| 26Feb | Researching Provincial Musical Culture: The Life of Elizaveta Nilovna Shniukova (1892–after 1970) (Dr Julia Mannherz, University of Oxford) |
This talk focuses on a little-known choral conductor, Elizaveta Nilovna Shniukova, who was born into a peasant family in the village of Ilenskoe, Irbitskii uezd, Permskaia guberniia in 1892, received musical training in Perm’ and Ekaterinburg at the “courses of singing literacy” run by the regional society of sobriety in the 1910s, and went on t |
| 25Feb | Composer's Workshop: Howard Skempton |
Howard Skempton’s music is renowned for the distinctive clarity of its musical language. |
| 25Feb | Genetics of aesthetic and music reward sensitivity (Giacomo Bignardi, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) |
From tingling spines triggered by tonal patterns to tearful eyes provoked by arrangements of colours and shapes, humans can have remarkable experiences. But what makes individuals susceptible to such aesthetic responses? Here, I present evidence that genetic effects are partly responsible. |
| 19Feb | Beethoven, Late Fascism, and Totality (Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith, University of Oxford) |
During the 2022 French Presidential election campaign, the extreme-right candidate Éric Zemmour released a video in which he expounded on the supposed threat posed to the Republic by “le grand remplacement,” underscored by the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. |
| 18Feb | Composers' Workshop: Nigel Osborne |
Nigel Osborne has been described as “a political composer in a unique sense: critical of all establishments, but benign and humane”. |
| 12Feb | Lessons in Singing: Vocal Treatises in Britain and the Writing of Voice (Professor Susan Rutherford, University of Cambridge) |
How can the act of singing, that most common yet most mysterious of musical emanations, be communicated in words? That is surely the issue facing every author of a singing manual. |
| 11Feb | Composers' Workshop: Simon Mawhinney, Lara Weaver |
This Composers Workshop hosts two visitors from Queen’s University Belfast: |
| 05Feb | A Theory of Early Twentieth-Century Harmony (Rajan Lal, Trinity College Cambridge) |
Theories of early twentieth-century harmony are legion, and often toggle between two main frameworks that alone seem insufficient to address the affluences of the period. Framework 1 views twentieth-century ‘music in transition’ as an expansion of tonal precedents set in motion by Wagner, Liszt and others. |
| 04Feb | Composers' Workshop: Catherine Kontz |
Catherine Kontz (b. 1976) is a London-based composer whose works explore nonlinear form, visual/spatial elements, and musical theatricality. |
| 04Feb | Trajectories and Revolutions in Western Popular Melody (Madeline Hamilton, Queen Mary University of London) |
In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. |
