Colloquium series

What was it about the music of Chopin that haunted French intellectuals so persistently in the wake of the Second World War? A surprising number of prominent writers penned books about the composer, including Vladimir Jankélévitch, André Gide and Stravinsky’s collaborator on The Poetic of Music (1942), Alexis Roland-Manuel...

This paper explores the stakes of audibility and visibility for victim-witnesses of sexual assault in highly mediated trials. In the Republic of Guinea, a high-profile criminal trial is currently underway, in which survivors of sexual violence have testified against leaders of a previous regime. While the trial is being...

Charlotte Bentley has been a Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University since 2021, having previously held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Her recent research focuses on musical transnationalism, with a particular interest in the development of transatlantic and intra-American operatic networks in the...

What happens when colonial sound fragments are transformed through Afrofuturistic sampling, roaring praise poetry, and the visual arts? What stories and pathways link the International Library of African Music—the world's largest archive of ethnographic music in Africa—and The Black Power Station, an independent arts...

“My dear and well-beloved son, William Babell,” wrote bassoonist-copyist-arranger Charles Babel (d. 1716) in his will. The two must have been close: Charles trained William in the arts of performance from a young age; the two played together in major London orchestras; and together they formed part of London’s finest band...

Abstract: There has been disagreement among music scholars as to whether Schoenberg’s string sextet, Verklärte Nacht , tips the balance toward program music or absolute music. Some argue for a line-by-line correspondence with the Richard Dehmel poem that inspired the work, while others argue that Verklärte Nacht , as a...

Abstract Scholarly tradition reveals a preference for reading the monotonal expositions of Chopin’s early sonatas (Opp. 4, 8 and 11) as unsuccessful attempts at a more normative dual-tonal structure owing to their lack of establishment of an expected secondary key. Writing on the Op. 11 Piano Concerto, Donald Francis Tovey...

Abstract: When Franz Liszt took up the post of Kapellmeister of the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1848, Weimar had just entered a new phase of its cultural history. The writers who had contributed to its reputation as the 'New Athens' - notably Goethe, Schiller and Herder - were increasingly stylised as the...

Abstract: Jiang Tcheng Tse , a choral-orchestral work composed by Qigang Chen in 2017, is based on Su Shi’s ( 蘇軾 , 1037-1101) mourning poem Jiang Cheng Zi: Yi Mao Zheng Yue Er Shi Ri Jimeng ( 江城子 · 乙卯正月二十日夜記夢 a riverside town: dreaming of my deceased wife on the 20 th night of the 1 st lunar month. After its world premiere...

Abstract: This is a talk about cultural connectedness in the 1890s. More than a century before what media scholar José van Dijck identifies as our own “culture of connectivity”, urban life in the West was closely entangled with infrastructural networks: of transit, media and communication. Those networks characterise “...