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, October 22, 2026, 4:00pm
Symposium: Alexandra Kieffer (Rice University)
“Sound, Voice, Incantation, Song: Antiquity and the Twentieth-Century Sonic Imagination”
Sound and voice became a vibrant site of academic theorizing in the late twentieth century. An important and recurring supposition about sound and voice in this discourse—typified, in different ways, by Derrida’s famous deconstruction of Plato’s Phaedrus in his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968) and by media theorist Jonathan Sterne’s “audiovisual litany,” as explained in his influential book The Audible Past (2003)—is that widespread ideas or prejudices about sound, voice, and orality in Western culture can be traced back to a distant, antique past. I argue in this talk that these narratives, though they claim to identify ideas about sound and voice that are deeply embedded in Western culture, are in fact critiquing something that was much more historically recent: a series of arguments put forward by classicists in the mid-twentieth century as they reimagined Greek antiquity through the lens of sociological and anthropological theories about cultures outside of the modern West. Recovering this midcentury academic discourse not only illuminates the historical suppositions on which the Derridean critique of phonocentrism and Sterne’s audiovisual litany were premised (and which we might be inclined to question), but also opens up a very different way to imagine music and song in relation to histories of sound and voice.
Thursday, October 29, 2026, 4:00pm
Symposium: Kate Galloway (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Title and Abstract TBA
