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MHTE Lecture Series
MHTE Lecture Series, 2015-16 Chair: Dr. Stephen Slottow
The Division Lecture Series is a vibrant nexus for a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas about music by students, faculty, and invited guests.
Lectures 2015-2016:
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Frank Samarotto
What’s the Use of Outmoded Theories? Rehearing Brahms’s Third Symphony
Frank Samarotto is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Indiana University Bloomington, teaching there since 2001, and was previously at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. He was a workshop leader at the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory Summer Institute in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis in 2002, a workshop leader and invited presenter at the first conferences in Germany devoted to Schenkerian theory and analysis held in Berlin, Sauen, and Mannheim in June of 2004, and gave a week of lectures on voice-leading and musical time at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki in 2007. He has served as a visiting scholar at Emory University, the Penn State School of Music, Bowling Green State University, Notre Dame, McGill University, and Yale University and was the keynote speaker at the 27th Annual Music Theory Forum at Florida State University. His publications have appeared in Schenker Studies II, the Beethoven Forum, Theory and Practice, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online, Integral and in conference proceedings, as well as a festschrift for Carl Schachter and a recent anthology on sonata form edited by Gordon Sly. He is currently working on a book on Schenkerian theory and analysis.
Friday, April 1, 2016
Janette Tilley, City University of New York
An Uneasy Eros: Secularization and the Changing Musical Expression of Mystical Love in Early Modern Germany
Janette Tilley is Associate Professor of Music and Deputy Department Chair at Lehman College and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her work has appeared in Early Music History, Music and Letters and her edition of Andreas Hammerschmidt’s Dialogen (1645) was published by AR Editions. She is a contributing editor to the forthcoming collected edition of works by Sebastian Knüpfer and is Editor-in-Chief of the Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music. She is hard on work on the book project from which this talk is taken, titled Singing the Sacred Erotic: Music, Gender, and Bible in Early Modern Germany.
All lectures take place at 4pm, in Room 321 unless otherwise noted. Topics will be announced soon.
Wednesday, November 18: Barbara Willi
Series Basso Continuo versus Counterpoint: An Intellectual and Musical Fight during the 17th and 18th Centuries
Barbara Maria Willi is a Czech-German harpsichordist who has significantly contributed to the development of historical performance practice in the Czech Republic. In 1991 she established a harpsichord class at the Janáček Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Brno. She wrote her dissertation (2006) on basso continuo styles in 17th-century central Europe, and has been head of the Department of Early Music and Organ at the Janáček Academy since 2014. Her research work focuses on basso continuo sources of the 17th century and lieder by Czech composers from the late 18th century such as Josef Rösler, Jan Hugo Voříšek, and Leopold Koželuh. Her interests include improvisation and the application of insights from theory and analysis to performance.
Her performance style has been influenced by her teachers Stanislav Heller, Aline Zylberajch, Kenneth Gilbert, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. She has won many musical rewards, including a special mention at the International Harpsichord Competition in Bruges (1995), the Choc du Monde de Musique for the CD "Salve mater“ with Capilla Flamenca and Schola Gregoriana Pragensis, and the Golden Prague prize (2000) for her recording of Handel arias with Magdalena Kožená.In 2011 Czech State Television produced a documentary about her under the title "Bravo! Barbara Maria Willi. She is program director of the Czech organ festival Bach´s Organ Autumn and a member of the Prague Spring Harpsichord Competition commission.
Wednesday, November 11: Alvaro Torrente
A la recherche du bal perdu: Erotic Dance-Songs in Early-Modern Spain
Álvaro Torrente Sánchez-Guisande is Professor of Music History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, director of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales (ICCMU), president of the Fundación Gonzalo Torrente Ballester and patron of the Fundación de Amigos de la Biblioteca Nacional de España. He is the director of the project Catálogo Descriptivo de Pliegos de Villancicos, published by Reichenberger, and associate director of the collection The Operas of Francesco Cavalli, published by Bärenreiter. His critical editions of seventh-century Italian operas have been performed in theatres in Munich, Amsterdam, London, Basel, Innsbruck, Frankfurt, Linz, and Wiesbaden. Since 2007 he has been the Spanish representative of the Directorate of the International Musicological Society.
Wednesday, October 21: Louise Meintjes
Singing Violence: Zulu Ngoma During South Africa’s Transition
Louise Meintjes is a native of South Africa and earned her Masters of Music and PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas-Austin. She is Associate Professor of Music and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, where she has taught since 1996. She is the author of numerous articles, including “Paul Simon's Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning" in Ethnomusicology 34/1 (Winter 1990); "Shoot the Sergeant, Shatter the Mountain: The Production of Masculinity in Zulu Ngoma Song and Dance in Post-Apartheid South Africa" in Ethnomusicology Forum 13/2 (2004) and "The Recording Studio as Fetish" in The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne (2012). Her book, Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Duke University Press, 2003) is a remarkable urban ethnography of a recording studio in Johannesburg during the early 1990s, a moment when everything was changing in South African music, and politics. She is currently at work on her new book entitled Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Song, Dance and Masculinity in the Post-Apartheid Struggle (Duke UP, forthcoming), from which her UNT Division talk will be taken. Meintjes has received several grants and fellowships, including the Nadia and Nicholas Nahumck Fellowship (2006) and the Jaap Kunz Prize (2005) from the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Rockefeller Fellowship in the Black Performing Arts (2001-02), and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Wednesday, September 16: Jonathan Kregor
Title: “I Have Prayed It Rather than Composed It”: On Franz Liszt’s Religious Programs, 1857–1865
Biography: Jonathan Kregor is Professor of Musicology at the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music. He is the author of Liszt as Transcriber (Cambridge University Press, 2010), winner of the inaugural Alan Walker Book Award from the American Liszt Society; Program Music (Cambridge University Press, 2015); articles and reviews in numerous academic journals; and editor of works by CPE Bach and Clara Schumann. Since 2012 he has been editor of the Journal of the American Liszt Society.
Wednesday, April 15, 4-5pm, Music Building, 321
Reception to follow in the Green Room.
Greg Barnett, Rice University
Title: Vallotti, Martini, Paolucci, and the Golden Age of Modal Polyphony
Gregory Barnett is Associate Professor and Chair of Musicology at the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University. He is the author of Bolognese Instrumental Music, 1660-1710: Spiritual Comfort, Courtly Delight, and Commercial Triumph (Ashgate) and is a contributor to The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, Geminiani Studies (Ut Orpheus Edizioni), and Regole Armoniche (1775) by Vincenzo Manfredini (Brepols). He has also published articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Early Music, The Journal of Musicology, and Theoria. His interests include the history of modal theory, Baroque-era instrumental music and instruments, and the music of Handel. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, and the American Musicological Society.
Wednesday, March 25, 4-5pm, Music Building, 321
Reception to follow in the Green Room.
Paul Dworak
Title: Vowel Set Transformations and Vowel Harmonies in Claude Debussy’s Proses lyriques
Abstract: In Proses lyriques, Debussy developed new methods for setting text to music. The music critics in Paris and Brussels who reviewed this composition between 1894 and 1914 were in most cases highly critical of the work. Their reviews indicated that they did not understand the innovations that Debussy had introduced in this composition, but instead focused on their belief that the songs abandoned traditional principles for writing poetry and for setting the text to music. Debussy wrote the text for the four songs of Proses lyriques. He used the innovations in writing verse that were introduced by Charles Baudelaire and that culminated in works of Stéphane Mallarmé. In particular, Debussy used the literary genre of prose lyrique that was cultivated by the Belgian writer Arnold Goffin and some of his contemporaries. Prose lyrique was a synthesis of poésie lyrique and developments in vers libre that were prominent in poèmes en prose. Mallarmé and Remy de Gourmont, in particular, encouraged writers to be aware of the harmonic and rhythmic aspects of the words that they selected in their verse. This lecture discusses the early performances of Proses lyriques and the reviews written during the two decades after its composition. It also discusses the development of verse during the second half of the nineteenth century. This discussion provides a context for understanding both the artistic environment in which Debussy composed these songs and the innovations that he implemented in this composition. Among these innovations were his exploration of the harmonic nature of vowels and how such harmonies could be notated for the piano; vowel sets and their transformations; the use of vowel sets as counterpoint to the piano and vocal lines; and transformations of vowel sounds using techniques that include spectral inversion and acoustical mixing of vowels.
Wednesday, March 11, 4-5pm, Music Building, 321
Reception to follow in the Green Room.
Amanda Minks (Assoc. Professor, University of Oklahoma)
Title: “Mapping Culture across Borders: Music Research and U.S.-Mexico Relations in the 1930s and 40s”
Abstract:
In the 1930s and 40s, recording technology and music research were increasingly put to work in the documentation of local musics as a representation of regional, national, or universal human heritage in the Americas. This work was carried out under the auspices of national and international organizations that crafted cultural policies along with hierarchies of difference and value. The intellectual, political, and artistic interaction between Mexico and the United States was especially intimate and multilayered due to their shared history and border. In this presentation, I will examine how U.S. music researchers such as Charles Seeger, Henrietta Yurchenco, and Alan Lomax engaged (or failed to engage) with Mexican music, and how their projects intersected with broader inter-American politics. I argue for a more nuanced view of a history that is usually reduced to either celebratory homage of disciplinary forebears or critical dismissal of cultural imperialism. This analysis helps to recover the role of Mexican and other Latin American musics in the development of ethnomusicology as a discipline and practice. More broadly, it historicizes the contemporary discourse of Latino influence in the U.S. by emphasizing the deep roots of Latin American music in U.S. territory, and the long- term mutual influence between the U.S. and Mexico in cultural and political realms.
Wednesday, November 19, 4-5pm, Music Building, 321
Reception to follow in the Green Room.
Donna Buchanan
Title: A Bulgarian Rite of Spring: Bells, Mummers, and Mana in “Balkansky”’s Cosmology for Social Change
Abstract:
Since 2009, the Bulgarian multimedia project “Balkansky”, a collaboration between graphic designer-photographer Ivo Hristov and graphic artist-composer Ivan Shopov, has released two concept albums of electronic dance music, Kuker (2009) and Orenda (2012), on the independent recording label Kuker Music, with accompanying music videos and artwork. As their titles suggest, both albums draw extensively upon nature worship, Christianity, and other belief systems, particularly apropos the mid-winter and springtide mummers called kukeri or survakari and the bells that are their sonic spiritual weapons. Drawing upon the ethnomusicological fieldwork conducted with mummers, artists, bellmakers, and musicians between 2008 and 2013, my paper explores how Balkansky has cultivated and artistically repackaged key symbols and imagery of older calendrical customs and agrarian rites, communicating them back to the Bulgarian public in a contemporary popular culture format that reveals the artists’ cosmological manifesto for social change.
Wednesday, October 22, 4-5pm, Music Building, 321
Reception to follow in the Green Room.
Mary Channen Caldwell
Title: Singing to Learn and Learning to Sing: A Premodern Approach to Grammar and Religion
Abstract:
Songs for learning are essential to the culture of childhood—from the soundtrack of Sesame Street to the ABC Song, music helps young and old alike acquire and embody knowledge through repeated performance. Song at the most basic level of medieval education, however, has rarely received attention beyond the simple acknowledgment of its presence within cathedral and song schools. A group of sacred Latin songs surviving from the twelfth to the fourteenth century nevertheless signal the rich culture of learning songs in the lives of medieval school children, designed as they are to instill in performers and audiences rudimentary concepts of grammar and theology. This collection of rhymed, rhythmical, and sacred Latin songs is marked by two significant features: first, each song is structured around noun declensions, noun and adjective agreements, and verb conjugations; and second, each song shares the musical and textual scaffolding of a refrain.
These remarkable songs not only allow for the challenging exercise of fitting changing grammar patterns into rhythmical, rhymed poetry, but also provide an inherently repetitive, performative, and communal space for memorizing grammar through their refrain forms. In addition to the learning goals suggested by grammatically-shaped lyrics, these refrain songs are spiritually edifying. Preserved in sources including the well-known Notre Dame manuscripts of the thirteenth century and the fourteenth-century Moosburger Graduale, the music-poetic works serve as musical glosses for religious feasts special to the calendar of medieval children: the Feast of St. Nicholas, Christmas, the Feast of Fools, and the New Year. With their focus on devotional moments showcasing youth participation, these sacred grammar songs are the playful product of didactic impulses emerging equally from the schoolroom and the church. By fusing basic grammar and religious ideology onto ostensibly “fun” songs, performers are, like children singing along with Sesame Street, effortlessly engaged in informal yet deeply embodied learning.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 4pm, Music Building, 321
Joel Lester
Title: Outer Form, Inner Form, and Other Musical Narratives in the first movement of Beethoven’s op. 14, no. 2
Joel Lester, scholar, professor, violinist, and administrator, was Dean of Mannes College of Music from 1996-2011. He was violinist from 1970-91 in The Da Capo Chamber Players (winners of the 1973 Walter Naumburg Foundation Chamber Music Award). Among his many books and articles are Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1992; winner of the Wallace Berry Publication Award of the Society for Music Theory), Bach’s Works for Solo Violin (Oxford University Press, 1999; winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award), and the textbook Analytic Approaches to 20th-Century Music (W. W. Norton, 1989). He was President of the Society for Music Theory from 2003-05. From 1969-95, he was Professor of Music at CCNY and a member of the doctoral faculty in music of the CUNY Graduate Center, where he directed the D.M.A. Program in Performance from 1986-95.
Below: Photographs from the Joel Lester Division Lecture on September 24, 2014; Photographer: Erin Lancaster
Justin Lavacek
Title: Contrapuntal Ingenuity in the Motets of Machaut
Wednesday, February 5, 4pm, Music Building, 321
Justin Lavacek is a lecturer in music theory at UNT. He completed his Ph.D. at The Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, in 2011. He research interests include issues of counterpoint and meaning in early music, Schenkerian analysis, and the history of music theory.
Wednesday, November 6, 4-5pm, Room 321
Ruth Hellier-Tinoco
University of California, Santa Barbara
Title: Strategies of now-then: molding Mexicanness through music, dance, theater, film, and photography
Ruth Hellier-Tinoco holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology and Performance Studies from the Birmingham Conservatoire, University of Central England. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Music, University of California, Santa Barbara where her classes are also listed in the departments of Theater and Dance, Feminist Studies and Latin American and Iberian Studies. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching are particularly focused on Mexican music and dance, politics, poetics and cultural history; experimental performance-making; and community and educational arts.
Between 1983 and 1994 Hellier-Tinoco had a successful career as a stage actress and performer in the UK, and also worked as a community arts facilitator and Head of Music in secondary education. In the field of arts and disability, she directed the InterAct Theatre Workshop.
Dr. Hellier-Tinoco’s publications include the books Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism, and Performance (Oxford University Press); Women Singers in Global Contexts: Music, Biography, Identity (University of Illinois Press); and Creating Theater and Performance: Mexican Trilogy–Trilogía Mexicana (forthcoming).
Wednesday, October 23, 4-5pm, Room 321
Bruce Dickey
Title: Far buon stromento: Reconstructing the technique of a forgotten instrument
Bruce Dickey is a performer and researcher who has devoted himself since 1975 to the revival of the cornetto. He has taught cornetto and 17th century performance practice at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel (Switzerland) since 1976 and is founder and co-director of the ensemble Concerto Palatino. As a performer he has made many groundbreaking recordings both as a soloist and with his ensemble, and has collaborated with most of the leading figures in the field of early music. His many students, over more than 30 years of teaching at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, have helped to consolidate and elevate the status of this once forgotten instrument. For his achievements the Historic Brass Society awarded him in 2000 the Christopher Monk Award for "his monumental work in cornetto performance, historical performance practice and musicological scholarship." In 2007 he was honored by British conductor and musicologist Andrew Parrott with a “Taverner Award” as one of 14 musicians whose “significant contributions to musical understanding have been motivated by neither commerce nor ego.” He has published numerous articles on the cornetto and performance practice. Together with Michael Collver, he has published a catalog of the surviving cornetto repertoire, and, together with trumpeter Edward Tarr, a book on historical wind articulation.
Wednesday, September 25, 4-5pm, Room 321
John Covach
Eastman School of Music/University of Rochester
"Before the Invasion: London, Liverpool and British Pop in the Early 1960s"
Reception in the Green Room, 5-6pm
John Covach is Professor and Chair of Music at the University of Rochester, Director of the University of Rochester Institute for Popular Music, Mercer Brugler Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Professor of Theory at the Eastman School of Music. Professor Covach teaches classes in traditional music theory as well as the history and analysis of popular music. He has published dozens of articles on topics dealing with popular music, twelve-tone music, and the philosophy and aesthetics of music. He is the author of the college textbook What's That Sound? An Introduction to Rock Music, recently published by W. W. Norton in a third edition, and has co-edited Understanding Rock (Oxford University Press), American Rock and the Classical Tradition, and Traditions, Institutions, and American Popular Music (both with Routledge), as well the recently published volume, Sounding Out Pop (Michigan). He is one of the founding editors for the University of Michigan Press series called Tracking Pop, which is devoted to scholarly monographs on popular music.
As a guitarist, Covach has performed widely on electric and classical guitar in both the US and Europe and recorded with the progressive rock band, Land of Chocolate. He currently performs with several Rochester based bands, including Going for the One.
Thursday, April 11, 2013, 6pm, Voertman Concert Hall
Susan Boynton, Columbia University
Topic: "Liturgy to Devotion: Transformations of the Man of Sorrows, ca. 1340-1503."
Wednesday, April 3, 2013, 4pm, 321:
William Caplin
Professor of Music Theory, Schulich School of Music, McGill University
Topic: "Teaching Classical Form: Strict Categories versus Flexible Analyses."
Professor William Caplin was the invited resident of UNT’s division of Music History, Theory, and Ethnomusicology in April, where he taught graduate analysis classes, including advanced Schenkerian analysis. Caplin’s residency culminated in his lecture at our division lecture series, concerning “Teaching Classical Form: Strict Categories versus Flexible Analyses.”
William Caplin is James McGill Professor of Music Theory at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, specializing in the theory of musical form and the history of harmonic and rhythmic theory in the modern era. His book Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (Oxford, 1998) won the 1999 Wallace Berry Book Award from the Society for Music Theory (SMT). Caplin publishes in the leading journals of his discipline (e.g., Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Eighteenth-Century Music) and contributes book chapters to major collections of essays (e.g., Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, Beethoven’s String Quartets, Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata). He recently co-authored (with James Hepokoski and James Webster, and edited by Pieter Bergé) Musical Form, Forms, & Formenlehre. A textbook on musical form, Analyzing Classical Form, will be published by OUP in June 2013. A former president of the SMT, he has presented many keynote addresses, guest lectures, and workshops in North American and Europe. He currently holds a major research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and is serving the second year of two-year leave supported by a Killam Research Fellowship from the Canada Council of the Arts, both on the project “Cadence: A Study of Closure in Tonal Music.”
Wednesday, March 27, 4pm, 321
Robert Pearson, University of North Texas
Topic: "The Critical reception of Beethoven's Fidelio and his 1806 Revisions to 'O namenlose freude'"
Robert D. Pearson is currently a lecturer in music history at UNT. Dr. Pearson received a B. A. in music from UC Davis and higher degrees in musicology from Brandeis University, where his dissertation research on Donald Francis Tovey was supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship. His research interests include the history of music theory, performance, and Beethoven.
Monday, March 4, 2013, 4pm, 321
Michael Bakan, Florida State University
Topic: "Musical Ethnography as Social Activism in the Ethnomusicology of Autism"
Michael Bakan is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Head of World Music in the College of Music at Florida State University. He is the author of the book Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur (Chicago 1999), which was selected to the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles list for the year 2000 and reviewed in The Times (London) as one of the two "most significant publications on Balinese music in almost half a century"; and of the textbook World Music: Traditions and Transformations, which is now in its second edition with McGraw-Hill (2012) and has been adopted at more than 150 universities nationwide and internationally. Bakan is the director of the Artism Ensemble, a unique music performance collective featuring children on the autism spectrum, their co-participating parents, and professional musicians from diverse world cultures. His current research on the ethnomusicology of autism is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and other agencies. It has yielded several publications in leading scholarly journals and edited volumes. He also directs the Sekaa Gong Hanuman Agung Balinese gamelan and the Omnimusica Intercultural Ensemble at FSU, serves as series editor for the Routledge Focus on World Music book series, and formerly served as president of the Southeast/Caribbean Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He has been an invited speaker or visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, the Berklee College of Music, and numerous other institutions. Bakan maintains a personal website at www.michaelbakan.com.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013, 4pm, 321
Giorgio Sanguinetti, University of Rome - Tor Vergata, Rome
Lecture Title: "Verdi’s Six-Four Chords"
Professor Giorgio Sanguinetti of the University of Rome—Tor Vergata completed a one week residency in the theory department earlier this year. His busy schedule included lecturing in undergraduate core theory classes, a special topics discussion of European vs. American approaches to analysis, he taught 18th-century counterpoint and Schenkerian analysis courses, and read a paper codifying Verdi’s usage of 6/4s as part of the MHTE division lecture series. As the culmination of his stay, Prof. Sanguinetti was the invited keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Texas Society for Music Theory, held this year at UNT, where he spoke about the history and future of partimenti, the subject of his recent book.
Giorgio Sanguinetti, author of The Art of Partimento: History, Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2012) and co-author of "Partimento and Continuo Playing in Theory and Practice" (with Thomas Christensen, Robert Gjerdingen and Rudolf Lutz; Leuven University Press 2010), has published on the history of music theory, Schenkerian analysis, form, and opera analysis. His articles and reviews have appeared in "Journal of Music Theory", "Studi Musicali, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia", "Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale", "Fonti Musicali in Italia", "Studi Pergolesiani", and in several conference proceedings. He delivered papers and keynote addresses at the annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory (SMT), of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory, the Società Italiana di Musicologia, the Schola Cantorum Basilensis (Basel, Switzerland), the 6th European Music Analysis Conference, and at several other meetings and conferences. He was the organizer of the VII European Music Analysis Conference (EuroMac 2011). In 2012 he was Visiting Professor at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). He is associate professor at the University of Rome - Tor Vergata.
2012 Lectures:
Monday, November 5, 2012
Wendy Heller
Professor of Music, Princeton University
"Rescuing Ariadne"
Wendy Heller is Professor of Music and Director of the Program in Italian Studies at Princeton University. She is a specialist in 17th- and 18th-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with particular emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, and the classical tradition. Author of Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (California, 2004), Heller has been a Fellow of the American Academyin Rome, of the Villa I Tatti (Harvard University
Center for Renaissance Studies), and the Sylvan C. and Pamela Coleman Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is also the author of Music in the Baroque and Anthology of Music in the Baroque (both for W. W. Norton, 2013), and is completing a book entitled Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Stephen Slottow
Professor of Music Theory, University of North Texas
"American Transformations of Zen Buddhist Chanting"
Stephen Slottow is an Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of North Texas. He received his Ph.D. from the City University of New York, where he wrote a dissertation on pitch organization in the music of Carl Ruggles. A former professional fiddler and banjo player, his interests include American traditional music, the American ultramodernists, atonal theory, and Schenkerian analysis. He was awarded the 2000 Emerging Scholar Award by the Music Theory Society of New York and has published in such journals as Music Theory Spectrum, Integral, Theory and Practice, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, Journal of the Society for American Music, and the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy. His book, The Music of Carl Ruggles (Pendragon Press), was published in 2009. He has been practicing Zen in the Harada-Yasutani line since the 1970s.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Melanie Plesch, Lecturer in Musicology at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music
"Theory and rhetorical efficacy: Argentine musical nationalism"
Melanie Plesch is an Argentine musicologist currently based in Australia. Her work focuses on the intersections of music, politics and society, with particular emphasis on the relationship between music and the construction of national identities. She has done extensive research on the construction of Argentina's national identity through music and music imagery. She completed her doctoral dissertation "The guitar in 19th century Buenos Aires: Towards a Cultural History of an Argentine Musical Emblem" at the University of Melbourne in 1998. She has lectured extensively both in Argentina and Australia. Before relocating to Australia in 2005 she was Associate Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and at the Catholic University of Argentina. In what has been described as the "longest commute in history", she continued teaching at both institutions during 2006 and 2007. Melanie is currently a Lecturer in Musicology at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, where she teaches subjects in music history, research methods and Latin American music. In 2011 she was ranked among the top ten lecturers in Australia and won the University of Melbourne Lecturer of the year award.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
John Miller Chernoff
Author, percussionist, ethnomusicologist
"Music and Historical Conciousness in an African Society"
John M. Chernoff was educated at Yale University (B.A.) and the Hartford Seminary Foundation (Ph.D.). He is the author of African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (University of Chicago Press 1979), one of the most cited books on African music that has influenced musicians and scholars in a wide array of disciplines and musical idioms. A multifaceted scholar and musician, he performed and composed music with David Byrne for The Catherine Wheel, a suite of dances choreographed by Twyla Tharp and performed on Broadway and shown on American Public Broadcasting’s Great Performances series. His two recent books, Hustling Is Not Stealing (2003) and Exchange is Not Robbery (2005), both published by the University of Chicago Press, depict the postcolonial generation of African urban youth. Hustling Is Not Stealing won the Victor Turner Prize for innovative ethnographic writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and was a finalist for the Melville Herskovitz award from the African Studies Association. Currently, he is working on an open-access publication of an ethnography of Dagbon, intended to create a freely available record of Dagbamba custom for future generations. A Drummer's Testament: Dagbamba Society and Culture in the Twentieth Century is a collaborative project based on more than thirty years of research.