Conference Report

From 19 to 21 September 2025, the International Musicological Society — Regional Association for East Asia (IMSEA) convened its Eighth Biennial Conference at Guangxi Arts University in Nanning, the capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Organized under the theme “Heritage and Community,” the conference assembled musicologists, ethnomusicologists, music theorists, performance scholars, and practitioners from across East Asia, Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and Oceania for three days of sustained intellectual exchange. With more than two hundred individual abstracts and over ten panel proposals submitted — the largest volume in IMSEA’s history, as Programme Committee Chair Nozomi Sato (International Christian University) noted in her welcome — the meeting offered a particularly capacious snapshot of contemporary musicological inquiry in and around East Asia.