Ukraine’s first female composer. Scholars also explored issues facing women in music, including women’s experiences in university music settings and female voices, tradition, and empowerment. Several other papers addressed topics of identity and social justice.

A unique aspect of CMS’s International Music conferences is the cultural immersion in the conference region. We toured the region of the upper Andes culture, a coffee farm, one of the world’s largest salt mines, and Bogotá’s colonial Candelaria neighborhood, learning about the resilience of the Colombian people and the importance of their traditional music. In Medellín, we visited Comuna 13, a neighborhood transformed through the arts, social inclusion, and entrepreneurship. Integral to our experience was the tour company Colombia 57 and their expert local guides.

There were many networking opportunities throughout the conference. Our university hosts at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and EAFIT University worked to ensure a seamless experience. At IAWM, we deeply thank the College Music Society for conference planning, organization, and logistics. IAWM’s next conference will take place in 2028, and plans are already underway for future international collaboration.