Colloquium series

Drawing on his experiences as a choral conductor, gospel musician, and music educator, Dr. Jeffrey Murdock is developing a comprehensive textbook dedicated to the performance practices of Gospel Music while in residence at Wolfson College during 2024-2025. This textbook seeks to remedy a significant gap in the...

In 1786, Johann Gottfried Herder wrote that the imagination was ‘still the most unexplored and the most unexplorable of all the human powers of the soul.’ Nevertheless, the imagination received a great deal of attention in German philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology during Herder’s lifetime and well into the twentieth...

Born in Algiers during the 1930s, Algerian «chaâbi» (a word meaning «popular» in arabic) results from appropriations of Andalusian music, Kabyle songs, but also jazz and french songs. From the very beginning of its story, chaâbi has also developed on French soil, but its practitioners and public have remained confined to...

This paper explores the semiotic dimensions of gospel performance, with a focus on how gospel has been presented and perceived within high-profile British state ceremonies and popular music. Using Peirce’s notion of indexicality (Turino 2014) and drawing on my framework of gospel codes, I analyse the meaning-making...

The poet George Herbert (1593–1633) has long been recognised as a musical poet: his earliest biographers described him as the ‘sweet singer of the Temple’ and recorded that his ‘chiefest recreation was Musick’, playing the lute and viol and singing settings of his verse. Critical studies of the relationship between Herbert...

Combining a mix of lecture and recorded performance, Samantha Ege brings the story of the South Side impresarios to life. She delves into the ways that Chicago's early 20th-century Race women (i.e., Black women intellectuals and creatives committed to the entwined tasks of racial uplift and gender equality) operated out of...

There is a long tradition, in the Western world, of contrasting vision, as an objectifying sense, with the allegedly more participatory sense of hearing. Listening to speech – when we imagine we hear words as if we were looking at them – seems to us to be the exception that proves the rule. Here we revisit the contrast...

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...