Colloquium series

The term ‘absolute music’ has been widely used from the 19th century right up to more recent musicological literature, without ever really becoming tangible. Even attempts to critically overcome it have only served to perpetuate this ambiguity. The fact that the term is often used in fundamentally changing, sometimes more...

This paper focuses on the life of composer Alma Mahler-Werfel. As well as being a gifted composer, MahlerWerfel was a skilled pianist, writer, draughtswoman, entrepreneur and pioneer of the arts in the 20th century. Yet despite her impact on the musical cultures of Austria, Germany, and the USA, scholarship has chosen...

This research is situated at the intersection of Ottoman studies, sound reproduction technologies, and the history of the (colonial) sciences. I examine the collections of the Phonogrammarchiv in Vienna and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, with a specific emphasis on the earliest recordings made during ethnographic fieldwork...

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...

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. I do not mobilize this example to revisit well-...

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. In Britain, for example, all manner of treatises across the centuries from Pietro Reggio’s The Art of Singing (1677) to Margaret Watts-Hughes’s...

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. Framework 2...

A new kind of music studies is needed to analyse the influence of artificial intelligence on music. Yet music also changes how we think about AI. In this paper I take three angles on the challenges posed by AI to music and music to AI. I follow media theory in breaking down the communicative process into three analytical...

Тhe last third of the 19th century saw great advances in the professionalisation of female pianists in Russia. The two conservatories, founded in the early 1860s, issued their best graduates a diploma that declared them to be “free artists”. The society was highly stratified, but not rigidly so, and this new social status...

In this lecture I will present and discuss my reconstruction (or restoration) of the fragmentary Missa Scaramella by Jacob Obrecht (c.1457/8–1505). It survives uniquely in two of an original set of four part-books. Reconstructing the material of the two missing part-books (the top voice and the tenor) poses very different...