Colloquium series

Abstract: This seminar concerns the histories of mobility and movement between Southern Europe (Italy) and North Africa (Tunisia, Egypt and Libya) through music. The talk aims to address musical exchanges between Italians and Arabs that followed Italian unification (1860s) and developed during Italian colonisation (1920s...

Abstract: This colloquium considers the opportunities and challenges for developing an interpretive framework to contextualise sources of Black Atlantic listening in the long eighteenth century. It will focus on Jamaica, Britain’s wealthiest Caribbean colony by 1720 and by the 1770s, the most lucrative in the British...

Abstract: In the 1860s Richard Wagner met biochemist Justus Liebig in Munich. Though he would eventually dismiss Liebig as a political enemy, the initial attraction was tied to Wagner’s own interest in biochemistry. Yet what of that? There was hardly any hot cultural topic Wagner did not at some point pontificate about, “...

Abstract: My lecture will counterpoint three forms of analysis that emerged around 1900 and which long dominated thereafter as music analysis, logical analysis, and psychoanalysis. Each mode of analysis addresses a pursuit of meaning as a breaking down or as a break down, but to what end? I draw on an historical triad of...

Abstract: In what Edward Said termed the “age of the refugee, the displaced person, [and] mass immigration,” art song became a medium deeply entangled with questions of mobility and exile, a form as embedded in tradition as it was unsettled by movement. I bring into dialogue two emblematic contemporary works: Hanns Eisler’...

Abstract : How closely were words bound to melody in medieval song, and how did medieval composers and performers decide how to align words and melodies? This paper approaches these questions by looking at instances of irregular contrafacture in trouvère song, that is, monophonic song in French composed between 1160 and...

Abstract: The ‘Gentlemen Singers’ of Henry VIII’s Privy Chamber were offered a new benefit in 1544: ‘att every removeing, allowance of a cart for the carriage of their stuff.’ Many Tudor singers spent a significant amount of time on the road. This was true above all for the royal household musicians who followed kings and...