Colloquium series

In the first century after Luther’s Reformation, debates flared up time and again over perceived remnants of papist superstition. The organ frequently came under fire in Protestant spaces, representative of musical excess and overt splendour, its continued presence far from assured. As a physical object, it was swept up...

The 1970s have been described as a ‘fragile decade’ in US history: Nixon’s resignation, the decreasing popularity of the Vietnam War, waning public faith in national government, economic recession, the OPEC oil crisis, mass unemployment, economic deregulation, and the lack of fulfilment of many of the promises of the Civil...

Ethnomusicologists have long called attention to extractive dynamics in musical cultures. But what of sound as a technology of extraction in the oil industry? This colloquium will explore the convergence, since the Second World War, between seismic survey and oil industries in which dynamite and air gun explosions have...

For Jews all over the world, the Torah scroll is the height of holiness, framed as the carefully designed and produced word of God. Jews give great attention to the care of Torah scrolls, ensuring they are maintained and protected so that they can be used for ritually chanting the Torah portion at regular intervals. North...

In this lecture, I focus more closely on singing and dancing embodiment as a site for the world-making I introduced in the first lecture. As a case study, I discuss the practice of performing Haudenosaunee-style personal war songs in negotiations to form multi-Indigenous/European military coalitions during the Seven Years...

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...

Opera’s history is a history of mobility: this much has become increasingly clear from the transnational turn that opera studies has taken over the last decade. But that focus on mobility, circulation and transnationalism has revealed opera to be a surprisingly slippery subject for study. The transformation of works on 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...