Colloquium series

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...

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...