The Musicology Department sponsors two series of presentations:
Both series are open to the Eastman community. All events take place on Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. in NSL 404 (Sibley Library seminar room) unless otherwise noted.
27 October 2022
Musicology Symposium: Michael Bakan
An Ethnomusicology of MINd—The Music and Intercultural Neurodiversity Project
Ethnomusicologist and co-chair of the Music and Intercultural Neurodiversity Special Interest Group of the International Association for Music and Medicine, Michael Bakan applies the narrative methods of dialogical, re-presentational ethnography developed in his book Music and Autism: Speaking for Ourselves to a compelling portraitof the MINd project. Privileging the words, music, and expressed ideas of his neurodivergent MINd collaborators over externally imposed modes of analysis and interpretation, Bakan foregrounds neurodiverse perspectives on musicking and musical responses toneurodiversity. This opens up new realms of possibility in diverse epistemological, practice-based, and agency-facilitating domains, thus yielding the potential for transformative new directions in ethnomusicology, music therapy, and other related disciplines.
Michael Bakan is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Head of the World Music Ensembles Program at Florida State University (FSU), where he directs the Sekaa Gong Hanuman Agung Balinese Gamelan. His more than 100 publications include the books Music & Autism: Speaking for Ourselves, World Music: Traditions and Transformations, and Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur. As a percussionist and drum set artist, he has performed and recorded with artists including George Clinton, Tito Puente, John Cage, the Toronto Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Players, and appears as percussionist on the legendary funk band Parliament’s 2018 album Medicaid Fraud Dogg.
3 November 2022
Musicology Colloquium
AMS/SEM Preview Papers
Select students presenting at the AMS-SMT-SEM Joint Annual Meeting in New Orleans will preview their work for those interested.
17 November 2022
Musicology Colloquium
AMS/SEM “round-up”
Students and faculty debrief about the AMS-SMT-SEM Joint Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
20 November 2022, 3pm
Musicale Performance Plus concert at the George Eastman Museum
Federico Ercoli, piano
Music by Mozart and Brahms with host Lauren Ganger (Ph.D. student, Musicology)
1 December 2022
Musicology Symposium: J. Martin Daughtry
“The Air and the Opera House”
From the standpoint of music studies, the relationship between the singing voice and the earth’s atmosphere is one of figure to ground or event to medium. When compared to the meaning-saturated sounds of human vocality, in other words, the air around us appears transparent, uniform, and theoretically inert: air is voice’s enabling condition, nothing more. However, outside of music studies—as humans and other creatures struggle with global warming, air pollution, toxic wardust, smoke from runaway forest fires, and a deadly coronavirus that is transmitted from breath to breath—air is front-page news. What might music scholars learn if we turned the tables on voice and began taking air seriously? Drawing upon recent writing on the Anthropocene and the “nonhuman turn” in the humanities, this paper stretches and distorts the connotative field that surrounds the voice, treating it less as a human-centered sound and more as an atmospheric vector that connects humans with nonhuman creatures, industrial processes, and environmental temporalities. Reframed as a mode of consequential gaseous exchange, the vocal metaphor can now draw attention to the entangled expressive capacities of car exhaust, landfill methane leaks, El Niño, microbial respiration, bovine flatulence, covid, and yes, human choirs.
After laying out the conceptual groundwork for an “atmospheric” concept of vocality, the paper will give a close reading of one of the fragile, volatile songs that atmospheric voices sing. The scene of this particular more-than-human vocal performance is the Metropolitan Opera in the spring of 2022; the “song,” rendered strange by the air itself, is Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. In a time of war, pandemic, and ecological destruction, the voice’s double nature—as sound charged with meaning and air charged with particulate matter—signifies across multiple registers.
J. Martin Daughtry is an Associate Professor of Music and Sound Studies at New York University. In his writing and teaching he explores themes of acoustic violence; human and nonhuman vocality; listening and non-listening; Russian-language sung poetry; the auditory imagination; environmental humanities; extraterrestrial musicalities; the end of the world; and jazz. His monograph Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford, 2015) received a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers, and the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is a founding member of the Analogue Humanities Archive and Symposium (AHAS), an enigmatic organization that, by design, has no internet footprint. Daughtry is currently writing a book on voice and air in the Anthropocene; collaborating with a group of European scholars and sound artists on new work related to the intersection of sound and violence; collaborating with a group of Brazilian scholars and sound artists on the theme of sound and environment; co-editing, with Nina Eidsheim, a volume on music and metaphor; and completing a volume of erasure poetry drawn from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
18 December 2022, 3pm
Musicale Performance Plus concert at the George Eastman Museum
92dB Quartet
Music for saxophone quartet by Gabriel Pierrne, Frank Ticheli, Jennifer Higdon, and others with host Paul David Flood (Ph.D. student, Musicology)
15 January 2023
“Strange Scenes: A Journey from the Romantic Era to Modernity”
Iines Kiuru, clarinet; Yip Wai Chow, violin; Yu-Ping Wu, cello
Hannah Harnest, piano and host
Music of Robert Schumann and others
16 February 2023
Talking Job Talks workshop with Darren Mueller
19 February 2023
Luna Trio; piano trios by Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms
21 February 2023
7:30pm, Hatch Recital Hall
Luna Trio; piano trios by Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms
Eastman Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology Ji Young Kim and Mike Cheng-Yu Lee (Cornell University) join forces in music for pianoforte using school’s replica of an Anton Walter instrument. DMA student James Marshall will also be featured.
Program:
S. Bach: French Suite in C minor, BWV 813
Mozart: Sonata in C minor, K. 475
Haydn: Sonata in C major, Hob. XVI:48
Schubert: Violin Sonata in A minor, D. 385
23 February 2023
Spring Conference Paper Workshop
2 March 2023
Work in Progress session: Darren Mueller
16 March 2023
Musicology Symposium: Jeffrey Q McCune
From Sonic Disobedience to Sonic Dis-Ease: The Rise and Fall of Kanye West
This paper argues that if you attend to the sonic scope of the music of Kanye West (YE), we can map well the deterioration of his critical blackness. Noting the move from radical hip-hop disobedience to pop sonics and gospel anthems, this paper marks the simultaneous decline of Kanye’s commitment to combat anti-blackness and anti-difference. Highlighting West’s musical shifts alongside his political ones, allows us to also interrogate the role of pop culture and white evangelical Christianity in the rise of anti-blackness and xenophobia.
Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., PhD, is the Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African & African American Studies and the Frederick Douglass Associate Professor of African American Literature and Culture. He is the author of the award-winning book Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing (University of Chicago Press, 2014). He is presently completing, Disobedient Reading: An Experiment in Seeing Black (University of California Press). He has published in a variety of journals and also serves on the editorial board of numerous journals. He is the co-editor of the University of California Press’s New Sexual Worlds book series. For his work at the intersections, of race gender, and sexuality, McCune has been featured on Left of Black, Sirius XM’s Joe Madison Show, HuffPost Live, NPR, Pitchfork and as a guest expert on Bill Nye Saves The World.
23 March 2023
4:30pm, Sibley Music Library Room 404
Musicology Colloquium: Kenneth Slowik
As part of a short residency with the Strings Department at Eastman, Kenneth Slowik—Curator of the Musical Instrument Collection in the Division of Culture and the Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History—will visit the Musicology colloquium to discuss his career in music and field questions about his curatorial work. A cellist, gambist, keyboard player, and conductor, Slowik is also Artistic Director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society. His impressive discography comprises over seventy recordings ranging from the Baroque to the early 20th century. He has won prestigious international awards, including France’s Diapason d’Or and Choc, the “British Music Retailers’ Award for Excellence,” Italy’s Premio Internazionale del Disco Antonio Vivaldi, and has received two GRAMMY® nominations.
30 March 2023
Musicology Symposium: Glenda Goodman, University of Pennsylvania
Brant’s Barrel Organ, Cosmopolitanism, and the Aurality of British Imperialism
Joseph Brant’s barrel organ provides an object lesson in the push and pull of settler colonial-Indigenous relations in the eighteenth century. During the American Revolution, Mohawk political and military leader Joseph Brant traveled to London to pledge his loyalty to the crown and seek guarantees of protection for Mohawk peoples’ lands and livelihoods in what is now upstate New York. George III welcomed his loyalty and Brant was the toast of the town in London, receiving many gifts, including a barrel organ. But the land was not protected. Brant and nearly two thousand other Haudenosaunee Indians became refugees after the war and were forced to move to Grand River, Ontario. The barrel organ went with him, bringing tunes from British comic operas and Anglican hymns to new Native listeners. Histories of the eighteenth century often ignore Native Americans’ engagement with music. In part, this is due to a spotty and compromised historical record. But it is also due to a lack of imagination that can be remedied by centering material culture and finding new approaches to colonialist archives. Using such approaches, this talk explores both how British music, including that of the barrel organ, was a tool that helped to advance colonial territorial spread; and how music was a tool that people in Native communities—in this case, Brant—co-opted and adapted to their own geopolitical, cultural, and spiritual purposes.
Glenda Goodman’s work explores the intersection of material culture, gender, and race in early American music. Her first book, Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (OUP 2020), shows how gendered, elite white musicking was critical to the cultural work of nation-formation following the American Revolution. This book won the Lewis Lockwood Prize for best first book from the American Musicological Society. She is currently investigating the roles English Protestant music played in eighteenth-century settler-Indigenous relations in the Native Northeast. She is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.
6 April 2023
Work in Progress session: John Kapusta
13 April 2023
Musicology Symposium: Shana Redmond, Columbia University
Agencies of Menace’: The State, the Car, and the Music in Between
In this work-in-progress, Redmond listens in conspiracy with Black drivers and passengers in the moments before fatal traffic stops in order to mark the histories and scale of state violence and the ways in which Black living eludes contemporary music study.
Shana L. Redmond (she|her) is a writer and scholar of Black life and culture. She is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke UP, 2020), which received a number of prizes including a 2021 American Book Award. She regularly writes for public outlets including NPR and the BBC, as well as having authored liner notes for the vinyl soundtrack release of Jordan Peele’s film Us (Waxwork Records, 2019) and String Quartets, Nos. 1-12 (TUM Records, 2022) by musician-composer-creative Wadada Leo Smith. She is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University and, in 2022-2023, President of the American Studies Association.
27 April 2023
Work in Progress session: Eleanor Price