The weekly Colloquia present engaging and thought-provoking research papers covering an eclectic mix of topics and musical styles. They provide stimulating opportunities to hear and discuss the latest research by distinguished scholars and musicians from the UK and abroad.
Colloquia are held on Wednesday evenings in the Recital Room (unless otherwise specified) of the Faculty of Music, West Road. Please arrive at 4.50pm for a 5.00pm start. Papers are followed by discussion and a drinks reception with the speaker. Admission is free and open to the general public. All are welcome to attend.
Please note Colloquia are currently being held online, please email fom.colloquia@mus.cam.ac.uk for any enquiries.
Should you be unable to attend or wish to view one of the sesions again, many of our Colloquia are available via the Faculty's YouTube channel.
Colloquia Contacts
Ekaterina Pavlova - ep554@cam.ac.uk
Eirini Diamantouli - ed479@cam.ac.uk
David Cotter - dtc35@cam.ac.uk
Programme
20 Jan 2021
Dr Ariana Phillips-Hutton
Title: In Good Conscience: Empathy and Ethics in Musical Conflict
Transformation
Abstract:
Teach the world to sing, and all will be in perfect harmony – or so the
songs tell us. Music is widely believed to promote unity and peace, but
the focus on music as a vehicle for fostering empathy and reconciliation
threatens to overly simplify our narratives of how interpersonal
conflict might be transformed. In this presentation, I ask fundamental
questions of the ways and means by which music might promote conflict
transformation. I critique the reliance on musical empathy and its
ethical imperative of radical openness; instead, I position it alongside
the acknowledgement of moral responsibility as a fundamental component
of music's capacity to transform conflict. Illustrated by examples from
Australia and Canada, I assess the complementary roles of musically
mediated empathy and guilt in societies struggling with a legacy of
racial conflict, and argue that a consideration of musical and moral
implication as part of studies on music and conflict offers a powerful
tool for understanding music's potential to contribute to societal
change.
27 January 2021
Dr Shzr Ee Tan, Royal Holloway, University of London
Title: Western Art Music in Chinese (counter)tropes: From Wang Yuja in Herve
Leger to 'Nerd-cool' of Twoset Violin
Abstract:
This paper challenges stereotypes of East Asian performers in Western
Art Music as emotionless automatons amidst burgeoning fears of the rise
of China as an industrial and politico-economic force. Recent
rebalancing of global (arts-spending and arts-hungry) power has led to
the influx of Chinese music students and artists (aka the 'New Yellow
Peril') in conservatories, music departments and orchestras around the
world, leading to the further troping of East Asian musicians as scions
of rich, single-child families - even as the emerging demographic itself
has been contributing to the sustenance of recruitment-savvy education
and arts sectors. Drawing on work by Yang (2007), Yoshihara (2008), Hung
(2009), Tan (2014) and Kawabata & Tan (2019), I examine how old and new
stereotypes ride uneasily alongside 'model minority' narratives of East
Asian diasporic musicians. Increasingly, figures such as Yuja Wang, Lang
Lang and YouTube stars Twoset Violin are claiming new agencies in the
shaping of Western Art Music scenes in multiple, contested, meme-based,
fan-friendly and gently-confrontational expressions of musicality
through performances of race and gender. Other examples I will discuss
include Yundi Li, Zhu Xiaomei, the fictional 'Ling Ling' and Ray Chen.
Examining their multifarious articulations of Chineseness in the plural,
I argue that increasing self-awareness of privilege as well as
self-exoticisation plays an important role in staking highly-nuanced and
shifting Chinese musical positionalities which have emerged in the
parsing of intersectional racisms coming to full tilt in the (after)math
of COVID-19 and #BlackLivesMatter in 2020.
3 February 2021
Dr Makoto Harris Takao, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Title:
Viols and Voices in Sixteenth-Century Japan: The Role of Music in the Jesuits’ Education of Children in the Province of Bungo
Abstract:
“My dear brethren, with these little boys Our Lord is going to bring
fire all over Japan, that it may flare up in the fire of his love.” So
claimed the Portuguese missionary Luís de Almeida of the young viol
players trained at the Jesuit elementary school in the city of Funai
(present-day Ōita) in 1562. Situated in the ancient province of Bungo,
this region is a recurrent reference in the annals of Japan’s so-called
Christian Century (1549–1650). An epicenter for the Jesuit mission
endorsed by its ruling daimyo, it was here that a standard was set for
the “Western” musical education of Japanese children, encompassing both
vocal practices and instrumental tuition. In this presentation, I will
trace the presence of these children in Jesuit records throughout the
1560s, looking to how their training in and performance of liturgical
and secular music fulfilled key proselytic and political objectives.
Indeed, there has been a tendency in scholarship to date to approach
these instances of music-making as detached episodes when, in fact,
there are deep connections between people and places that warrant closer
inspection. This presentation thus etches out a broader narrative of the
developing musical practices and identities of Japanese Christian
(kirishitan) communities that began to take shape in the early decades
of their formation.
10 February 2021
Professor Joseph Straus, City University of New York
Title: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability
Abstract:
Modernist music is centrally concerned with bodies and minds that
deviate from normative standards for appearance and function. The
musical features that make music modern are precisely those that can be
understood to represent disability. Modernist musical representations
of disability both reflect and shape (construct) disability in a eugenic
age, a period when disability was viewed simultaneously with pity (and a
corresponding urge toward cure or rehabilitation) and fear (and a
corresponding urge to incarcerate or eliminate). The most
characteristic features of musical modernism—fractured forms,
immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical
simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and
hermeticism in others—can be understood as musical representations of
disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility
impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism.
17 February 2021
Dr Mina Gorji, University of Cambridge
Title: Lyric Quiet: Listening to "Frost at Midnight"
Abstract:
This talk explores the experience and representation of quiet in
Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" to ask broader questions about the ways
poetry can register and express volume and sound dynamics. It offers
historical contexts for understanding the poem including the development
of musical and rhetorical notation for volume as well as accounts of
shifting reading practices in the period. It demonstrates how "Frost at
Midnight" offers a rich nexus for thinking about the experience and the
representation of volume, and of silence, in Romantic lyric. The poem
invites further thinking about the semiotics of sound and silence
through a playful interplay between eye and ear. Coleridge was
fascinated by visual codes for sound and the ways in which patterns of
sound can be seen as well as heard, and his poems are full of accounts
of different kinds of sound, which complicate the distinction between
silent and vocalised reading. Coleridge provides an especially
interesting case study not only because he was writing on what has been
described as the cusp between reading aloud and silent reading, but also
because he was deeply interested in musical forms and in the science and
semiotics of acoustics. The essay demonstrates how shifts in volume can
be expressed and experienced in a poem's own acoustic, rhythmic and
verbal textures as well as through shifts of tempo, and suggests that
the representation of different levels of sound in "Frost at Midnight"
challenges and extends what is understood by 'silent reading. More
broadly, it proposes that volume be understood as part of a critical
discourse about genre and considers the critical language we might use
to describe volume and dynamics. Arguing that Coleridge's lyric poetry
has its own playful modes and codes for communicating degrees of sound,
the essay proposes that volume is a neglected but significant figure in
Lyric studies.
24 February 2021
Professor R. Keith Sawyer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Title: Teaching musical creativity using guided improvisation
Abstract:
I will describe the pedagogical approach I call "guided improvisation." This approach is inspired by research on music and theater improvisation, yet it is generally applicable across disciplines. Guided improvisation emphasizes the teacher's careful balance of structure and improvisation. Teaching is most effective when the instructor facilitates the classroom such that the teacher and students can be said to be improvising together, a form of group creativity. Yet, this is difficult for teachers, because structure and improvisation are always in tension. I call this challenge "the teaching paradox." I show how instructors can best address the teaching paradox by drawing on concepts and techniques from staged ensemble performance. I situate this approach within a broader body of research on effective learning in all school subjects to show that guided improvisation is aligned with current research on effective teaching and learning.
3 March 2021
Dr Matthew D. Morrison, New York University
Title: William Henry 'Master Juba' Lane and the making of Blacksound in the
United States and United Kingdom
Abstract:
This talk will consider how Black performance practices influenced the
proliferation of blackface minstrelsy as the first form of global
popular music in the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that William Henry
"Master Juba" Lane—Long-Island born African American performer known as
the "father of modern tap dance"—emerged as one of the first
international pop stars in the US and the UK as a result of his unique
amalgamation of black performance aesthetics with blackface tropes
previously developed mostly by white (Irish) performers. I explore
Lane's performance in London at Vauxhall, described and represented in
copious historical documents, to illustrate how improvisation,
syncopation, the banjo, and the idiosyncrasy of black performance
aesthetics directly shaped popular music, culture, and racial identity
through early blackface and the materialization of Blacksound. This
chapter continues to theorize through the concept of intellectual
performance property to account for the ways in which performance, and
black performativity in particular, has historically been constructed as
public domain, both in the United States and United Kingdom.
10 March 2021
Professor Michael Beckerman, New York University
Title: "From the Monkey Mountains to the Suicide Bridge: The Hidden Subjects of
the Haas Brothers"
Abstract:
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.
17 March 2021
Dr Daniel Elphick
Title:
'Music on a Leash': Socialist Realism across Twentieth-Century Music
Abstract:
'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.
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