The Musicology Department sponsors a Symposium series with prominent guest speakers from other institutions, plus works-in-progress talks from students and faculty; and professional development workshops organized by the Graduate Musicology Association. All of these events are open to the Eastman community and take place on Thursdays at 4:00 p.m. in NSL 404 (Sibley Library seminar room), unless specified.
The Musicale: “Performance Plus” series showcases outstanding young performers from the Eastman School of Music, “plus” lively in-concert commentary provided by the school’s Ph.D. students in Musicology. Performances take place at 3 p.m. on the third Sunday of each month of the academic year at the George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave.), and the concert is included with museum admission. The Musicale: “Performance Plus” series at the George Eastman Museum is made possible in part by Joanna and Michael Grosodonia.
Events during neither of these standing times are marked with asterisks.
Thursday, August 29, 2024
Student Happy Hour
Thursday, September 5, 2024
Student Bio Writing Coffee Hour @Java’s
Thursday, September 15, 2024, 3:00pm
George Eastman Museum Musicale: Performance Plus concert
Minus 2 brass trio
Music for brass trio by Jean-Désiré Artôt, J.S. Bach, and Leó Weiner
Sven Joseph, PhD Musicology student host
September 19, 2024
Musicology Symposium: Fanny Gribenski
The Elephant in the Piano: Music, Ecology, Empire
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the piano was ubiquitous across the world and diverse segments of societies. Drawing on recent approaches to the global circulation of the instrument, my talk expands these discussions by tracing the connections embedded in the piano’s materials—specifically ivory, one of the prime materials for the construction of piano keyboards. I show that this commodity mediated a series of encounters between environment and music cultures, as well as between East Africa, Europe, and the United States. From the warehouses of European and American traders in Zanzibar to ivory auction houses at London and Antwerp, and from these sites to US keyboard factories and consumers’ homes, pianos’ ivory enabled differentiated experiences of a globalizing world, revealing hitherto unexamined entanglements between music, ecology, and empire. All in all, my talk shows the value of material approaches to instruments for a “remapping” of music and sound studies, and the reciprocal benefit of global and postcolonial perspectives for eco-musicological conversations.
Fanny Gribenski is Assistant Professor of Music at New York University. She is the author of L’Église comme lieu de concert (2019) and Tuning the World (2023). Her current research examines the relations between musical instruments, ecology, and empire. Recent articles have appeared in Past and Present, ISIS, Journal of Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music, Sound Studies, History of the Humanities, Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances, and the Revue de musicologie. She is currently co-editing two books: Unsound Supplies: Noisy Matter and the Making of Modern Soundscapes (with Viktoria Tkaczyk and David Pantalony), and New Methods and New Challenges in Empirical Musicology (with Clément Canonne).
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Pedagogy Skills Workshop: Grading and Generating Student Writing with Prof. Sue Uselmann
Thursday, October 17, 2024
Symposium: Wendy Heller (Princeton University)
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Pedagogy Skills Workshop: Managing Your Time in the Classroom with Prof. Darren Mueller
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Humanities Data Management Workshop with Heather Owen (River Campus Libraries)
Wednesday, November 6, 4:30-6:00pm
Hatch Recital Hall
Glenn E. Watkins Lecture Series: Valerie Coleman, flutist and composer
Thursday, November 7, 2024
Run through of papers for the American Musicological Society annual meeting
Thursday, November 17, 2024, 3:00pm
George Eastman Museum Musicale: Performance Plus concert
Mousai Quintet
Music for wind quintet by Miguel del Águila, Reena Esmail, and John Harbison
Babak Kashfi Yeganeh, PhD Musicology student host
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Debrief following the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society
Thursday, December 5, 2024
Student Happy Hour
Thursday, December 15, 2024, 3:00pm
George Eastman Museum Musicale: Performance Plus concert
Cantante Quartet
String quartets by Franz Joseph Haydn and Sergei Prokofiev.
Sven Joseph, PhD Musicology student host
