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.
Sunday, January 19, 2025, 3:00pm
George Eastman Museum Musicale: Performance Plus concert
Trio Celestra
Music for piano trio including Astor Piazzolla, Four Seasons of Buenos Aires
Nick Anderson, student host
Thursday, January 30, 2025, 4:00 pm
Presser Award Lecture: Paul David Flood, “Crying at the EuroClub: Queer Diasporas, Rainbow Europe, and the Politics of Escapism at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest”
Hatch Recital Hall, reception in Miller Center 105
Link
Thursday, February 13, 2025, 4:00pm
Abstract Writing Workshop
Sunday, February 16, 2025, 3:00pm
George Eastman Museum Musicale: Performance Plus concert
Amber Piano Quartet
Music for piano quartet by Antonín Dvořák and Frank Bridge
Sven Joseph, student host
Thursday, February 20, 2025, 4:00pm
Works-in-Progress: Eleanor Price / Database launch
Robbins Library
Thursday, March 6, 2025, 4:00pm
Spring Conference run-through
Sunday, March 16, 2025, 3:00pm
George Eastman Museum Musicale: Performance Plus concert
Violin sonatas
Music for violin and piano by Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Ravel
Julia Hamilton-Louey, host
Thursday, March 20, 2025, 4:00pm
Symposium: M. Myrta Leslie Santana (University of California, San Diego)
From Havana to Jupiter: Possibilities of Trans/Queer Performance
This talk considers the genealogies of trans and queer performance in Cuba and its diaspora and asks what work such performances are doing today in both Miami and Havana. It relies on three sites in particular: the Wigwood drag festival in contemporary Miami, an album recorded by a Chinese Cuban diasporic drag queen in New York City in the 1980s, and the ongoing work of a prominent Black lesbian drag king in Havana. In each context, Santana will discuss the social and aesthetic lineages and contents of the drag performers’ aesthetic choices, focusing on how they might offer insight into the performances’ interventions in dominant LGBT rights discourses in the Americas and the groundswell of political repression of trans and queer people.
M. Myrta Leslie Santana is an ethnomusicologist and performer whose work examines the social and political significance of trans and queer performance in the Americas. Her book Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba, an ethnography of drag performance in contemporary Cuba, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in February 2025. In addition to her book, Leslie Santana has essays published or forthcoming in Ethnomusicology, Small Axe, Queer Nightlife (Michigan), and Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford). Originally from Miami, Florida, Leslie Santana is currently Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego.
Thursday, April 10, 2025, 4:00pm
Symposium: David Burn (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
New Light on the Anonymous Mass Cycles in Prague, Czech National Library, Ms. 59 R 5117
In 1994, the Czech National Library acquired a previously unknown sixteenth-century choirbook of central European provenance. Now housed under the shelfmark 59 R 5117, the source contains eight four-voice mass-cycles, as well as choral settings of the mass-responses. Of the masses, three have up to now been considered unique: a Missa Presulem ephebeatum, attributed to Heinrich Isaac; and two anonymous, title-less cycles. This paper evaluates the latter two cycles for what they reveal concerning the source that contains them and the circulation of music in central Europe at the time in which the source was produced. One of the anonymous masses is chant-based. Martin Horyna, the first, and, to date, only scholar to study Ms. 59 R 5117 in any detail, identified this cycle as a Missa dominicalis in a short study from 2002. Since then, the mass has received no further scholarly examination. My paper identifies concordances and a composer for the mass. The other anonymous cycle can be identified as having been modelled on a motet with the text Vulnerasti cor meum. It too turns out not to be unique. The mass bears the hallmarks of having been composed in western Europe, possibly at the French royal court. I assess the piece, its sources, compositional techniques, and model.
David J. Burn studied music at Merton College, University of Oxford. He completed his doctorate in 2002 on Heinrich Isaac’s mass propers under the supervision of Reinhard Strohm. From 2002-2003 he was Guest Researcher at Kyoto City University of Arts. From 2003-2007 he was Junior Research Fellow at St. John’s College, University of Oxford. In 2007 he joined the University of Leuven musicology department as head of the Early Music Research Group. His research focusses on the later 15th and 16th centuries, with particular interest for Heinrich Isaac and his contemporaries, interactions between chant and polyphony, source-studies, and early-music analysis. He has published widely on these topics in leading international peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Musicology, the Revue de musicologie, the Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, the Journal of Music Theory, and Musiktheorie. In 2020 he was Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York City, and in 2023 he held the Pieter Paul Rubens Visiting Professorship at UC Berkeley.
Tuesday, April 15, 2025, 5:00pm
Interfaith Chapel (University of Rochester)
St. Mark Passion performance from a 16th-century manuscript
Join Eastman School of Music students and faculty on April 15, 5:00 pm, at the Interfaith Chapel for a live recitation of the Passion of St. Mark from a 16th-century manuscript passional from River Campus Libraries’ medieval manuscript collection. Singing directly from the source, performers will bring the commemoration of Holy Week in early modern France into 21st-century Rochester. Students will decipher the ancient notation and text from the manuscript in real time, connecting past and present in a transformative experience for listeners. The performance is directed by Michael Alan Anderson, Professor and Chair of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music. This event is cosponsored by the Rossell Hope Robbins Library; Eastman’s Musicology Department and the Department of Organ, Sacred Music & Historical Keyboards; the Premodern Cluster; and the CNY Humanities Corridor.
Thursday, April 17, 2025, 4:00pm
Pedagogy Skills Workshop on Syllabus Design
Thursday, April 24, 2025, 4:00pm
Works-in-Progress: “Listening for Musical Abolitionism in Eighteenth-Century British Song”; Julia Hamilton-Louey, Visiting Scholar at the Eastman School of Music
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 4:00pm
Works-in-Progress: “An Americanist in Eighteenth-Century London; or, Making Sense of Satire”; Cody Norling, PhD, Manager of Administrative Academic and Faculty Affairs, Eastman School of Music
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)
Ovidian Eclecticism in Venetian Opera
A stroll through the newly restored Palazzo Grimani in Venice invokes a theatrical realm saturated by fantasies about the past. Frescoed rooms narrate the tales of Callisto, Psyche, and Apollo; a flying statue of Jupiter abducting Ganymede beckons provocatively from the ceiling; niches display ancient busts and statues that were part of the vast collection of antiquities that Giovanni Carlo Grimani donated to the Republic of Venice at the end of the sixteenth century. My paper explores how the next generation of Grimani (along with other noble families) would draw upon this legacy by promoting a newly expansive, erotic and visually-compelling brand of opera where the influence of Ovid’s eclecticism was especially evident.
Wendy Heller, Scheide Professor of Music History at Princeton University, specializes in the study of baroque music. Author of Emblems of Eloquence: Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice and Music in the Baroque, Heller is co-editor, with Beth Glixon, of the forthcoming volume Barbara Strozzi In Context (Cambridge University Press). Heller’s edition of Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’Amazzone di Aragona (Bärenreiter) will be published later this year; she is currently completing a monograph entitled Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy.
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
Of Crosscurrents and Catalysts
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
Wednesday, December 4, 2024, 6:30pm
Ciminelli Lounge
Creating and Analyzing Baroque Performance Practice at the Piano: Viktor Lazarov
Historical performance practice is a main concern in 21st century music performance, pedagogy, and research. This talk presents the results of two case studies in computational analysis of Baroque performance practices at the modern piano.
Viktor Lazarov is an interdisciplinary researcher and performer specializing in performance practice analysis and 20th and 21st century piano repertoire by Canadian and Balkan/Eastern European composers. Viktor has presented lectures, lecture-recitals, and solo and chamber recitals in Austria, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, and the United States.
A recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, including the Opus Prize for the “Article of the Year” awarded by the Conseil québécois de la musique in 2021. He writes for the Canadian magazine for arts, music, and culture, La Scena Musicale, and has published in scholarly journals such as CIRCUIT and La Revue musicale de l’OICRM. His training includes an M.Mus. and a Graduate Diploma in Performance at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, and B.Mus. in piano performance at the University of South Carolina, School of Music. He also holds a Graduate Certificate in Business Administration from the John Molson School of Business of Concordia University.
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
