On 7–8 and 14–15 November 2020, the 86th AMS Annual Meeting will be held in conjunction with the Society for Music Theory (SMT) virtually. As with all AMS Annual Meetings, this gathering is made possible by the support and voluntary service of AMS committee members on the Committee on the Annual Meeting, Program Committee, Performance Committee, and Local Arrangements Committee. A full listing of committee members is available on our Committees page.

The American Musicological Society was founded in 1934 as a non-profit organization to advance "research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship," a mission that has since evolved to include teaching and learning about music in addition to research. At present, 3,500 individual members and 1,000 institutional subscribers from forty nations are on the rolls of the Society. The office of the Society is located on the campus of New York University in New York.

From its founding, the Society has held annual meetings, either solely or jointly, to explore and share the work of its members and constituents. AMS Annual Meetings typically run from Thursday afternoon to Sunday noon on a weekend near the beginning of November. The AMS Annual Meeting generally accommodates the reading and discussion of about two hundred papers, as well as a wider variety of study sessions, panel discussions, workshops, films, performances, community forums, and social engagements. Meetings are held in metropolitan centers throughout the U.S. and Canada, and attendance varies from 1,400 to over 2,200.