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 =

== Michael Beckerman (New York University). From the Monkey Mountains to the Suicide Bridge: The Hidden Subjects of the Haas Brothers. 10 March 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.

At some point in the early 1920’s Pavel Haas took a vacation in the Czech Moravian Highlands, known colloquially as the “Monkey Mountains.”  A few years later he referenced this experience in the programme for his second string quartet, the jazzy final movement of which is suddenly interrupted by a song he had written for his lover. More than a decade later he worked on a symphony, unfinished when he was transported to Terezin, which includes “hidden” quotes from the St. Wenceslaus Hymn, the Horst Wessel Lied, a 15th century Hussite war song and Chopin’s Funeral March. While in Terezin, he composed a choral work with a frontispiece that looks like musical notes, but actually spells out a message in Hebrew. Then, in the summer before he was transported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered, both his Songs on Chinese Poetry and his Study for Strings were performed (the latter memorialized in the infamous Terezin propaganda film) and each had its own reference to other works. Fast forward six years. Pavel’s younger brother Hugo, in the 1930’s a kind of Czech Cary Grant, has escaped from Europe and made enough money as a character actor in Hollywood to start his own B-movie production company. One of his very first noir films, Girl on the Bridge has its own hidden secret, and the secret is…his brother Pavel. This talk explores the connection between the brothers, presents examples of their intertextual framing, considers the question of artistic secrets, and argues that some works were created for an audience of one.

Michael Beckerman is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor and Collegiate Professor of Music at New York University where he is also head of the Department of Music. He has written several books on Czech topics and has just edited, with Paul Boghossian a volume on issues around classical music. He served as Distinguished Professor of History at Lancaster University and the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic. He is currently working on a volume titled The Doctrine of One.

== The Underrepresentation of Women of Colour in the Classical Music Industry, and How We Can Enact Change: Part of 2021 MUSICA Festival. 11 March 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) University of Manchester ==

Sign up and further information here

As part of the student-led Musica festival, we welcome guest speakers Rebeca Omorida (founder of the African Concert Series), Natalia Franklin Pierce (Executive Director of nonclassical) and Dr Ellie Chan (Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Manchester) to discuss the challenges facing the Classical music industry regarding diversity and inclusion. Two of the panelists will present twenty-minute talks on the topic, followed by a roundtable discussion with the rest of the panel. Questions from the audience will conclude the session. 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.

Veza Fernandez. Tremor – Video performance and artist talk. 11 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

== Chikako Morishita. Composing ‘Narrative Dissolution’: Framing Subjectivity in Music Composition. 11 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 == Frances Wilkins (University of Aberdeen). Engaging Community and Landscape: The Role of Sacred Singing as a Soundscape to a Way of Life. 11 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST). University of Aberdeen ==

Further information and meeting link

Scotland is home to an incredible wealth and variety of sacred song traditions with unique and multi-dimensional histories. In North-West Scotland, Gaelic psalmody is recognised as a highly stylised and unique vocal tradition, and there are numerous other practices making a profound contribution to the cultural lives of those living in the region. Likewise in North-East Scotland, the close connection between the fishing industry and gospel hymnody is unequivocal and this has fed directly into the development of a distinct style of musical worship.

Drawing on specific examples from fieldwork conducted in Northern Scotland since 2005 and placing contemporary sacred singing within a historical framework, the aim of this seminar is to discuss the processes by which specific regional repertoires and styles have developed as a response to the cultural and occupational landscape, and as an expression of cultural memory through performance. As with the Gaelic language some of these traditions are considered in steep decline.

The seminar will go on to explore moves that have been made to incorporate sacred singing into vernacular contexts of composition and performance as artistic responses to declining use as a form of worship. How has the performance of sacred singing been modified as it has been taken outside the church, and how has it affected the aesthetics of the performance?

== William Stanford Abbiss (Victoria University of Wellington): Sounds of the Past: Music in 2010s Period Drama & Melissa Beattie (Independent scholar): ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’: Death in Paradise’s Use of Reggae. 11 March 7:30pm GMT (11:30 PST, 13:30 CST, 14:30 EST, 20:30 CET). British Audio-Visual Research Network (BARN) Virtual Colloquia ==

Email barnvirtual.com to receive the joining link and visit www.barnvirtual.com for further information.

Sounds of the Past: Music in 2010s Period Drama (Will Stanford Abbiss, Victoria University of Wellington)

In my PhD thesis, I studied six period dramas from 2010s television: Upstairs Downstairs (BBC/Masterpiece, 2010), Dancing on the Edge (BBC, 2013), The Crown (Netflix, 2016-present), The Living and the Dead (BBC/BBC America, 2016), Dickensian (BBC, 2015-16) and Parade’s End (BBC/HBO, 2012). While each of these dramas uses diegetic and non-diegetic music in distinctive ways, I was not able to directly draw the connections between them in the context of my establishment of a post-heritage critical framework (Abbiss, 2020). This presentation will aim to address this, outlining the characteristics of the music deployed in each drama and identifying how these operate alongside visual and narrative elements. Moments will be identified where music evokes spectacle and nostalgia, but also where it helps to undermine these modes. For example, Dancing on the Edge utilises 1930s-style jazz music performed within the drama; this provides spectacle and establishes the serial’s cultural moment, but takes on a more troubling aspect as the narrative approaches its climax. The Crown’s music, meanwhile, develops through multiple composers over successive seasons, as its narrative moves through the decades of the twentieth century and further away from traditional period drama characteristics. Analysing elements such as these will allow me to come to a hypothesis on the role sound can play in contributing to period drama innovations, which can be considered alongside the broader conclusions of my doctoral work.

‘You Can Get It If You Really Want:’ Death in Paradise’s Use of Reggae (Melissa Beattie, Independent Scholar)

British/French co-production Death in Paradise (BBC 2011-) has become one of the flagship series of BBC1. Set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie and filmed on Guadeloupe, the series frequently uses reggae amongst other perceived-local styles as diegetic and non-diegetic music. Reggae is historically a music of resistance, specifically resistance to oppression by white colonial power structures (King et al, 2002). The premise of Death in Paradise follows a series of white, male, British or Irish DIs who take over the local Black police force. The DS is a series of Black Frenchwomen who are either the love interest for the DI or an extremely supportive subordinate. While the perpetrators are a mix of locals, tourists and foreign residents, the Black supporting characters, subordinates all, constantly point out how brilliant and wonderful their white male, British or Irish DI is and how much they depend on his expertise. That a British/French co-production uses reggae to reinforce an elided pan-Caribbean location can be read as stereotypical. When added to a British/French series such as this, with what can be read as colonialist discourses, the readings can become problematic. This paper, part of an intended-larger project which will ultimately also use audience research, examines the argument that, rather than simply being part of the series’ banal diegetic nationalism (i.e., the series’ flagging itself as a particular identity/-ties, Beattie 2020) the use of reggae in this context can be read as subverting the genre’s original anti-colonialist context and supporting a (perceived) colonialist reading for the series.

== 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).

== 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 ==

Sign up 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.

== 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.

== 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 ==

Sign up 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.

== 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 ==

Sign up 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 ==

Sign up 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.

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

Further details, an abstract and sign-up information will be posted shortly on the seminar webpages. You can also follow OSiMTA on Twitter @OxfordAnalysis

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.

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 ==

Sign up 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 ==

Sign up 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).
Further details, an abstract and sign-up information will be posted shortly on the seminar webpages. You can also follow OSiMTA on Twitter @OxfordAnalysis

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.