Colloquia Easter Term 2015

The Colloquium series is the main opportunity for members of the Faculty, researchers from other departments, and the general public to come together and hear papers on all aspects of music research, given by distinguished speakers from the UK and abroad. Colloquia are held on Wednesday evenings in the Recital Room of the Faculty of Music, West Road. Admission is free and all are welcome. Please arrive at 4.50pm for a 5.00pm start. Papers are followed by a discussion and a drinks reception with the speaker.

Wednesday, 29 April 2015
5.00pm, Lecture Room 2, Faculty of Music

Prof Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge)
‘capturing sound, designing notation, writing music’

Susan Rankin holds a personal chair in the University of Cambridge as ‘Professor of Medieval Music’. She was educated at the universities of Cambridge, King’s College London and Paris (École Pratique des Hautes Études, IVeme section). Her scholarly work engages with music of the middle ages through its sources and notations and through its place and meaning within ritual. Those ways in which music was exploited as an element within church ritual, and especially in dramatic ceremonies, have formed a long-term focus of study. A second focus has been the palaeography of musical sources copied at Sankt Gallen in the early middle ages. Most recently she has edited a facsimile of the early eleventh-century ‘Winchester Troper’ (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 473), demonstrating to what extent it is possible to transcribe the earliest European repertory of two-part polyphony. In Spring 2007 she gave the Lowe lectures at the University of Oxford entitled ‘Impressed on the Memory: Musical Sounds and Notations in the Ninth Century’, and this forms the basis of her current project while based at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She was elected fellow of the British Academy in 2009.

Wort Lectures

Haydn's Musical Personalities
James Webster, Goldwin Smith Professor of Music at Cornell University

Monday, 4 May 2015
5.00pm, Recital Room at the Faculty of Music
Wort Lecture 1: What is a Musical Personality?

Wednesday, 6 May 2015
5.00pm, Recital Room at the Faculty of Music
Wort Lecture 2: The Author of the Work: Le style c'est l'homme?

Monday, 11 May 2015
5.00pm, Recital Room at the Faculty of Music
Wort Lecture 3: The Author 'in' the Work: Personae?

Wednesday, 13 May 2015
5.00pm, Recital Room at the Faculty of Music
Wort Lecture 4: Did Haydn Have a 'Late' Style?

James Webster is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Music at Cornell University.  He specializes in the history and theory of music of the 18th and 19th centuries, with a particular focus on Haydn.  He is the author of Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music (Cambridge, 1991), a co‑author of Musical Form, Forms & Formenlehre (Leuven, 2009), and an editor of Haydn Studies (Norton, 1981), Johannes Brahms Autographs (Garland, 1983), and Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna (Cambridge, 1997).  He has published widely on Haydn (including the Haydn article in the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, also published as a separate volume [Macmillan/Palgrave]), Mozart (especially his operas), Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms, as well as editorial and performance practice, and the historiography of music.  His critical edition of the string quartets Opp. 42, 50, and 54–55 recently appeared in the complete edition, Joseph Haydn: Werke (Henle).  In theory he specializes in issues of musical form, Schenkerian analysis, and analytical methodology.  He was a founding editor of the journal Beethoven Forum. 

Among Webster's many honors are the Einstein and Kinkeldey Awards of the American Musicological Society, a Fulbright dissertation grant, two Senior Research Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany).  He has served as President of the American Musicological Society, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Executive Committee (Vorstand) of the Board of Directors of the Joseph Haydn Institute (Cologne).

Wednesday, 20 May 2015
5.00 pm, Recital Room at the Faculty of Music

Prof Reinhard Strohm (University of Oxford)
‘Le roi caché: incognito and false identity in Baroque opera’

Reinhard Strohm is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and has also taught at King’s College London and Yale University. His main research interests are in music history of the 14th to 18th centuries, opera, and modernist and postmodern debates in musical historiography. His books include Music in Late Medieval Bruges (rev. edn: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), The Rise of European Music (1380-1500) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), The Eighteenth-Century Diaspora of Italian Music and Musicians (editor, Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages (editor with Bonnie J. Blackburn, Oxford University Press, 2001, vol 3/1 of The New Oxford History of Music), and The Operas of Antonio Vivaldi (Florence: Olschki, 2008). He has also published critical editions of music by Wagner and Vivaldi and English 15^th-century Masses. Among other awards, he won the 2012 Blanzan Foundation Prize for Musicology, with which he is funding the current research project Towards a Global History of Music.