Departmental seminars

= Music Department seminars =

The following talks, seminars, or other events are open to virtual attendees from inside or outside of the institution that is hosting them. This page provides links to further information on these events.

What to include in your advert
Anyone who hosts such an event is welcome to edit this page. Please provide the following information:


 * 1) Speaker. Title. Date and Time. Host institution. [Enclose this information between two equals signs, to create a heading. Ideally, you should give the time given in several time zones, e.g. CET, GMT, EST, PST. This page will automatically produce a range of times if you input the date and time at your own location.]
 * 2) A link to further information on the event, including registration instructions.
 * 3) An abstract or other information about the event.

Editing the list of events
Please place your advert in the right position on the list, in date order, with the most imminent event at the top. If you notice that some events at the top of the current list have now taken place, feel free to move them to the archive so that the list is kept tolerably up-to-date.

How to edit the wiki
For those unfamiliar with wiki editing, instructions can be read here. It's actually very easy.

= Listings, organized by date =

== Joshua Tucker (Brown University). 'My Dear Little Beer'. Alcohol, Emotion, and the Business of Andean Popular Song. 16 March 2021 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST). Royal Holloway, University of London ==

Sign up and further information here

Joshua Tucker is Associate Professor of Music at Brown University. Beyond teaching and advising, Professor Tucker is an active researcher in the field of Ethnomusicology, specialising in “sound and society in Latin America, with a particular emphasis on popular music both in the Andean region and Brazil.” During the 2013 academic year, Professor Tucker was on sabbatical leave in southern Peru, studying the changing definition of indigenous identity and its relation to the musical culture of Peru's Quechua-speaking communities. He has authored numerous papers featured in a wide collection of scholarly journals, and his book, Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru, was published in 2013. This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. To join us, please complete this short form (link embedded). Access details for the session will be emailed to you on the day of the event.

Elisabeth Schimana. Sound as Score. 16 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST) Fragility of Sound - KUG University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria
Link and further information here

As a composer and musician of electronic music since the 1980s my medium is sound. When I was asked 2009 to compose a piece for RSO (Radio-Symphonieorchester) Vienna I had to think about how to communicate with this sound body. I opted for what I do best – sound and listening. Since that year I developed two different methods of communication with musicians – the live generated audio score and the audio score based on acoustic memory. This lecture examines the method, scoring, practise and rehearsal, as well as the artistic results using examples from The Virus series and the music theater piece Pricked and Away.

Since the 1980s the musician and composer Elisabeth Schimana has been active as one of the Austrian female pioneers of electronic music with projects marked by a radical approach and equally unconventional aesthetics. After completing vocal training, she earned degrees in composition, computer music, musicology, and ethnology. She has worked intensively with the theremin in Moscow and with the Max Brand Synthesizer in Vienna. Not only has she created countless radio works in cooperation with ORF Kunstradio but numerous sound installations and interdisciplinary and performative projects as well. Her concepts for experimental set-ups fathom the social field and put to the test new ways of interacting musically on the Internet. In her artistic work, Schimana examines questions of space, communication, or the body in its presence or absence, especially the imparting of compositional concepts (scores), which gives rise to completely new approaches that experimentally explore how we hear and demand a heightened musical presence on the part of the performer. Her probing approach also led her to found the IMA Institute of Media Archeology, which has dedicated itself to acoustic media at the analogue/digital interface and to the subject of women, art, and technology since 2005. Schimana’s award-winning and internationally performed work spans the gamut of composition and free playing, is inextricably bound to her as a live performer, makes reference to historical positions, but resists all attempts at categorization, and stands out, strikingly and reduced, with tremendous intensity.

== Susanne Kogler. “The fragility of sound” – On Possible Connections between Aesthetics and Politics in the 21st Century. 16 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST) Fragility of Sound - KUG University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria ==

Link and further information here

In der Philosophie der Nachkriegszeit spielt die Frage nach einem adäquaten Verständnis des Politischen eine große Rolle. Hannah Arendt und Theodor W. Adorno stellten diese vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Erfahrungen in Deutschland nach 1945, wo sie nach wie vor Residuen einer totalitären Einstellung wahrnahmen. Für beide ist die Kunst zentral, um wichtige Aussagen über die Gesellschaft und deren Status zu treffen, und beide definieren das Politische als einen Bereich der Interaktion, in dem für die Gemeinschaft relevante Fragen zur Diskussion gestellt werden. Von diesen Überlegungen ausgehend, behandelt der Vortrag die Frage, wie Kunst heute politisch sein könnte. Dabei wird die Kategorie der Fragilität des Klanges ins Zentrum gestellt. Diese spielt eine wesentliche Rolle in der Ästhetik Jean-François Lyotards, der an Adorno und Ahrendt anknüpfend ein neues, von der Musik ausgehendes Zeitverständnis in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts als wegweisend ansah: eine Wahrnehmung des Augenblicks, in dem die Fragilität des Lebens wahrnehmbar wird. Seine Überlegungen treffen sich mit Adornos Auffassung des Sublimen in der Moderne und Arendts Vorstellungen von Kreativität, die Julia Kristeva in ihrer Biografie der Philosophin mit dem Titel „Das weibliche Genie“ behandelte. Die theoretischen Überlegungen werden von Klangbeispielen begleitet, die eine besondere Qualität des Hörens zur Voraussetzung haben und diese auch von den Zuhörenden fordern. Sie sollen zugleich als exemplarisch für eine mögliche politische Dimension aktueller Kunst zur Diskussion gestellt werden.

Susanne Kogler combines music-aesthetic, analytical and historical perspectives in her research, specifically focusing on music from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Her numerous publications address language and music (song, opera, music theatre), modern and postmodern aesthetics (music and nature, temporal forms, performativity, expression, gesture, electronics, multimedia), contemporary creation and gender issues. Current interests concern the methodology and possibilities of music history and critical aesthetics in the digital age, the change in cultural topographies, music (science) after 1945 and research on the Third Reich.

== Shzr Ee Tan (Royal Holloway). Wearing Ethnomusicology: cultural appropriation/ appreciation and performative representation 1:30pm - 2:30pm, Wednesday 17 March 2021. Hartley Research Seminar, University of Southampton ==

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on Microsoft Teams. For an invitation, write Matthew Shlomowitz at M.Shlomowitz@southampton.ac.uk

This paper attempts a holistic investigation of multiplicities in the visual performativity of clothing in ethnomusicological practice in the academy, the field and in everyday life. Drawing from my own experiences in research environments, the classroom and conferences, as well as candid interviews with ethnomusicologists and music researchers encountered through social and professional settings, I look at how clothes are worn and presented/ photographed/ imaged and re-mediated. The context of my investigation is set amidst evolving debates on cultural appropriation, feminist movements, notions of professionalism, ritual requirements of dress, the wider societal disciplining of the human body and, finally, ease of comfort. My case studies include how the batik print is gendered, represented and signified in different ways when worn by men versus women performers/ music scholars, and in clothing versus accessories, in the (for example) different territories of Indonesia, Hawaii and sub-Saharan Africa. I also consider how ‘traditional’ and neotraditional ‘fusion’ costumes, as well as ‘concert black’ kit vs casual jeans are worn in ritual or performance settings by insiders versus outsiders, and by cultural (non) bearers on different calibrations of ‘contextual requirement’ and ‘musical privilege’. Here I discuss different approaches to professional representation, decorum and career-branding at conferences, performance arenas, in the classroom and in the course of fieldwork. In the ensuing process, I also consider the conflicting demands of practical convenience in dressing/ travelling/ ‘fitting in’, artist’s license in choice of clothing, and fashion expectations of academic researchers and classroom facilitators in different - often intersecting - playing fields. In doing so, I come to conclusions on how the wearing of ethnomusicology in theory, practice and in constantly-remediated images continue to assemble well as disassemble identities, divides and ways of being. Shzr Ee Tan is a Senior Lecturer and ethnomusicologist (with a specialism in Sinophone and Southeast Asian worlds) at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is interested in impact-based issues of music and decolonisation, aspirational cosmopolitanism, and race discourses in music scenes around the world (including HE), with a view towards understanding marginality through the lenses of intersectionality. In June 2020 with Kiku Day she organised the webinar Orchestrating Isolation: Musical Interventions and Inequality in the COVID-19 Fallout, calling to attention the pandemic-led devastation caused to musicians, freelancers and researchers in precarious labour, even traumatic losses of artists, investigators and teachers to the disease were mourned. In 2019 with Mai Kawabata she initiated the project 'Cultural Imperialism and the 'New Yellow Peril' in Western Art Music', which has gained considerable traction among East Asian music communities around the world and turned her towards more activist-informed scholarship and teaching. Other projects she is developing include musical theorizing on decolonization and issues of cultural appropriation, including an investigation into racist reactions to the ‘problem’ of China as a politico-cultural heavyweight/ new imperialist influence. In her broader work on decolonization she stakes a commitment to collaborative ethnography in a development/ impact-based ethnographic project with transient workers in Southeast Asia, in exploration of Islamic soundscapes in Chinese transnational contexts. She is also exploring alternative ontologies and pedagogies in the disciplining and institutionalisation of musical practices in China in transnational and international interaction with higher education institutions around the world. This research has been motivated in part by changes (and resulting conversations on flashpoint topics of race and immigration) in the global higher education sector, as a result of large-scale transnational (transient) Chinese student enrolment in music programmes around the world, as well American, European and Asian establishment of China-based campuses. Her writings have appeared/ will appear in imprints by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge, among other publishers. Recent scholarly work includes Digital Inequality and Global Sounds (CUP), an article in (and co-editing of) Music, Indigeneity and Digital Media (Univerisity of Rochester Press; Hilder, Stobart and Tan), an article and co-editing of Gender in Chinese Music (University of Rochester Press; Harris, Pease & Tan), plus a monograph, “Beyond Innocence”: Amis Aboriginal Song in Taiwan as an Ecosystem (Ashgate).

== Daniel Elphick (Royal Holloway). 'Music on a Leash': Socialist Realism and Twentieth-Century Music, Wednesday 17 March 2021, 5pm GMT. Colloquium Research Series, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, UK ==

Please email fom.colloquia@mus.cam.ac.uk for the link to the event.

'Awful'... 'supporting tyranny'... 'mammoths and mastodons': socialist-realist music provokes strong rejections. Original attempts to define it lurched into prescriptive platitudes, or projections of intention on the part of music critics; Levon Hakobian has recently side-stepped the term altogether and refers to the 'Big Soviet Style' instead. This paper details the afterlife of socialist realism in the latter half of the twentieth century, with globe-spanning examples. I argue that socialist realism is an aesthetic in need of reappraisal, as a trend just as important as modernism to our understanding of art music composition since 1900. Our music histories have become stuck in the narrative rut somewhere between Fukuyaman 'End of History' and Fisher's 'Capitalist Realism', and we need socialist realism to get out.

Daniel Elphick is a Teaching Fellow and musicologist at Royal Holloway, University of London. His first book, "Music Behind the Iron Curtain" is available from Cambridge University Press. He is a Fellow of the Centre for Russian Music, Goldsmiths, a member of the editorial board for DSCH (the Shostakovich Journal), and a union activist, campaigning against precarious contracts in higher education.

== Michael Beckerman: The Grey Zone, Middles, and the Doctrine of One. Wednesday, 17 March 2021. 17:30-19:30 GMT (starting 18:30 CET, 13:30 EST, 10:30 PST). Research Seminar Series, Department of Music, City, University of London, UK ==

'''Link to further information and Zoom registration: https://www.city.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/2021/03/professor-michael-beckerman-the-grey-zone-middles-and-the-doctrine-of-one '''

Over the last decade I have tried to develop three strains of thought in relation to music. The Grey Zone, after Primo Levi, argues that we are, as never before, obligated to consider widely diverse fields of meaning as we approach musical works, including especially problematic and dismal ones.

The theory of middles advances the view that ‘middles’, construed broadly, are subject to special rules and behaviours, and often present things that are impossible to place on the ‘edges’.

The Doctrine of One argues that all reception of artworks is at the level of the individual, and that routinely, something that might be a throwaway to one person, could be the core of the experience for another.

My talk explores the process of trying to synthesize these three approaches into a single, more useful and powerful, theory of music and perception.

Michael Beckerman is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Music at New York University. His diverse areas of research include Czech and Eastern European music; Musical Form and Meaning; Film Music; Music of the Roma; Music and War; Music in the Concentration Camps; Jewish Music, and Music and Disability. He is author of New Worlds of Dvořák, Janáček as Theorist and has edited books on those composers and Bohuslav Martinů. He is the recipient of numerous honours, from the Janáček Medal of the Czech Ministry of Culture in 1988 to an Honorary Doctorate from Palacký University (Czech Republic) in 2014, and most recently the Harrison Medal from the Irish Musicological Society.

== Pia Palme. With. The significance of a preposition in my artistic practice. 18 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST) Fragility of Sound - KUG University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria ==

Link and further information here

== Costas Karageorghis (Brunel University, London). Music, Sound and Athletic Performance. 18 March 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK ==

Meeting link and further information here

In this session, hosted by the Sound, Space and Interactive Art research group, Professor Costas Karageorghis (Professor in Sport & Exercise Psychology at Brunel University London) will discuss his research into the psychological, psychophysiological and neurophysiological effects of music in the domain of exercise and sport. He will be joined in discussion by Professor David Berezan (Electroacoustic Composer, University of Manchester) for an update on SoundRunner, an arts-led collaborative project that explores the potential for music and sound to be dynamically created through the act of running. Questions and discussion will follow. Led by David Berezan.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. Sessions begin at 4:30pm GMT and last 90 minutes.

Professor John Michael Cooper (Southwestern University, USA). 'Black Feminism, Margaret Bonds, and the Credo of W.E.B. Du Bois'. 24 March 1pm GMT. Royal Irish Academy of Music
Registration

John Michael Cooper is Professor of Music and holder of the Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. He is the author of books published by Routledge, Oxford University Press, the University of Rochester Press, and Rowman and Littlefield, as well as the editor of twelve editions of music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy published by Bärenreiter Urtext and other editions published elsewhere. He is the editor of an ongoing series of sixty-four editions of (mostly) previously unpublished works by Florence Price with G. Schirmer, Inc., and of a series of more than thirty compositions by Margaret Bonds published by Hildegard Publishing Company in association with Theodore Presser. He is currently working on a monograph titled Margaret Bonds and the Poetics of Racial Justice: the “Montgomery Variations” and “Credo” in Context.

== Raymond MacDonald (University of Edinburgh). Duet for Two People Who Have Never Met: Online Improvising as a Means of Sustaining Community and Developing New Approaches to Creativity. 25 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST). University of Aberdeen ==

Further information and meeting link

This presentation outlines a number of online music projects during the COVID 19 global pandemic. Particular attention is given to the experiences of The Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra’s virtual, synchronous improvisation sessions.

Sessions included an international, gender-balanced, cross-generational group of over 70 musicians all of whom were living under conditions of social distancing. All sessions were recorded using Zoom software. After 3 months of twice-weekly two hours improvisation sessions, 29 one-hour interviews with participants were undertaken, recorded, transcribed, and analysed.

Key themes include how the sessions helped participants stay connected, provided opportunities for artistic development, enhanced mood, reduced feelings of isolation and sustained and developed community. Particular attention is placed upon how improvisation as a universal, real-time, social, collaborative process facilitates interaction allowing the technological affordances of software (latencies, sound quality, gallery/speaker view) and hardware (laptop, tablet, instruments, microphones, headphones, objects in the room) to become emergent properties of artistic collaborations. The extent to which this process affects new perceptual and conceptual breakthroughs for practitioners is discussed as is the crucial and innovative relationship between audio and visual elements. Analysis of edited films of the sessions highlights artistic and theoretical and conceptual issues discussed. Emphasis is given to how the domestic environment merges with technologies to create The Theatre of Home.

== Dan White (University of Huddersfield), 'One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor: Sound and Music as Suture in the Opening Sequences of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth Films'; Stefan Greenfield-Casas (Northwestern University), 'Worldbuilding Through Preexisting Music and Remediation in the Kingdom Hearts Series'. 25 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST). British Audio-Visual Research Network ==

Email barnvirtual@gmail.com to receive the Zoom link (it is the same as previous sessions) and please do share with any colleagues/students who may be interested! Visit our website for further info.


 * One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor: Sound and Music as Suture in the Opening Sequences of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth Films (Dan White, University of Huddersfield)

The opening sequences of narrative films are perhaps the most important moments for establishing a coherent film-world and drawing a viewer into a space and time often quite different from their own, and yet these moments remain largely untheorised within film studies and film music theory in particular. This paper analyses the uses of music and sound in the opening sequences of one of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth trilogies: The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003). The paratextual nature of opening sequences might lead us to understand them as theoretical gateways or airlocks, but it is the psychoanalytical concept of suture that proves most effective in theorising music’s dual roles in drawing an audience into a film-world and simultaneously building that world around them.


 * Worldbuilding Through Preexisting Music and Remediation in the Kingdom Hearts Series (Stefan Greenfield-Casas, Northwestern University)

The now-classic PlayStation 2 game Kingdom Hearts (2002) was the result of a synergetic collaboration between two media powerhouses: Walt Disney Studios and SquareSoft. In the game, characters from both franchises cohabitate the many in-game “worlds” players must save from evil. These worlds are largely built upon the settings of Disney movies (e.g., the “Halloween Town” world based on Disney’s Nightmare Before Christmas (1997)), with Kingdom Hearts composer Yoko Shimomura oftentimes arranging the original music from these films to be incorporated into the game. Here, then, preexisting music literally contributes to the process of worldbuilding.

In this paper, I draw on the Kingdom Hearts series (2002 – present) to show how arrangements of preexisting music can be used as worldbuilding devices across and between franchises. Expanding upon James Buhler’s (2017; cf. Godsall 2019) notion of musically “branding” the franchise, I consider the politics of what happens when two media franchises are merged. Drawing on the writings of Robert Hatten (1994, 2014) and David Neumeyer (2015), I analyze this dialogic relationship between preexisting musics (as well as newly composed music) through the lens of musical troping. I conclude the paper by considering how “Dearly Beloved” -- Kingdom Hearts’ main theme -- has similarly been arranged for the concert hall, thus bridging our “real” world with the virtual world(s) of the game through a process of remediation.

== Tom Beghin (Orpheus Institute, Ghent). Beethoven's French Piano: a Tale of Ambition and Frustration. 25 March 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK ==

Meeting link and further information here

In this session, hosted by the departent's Creative and Performing Practices core research area, we are pleased to welcome Professor Tom Beghin (Orpheus Institute, Ghent) to the department for a lecture-demonstration on Beethoven’s Erard piano and its influence on Beethoven’s technology-related exploration and experimenttation in the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, Op. 53. Tom will open the session with a 30-minute presentation, followed by a roundtable discussion involving Dr Marten Noorduin (University of Oxford) as well as members of the department’s Historically and Culturally Informed Analysis research area. The session concludes with an open Q&A. Tom invites attendees to listen in advance to a video productions on this topic, a links to which is provided here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/tom-beghin-erard (password protected; please email the Anne Hyland for access). This session is led by Barry Cooper.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. Sessions begin at 4:30pm GMT and last 90 minutes.

Anna Bull (Univeristy of Portsmouth). 'Getting it right' Classical Music as a Middle-Class Social Practice. 1 April 4pm BST (5pm CEST, 8am PDT, 11am EDT). University of Aberdeen
Further information and meeting link

In this talk, I draw on my recently published book, ‘Class, Control, and Classical Music’ (Oxford University Press, 2019), to discuss why, in the UK, classical music remains predominantly played by white middle-class people. I draw on data from an ethnographic study with young people playing in classical music ensembles in the south of England to explain how the inclusions and exclusions that are visible today were set up historically in the establishment of music education institutions in the late Victoria period. The link between class and classical music is also apparent in the ways in which classical music indexes middle-class respectability for young women; and in the social relations of classical music pedagogy, such as what I am calling a ‘pedagogy of correction’. These social relations are not, I argue, separate from the music itself, but are in part formed by the demands of classical music’s distinctive aesthetic, repertoire, and instruments. These demands create an aesthetic ideal of ‘getting it right’. This means that in order to change the demographic patterns of who plays classical music, the aesthetic itself will need to change.

Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst. In conversation with Lily Markaki and Adam Ganz. 1 April 6:30pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST) Everywhere it is Machines - Royal Holloway
Email address to register and further information here

For session 03 of EVERYWHERE IT IS MACHINES, Prof Adam Ganz and series curator Lilly Markaki will be talking to world-renown artists and longtime collaborators and partners Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst about their solo practices and collaborative works in sound, dgital art & performance; their AI baby named Spawn; their podcast Interdependence; but also technology, politics and culture at large!

Mat Dryhurst releases music, research and artworks solo and in conjunction with creative partner Holly Herndon. He teaches at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Music, and hosts discussions with figures shaping 21st century culture on the Interdependence podcast.

Holly Herndon operates at the edge of electronic and avant-garde pop music and emerges with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own. On her most recent full-length album PROTO, Herndon fronts and conducts an electronic pop choir comprised of both human and A.I. voices over a musical palette that encompasses everything from synths to Sacred Harp stylings. CNN noted that Herndon is “shaping the future of A.I.,” and she has demonstrated this nexus of technological evolution and musical catharsis with elevated performances at The Barbican (London), Volksbühne (Berlin), Sónar (Barcelona), Unsound (Krakow), and Club 2 Club (Milan). The sounds synthesized on PROTO by Herndon, her A.I. “baby” Spawn, and the vocal ensemble combine elements from Herndon’s dynamic and idiosyncratic personal journey: the timeless folk traditions of her childhood experiences in church-going East Tennessee (particularly the prismatic layered practice of Sacred Harp singing), the avant-garde music she explored while at Mills College, and the radical club culture of Berlin, all enhanced by her recent completion of a doctorate at Stanford University’s CCRMA, researching machine learning and music.

Jonathan Cannon (MIT). The shared predictive roots of motor control and beat-based timing. 13. April 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST)
Meeting link

fMRI results have shown that the supplementary motor area (SMA) and the basal ganglia, most often discussed in their roles in generating action, are engaged by beat-based timing even in the absence of movement. Reviewing a body of motor neurophysiology literature, I hypothesize that we can see timing functions of these brain areas as analogous to their functions in the generation of periodic movement: sub-second dynamics in SMA represent progress through an action or interval, and direct pathway activation in basal ganglia provides this representation with higher-level structure including sequence and tempo. Drawing on the "active inference" framework, I argue that we can see both rhythmic motor and rhythmic timing processes as examples of dynamic sub-second prediction of (and informed by) sensory event timing.

== Intercultural Musicking: Ensemble Performance, (inter)Cultural Encounters, and Personal/Professional Fransformations. 15 April 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK ==

Meeting and further information here

This session features members of our Intercultural Musicking core research area. Professor Caroline Bithell, Dr Robert Szymanek, Dr Richard Fay and Dan Mawson will offer short, complementary research papers exploring intercultural music-making, followed by invited responses and discussion. The department’s gamelan and klezmer ensembles (led by Robert and Dan/Richard) serve as living laboratories for exploring the dynamics of encountering new cultural as well as musical worlds through learning to perform in ensembles playing in unfamiliar styles and/or on ‘new’ instruments. These have their counterpart in the transnational Georgian-singing communities that are the focus of Caroline’s research. The research forum will be preceded by a show-and-tell session (2:00–4:00pm) offering insights into the practices of the ensembles, with contributions from participating students. You are welcome to attend either or both of these sessions! This session is led by Caroline Bithell.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. Sessions begin at 4:30pm GMT and last 90 minutes.

Jeanice Brooks (University of Southampton). 4pm, Wednesday 28 April 2021. First Editions Research Seminar,University of Southampton
This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on Microsoft Teams. For an invitation, write Matthew Shlomowitz at M.Shlomowitz@southampton.ac.uk

Professor Brooks discusses two collaborative books that have been recently published. Both books are devoted to the 20th century French composer, conductor and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Each addresses different aspects of Boulanger’s multifaceted career, exploring her musical beliefs and interrogating the discourses of power, inclusion and exclusion that shaped her professional world. You can read more about each book here:

https://boydellandbrewer.com/nadia-boulanger.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo68373136.html Jeanice Brooks is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton (UK). Her doctoral dissertation treated musical settings of poetry by the sixteenth-century writer Pierre de Ronsard. Since then she has continued to work on aspects of French music and culture in the Renaissance; her book on the strophic air de cour in the context of court culture, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (University of Chicago Press, 2000), received the 2001 Roland H. Bainton prize for the best book in music or art history. She also works on twentieth-century French music, especially the career of Nadia Boulanger. She is the author of The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2013); editor of Nadia Boulanger and Her World (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and co-editor of Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music (University of Rochester Press, 2020). She led the Austen Family Music Books digitisation (2015) and current projects explore further topics in domestic music culture in Britain in the years around 1800.

Nathan Wolek (Stetson University). Documenting Coastal Soundscapes from Florida to Scotland. 29 April 4pm BST (5pm CEST, 8am PDT, 11am EDT). University of Aberdeen
Further information and meeting link

== Steven Vande Moortele (University of Toronto). Microtheories of Musical Form in the Nineteenth Century. 29 April 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK ==

Meeting and further information here

This session will explore the limits and possibilities of a theory of musical form in the nineteenth century that is structured as a network of geographically, chronologically and generically localised micro-theories. It will focus on an ongoing case study of sonata form in Viennese chamber music from 1815–1828 by composers including Beethoven, Call, Fesca, Halm, Hänsel, Hirsch, Jansa, Krommer, Mayseder, Onslow, Romberg, Schubert and Spohr. Professor Steven Vande Moortele (University of Toronto) opens the session with a presentation on his recent work in this area, followed by a case-study presentation from Dr Anne Hyland (University of Manchester) focusing on Joseph Mayseder’s (1789–1863) string quartets. These papers will be followed by a brief roundtable discussion involving members of the department’s Historically and Culturally Informed Analysis research group, culminating in a plenary Q&A. This session is led by Anne Hyland.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. Sessions begin at 4:30pm GMT and last 90 minutes.

Samuel Mehr (Harvard). Universality and diversity in human song. 4 May 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST)
Meeting here

Discovering the universal features of human musicality is a prerequisite for explaining the biological and cultural evolution of music. What is universal about the psychological representation of music, and what varies? In this talk I will present analyses of the Natural History of Song Discography, which includes songs recorded in 86 mostly small-scale societies, and experiments using these songs. We find that acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their primary behavioral functions across cultures. Adult listeners worldwide are sensitive to this fact, in that they accurately infer behavioral functions even when the songs are from unfamiliar cultures and sung in unfamiliar languages. Such effects are not, however, merely a result of musical or cultural experience: both young children and infants show comparable effects, with little evidence for increases in sensitivity across ages. Moreover, high-level representations of musical behaviors are apparently enabled by lower-level processing of pitch and duration information into tonal and metrical representations. These cognitive phenomena may form a foundation for a universal psychology of music underlying culturally varying phenomena, such as musical aesthetics.

Samuel A. Mehr is Principal Investigator at The Music Lab, Department of Psychology, Harvard University. He studies how and why the design of the human mind leads us to perceive, create, and engage with music across human societies and across the lifespan. Originally a musician, Sam earned a B.M. in Music Education from the Eastman School of Music, followed by a doctorate in Human Development from Harvard. You can participate in Sam's research at https://themusiclab.org and follow him on Twitter @samuelmehr.

== Nicola Dibben (University of Sheffield). ‘Analysing musical new multimedia: music in mobile apps and extended reality’. 5 May 2021, 16.30 GMT+1. Oxford Seminar in Music Theory and Analysis (University of Oxford). Via Zoom. ==

Further details and sign-up information can be found on the seminar webpages. You can also follow OSiMTA on Twitter @OxfordAnalysis

This paper investigates an emerging new musical multimedia form—interactive musical/sonic art experiences in audio augmented reality. It is common to think of augmented reality as visual, in which imagery is overlaid onto a scene viewed through a screen. However, it can also take aural form—audio augmented reality— in which (spatialised) headphone sound is integrated with (or more commonly) overlays audio from the physical environment surrounding the listener. Previous research has focused on the technical challenges and realisation of sound spatialisation, interactivity, and storytelling in extended reality formats. It has less frequently addressed what audio augmented reality means for musicking (presentational and participatory) and musical aesthetics. In this paper I identify distinct approaches to music in audio augmented reality, and use this to contextualise analyses of specific musical examples, including Moonmoons AR app (Anna Meredith, 2019) and Bloom: Open Space Hololens installation (Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers, 2018). I use these to highlight specific material, aesthetic and phenomenological characteristics of and possibilities for audio augmented reality music, including compositional and listener agency and interactivity, visualisation of sound, the open-work and ludification. In doing so I reflect on what the important music-analytic questions might be about these media and what kinds of theory and analytical methods might be needed to better understand them.

Nicola Dibben is Professor in Music and Faculty Director of Research at the University of Sheffield, and former editor of the academic journals Empirical Musicology Review and Popular Music. Her research investigates how people engage with music (primarily through listening) and what that engagement means for how people think about and make sense of themselves and the world. She does this through case studies and methods from the science and psychology of music and popular music studies – interests she attributes to encountering empirical methods while an undergraduate, and to a childhood infatuation with British TV chart show Top of the Pops. She has published over 60 journal articles and book chapters, and is the author of Björk (2009), and co-authored Music and Mind in Everyday Life (2010) and edited Sounds Icelandic (2019). Her commercial collaborations include investigating effects of music on driving, and working with Björk on the artist’s multi-media app album, Biophilia (2011). Current projects include a monograph on how digitalisation is impacting the experience of recorded music, partly researched while Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, USA.

Seminars are open to all, including the general public. Sessions will last 90 minutes and lively discussion is encouraged. They take place on Wednesday afternoons, beginning at 16.30 UK time, via Zoom.

Matt Brennan (University of Glasgow). The cost of music. 4pm, Wednesday 5 May 2021. Hartley Research Seminar, University of Southampton
A world where music does not have an environmental impact is a world without music. I do not want a world without music, and it is not my intention to ruin one of life’s great pleasures – the enjoyment of music – by pointing out its environmental cost. However, if we are to have any hope of addressing the global challenge of climate change, we urgently need to become more mindful of the cost of the whole range of production and consumption behaviours that we usually take for granted, including our participation in music. This talk therefore considers the music industries from the perspective of environmental sustainability. It also offers a critique of the assumption that the growth of these industries is an unquestionable good.

Matt Brennan is Reader in Popular Music and Convenor of the MSc Music Industries degree at the University of Glasgow. He has served as Chair of the UK and Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and has authored, co-authored, and edited several books in the field of popular music studies. His latest book, Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit (Oxford University Press 2020), establishes the drum kit’s central role in shaping the history of music over the last 150 years; it was named one of the "best pop music books of 2020" by the Financial Times. His previous monograph, When Genres Collide (Bloomsbury 2017), was named as one of Pitchfork’s “Favourite Music Books of 2017” and was awarded the IASPM Canada Book Prize. He has also co-authored (with Martin Cloonan, Simon Frith, and Emma Webster) a three-volume History of Live Music in Britain (Routledge 2013; 2019; 2021).

== Nicole Grimes (University of California, Irvine). Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Brahms's Gesang der Parzen. 6 May 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK ==

Meeting link and further information here

In this penultimate session of our departmental research fora, we are delighted to welcome Professor Nicole Grimes (University of California, Irvine) whose paper considers the rich cultural context for Brahms’s Gesang der Parzen, a one-movement choral work for mixed voices. In his correspondence with a select few friends, Brahms persistently associated Gesang der Parzen with a text from the Book of Job that he had earlier set in the motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben?, Op. 74 No. 1. This juxtaposition of Biblical and mythical tales of divine punishment provides a broader hermeneutic context for the Parzenlied which resonates with certain artworks of the Italian Renaissance (including Titian’s cycle The Four Great Sinners and his Flaying of Marsyas) with which Brahms was particularly preoccupied at the time he was writing Gesang der Parzen. The session begins with a presentation by Nicole considering how the analysis of the work offered in her book, Brahms’s Elegies: the Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture (Cambridge, 2019) is intricately bound up with the composition’s rich historical and cultural context. This will be followed by a roundtable discussion with members of our Historically and Culturally Informed Analysis core research area, followed by questions from the (virtual) floor. This session is led by Anne Hyland.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. Sessions begin at 4:30pm GMT and last 90 minutes.

== Human Experiences in Contemporary Music-Making: collaborative Composing and Presenting Process in 48 Hours. 13 May 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK ==

Meeting link and further information here

When a twenty-minute piece takes two weeks to rehearse, can a public presentation of that preparatory creative journey shed new light on the process of music making for audiences? This question, posed by Gemma Bass and Gary Farr (Vonnegut Collective), led commissioning composer Tullis Rennie (City, University of London) to create 48 Hours (2020), a new large-scale concert work for Piano Quintet, Trumpet and Recorded Sound. Together, they collaboratively documented the trajectory of the rehearsal process and the motivations of the performers, as the group tackled the challenges of Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet (2000). 48 Hours continues Rennie's practice-based research in ‘socio-sonic’ composition methodologies (Rennie 2014), where collaborative and (auto)ethnographic processes are considered both as tools, and as materials, for co-composition. In this session, hosted by the department’s Creative and Performing Practices research area, we welcome Gemma Bass and Tullis Rennie in conversation. Vonnegut Collective’s recordings of Ades’s Piano Quintet and 48 Hours will be released by Moving Furniture Records in 2021. This session is led by Camden Reeves.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. Sessions begin at 4:30pm GMT and last 90 minutes.

David Bretherton (University of Southampton). ‘Schubert’s sexuality and queer music theory’. 19 May 2021, 16.30 GMT+1. Oxford Seminar in Music Theory and Analysis (University of Oxford). Via Zoom.
Further details and sign-up information can be found on the seminar webpages. You can also follow OSiMTA on Twitter @OxfordAnalysis

Abstract to follow.

The Oxford Seminar in Music Theory & Analysis (OSiMTA) meets two or three times a term. Its convenors are Professor Jonathan Cross and Dr Sebastian Wedler. Our conception of theory and analysis is critical, plural and interdisciplinary. In shaping the seminars, we aim to reflect the broad range of activity taking place under the heading of theory and analysis today, as well as to challenge boundaries, embracing not only ‘conventional’ practices, histories of theory and repertoires, but also new interdisciplinary approaches that engage with cultural studies, ethnomusicology, aesthetics and philosophy, psychology, politics, performance studies, popular music studies, and so on. Speakers include distinguished local, national and international scholars.

Seminars are open to all, including the general public. Sessions will last 90 minutes and lively discussion is encouraged. They take place on Wednesday afternoons, beginning at 16.30 UK time, via Zoom.