details on the spring series

Unless otherwise noted, all colloquia take place at 4 p.m. in room 315 of the Orwig Music Building on the Brown University campus. The series is open to the public and free of charge. (To request special services, accommodations or assistance for this event, please contact Ashley Lundh as far in advance of the event as possible.)

January 29: Steam Engines, Beethoven, and Victorian Modernity
Ruth Solie/Smith College

Speaker's abstract: In 1883 Ernest Foxwell wrote an essay for Macmillan’s Magazine that he called “Express Trains—A Rhapsody.”  Foxwell was a railroad enthusiast and historian who wrote a great deal of factual material about railroad construction, routes and timetables, and other technicalities, but in this piece he instead gives vent to some of his more poetic feelings about the system to which he had devoted so much of his time and attention.  What interests me is his most surprising rhetorical trope: “This illusion of infinite capability, bred by such sights as expresses and such music as Beethoven’s, is invaluable for giving men buoyancy (274).”  Indeed, for the remainder of the essay references to musical phenomena and especially to Beethoven continue to drive his argument. My talk concerns two aspects of Foxwell’s article.  First and foremost, what were the resonances of meaning in his citation of Beethoven’s music for his middle-class readers? Secondly, I explore the most glaring anomaly in Foxwell’s article, its anachronism.  By 1883 this kind of rhetoric in the Victorian press would normally have had Wagner as its referent, who always represented phenomena “of the future.”  How can we understand what Foxwell is up to here, and how his readers may have understood his essay?

Bio:  Ruth Solie is Sophia Smith Professor of Music at Smith College and was the founding chair of Women’s Studies there; she has also taught as a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, and Harvard.  She is the author of Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (University of California Press, 2004) and editor of Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (University of California Press, 1993).  Her articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of Women’s History, Victorian Literature and Culture, and other leading scholarly publications, and she is a former president of the American Musicological Society.

February 8: Repatriation as Re-animation: the Multiple Circulations of Native Musical Heritage
Aaron Fox/Columbia University

Speaker's abstract: This paper describes several years of work I have done with Navajo and Inupiat communities in New Mexico and Alaska to "repatriate" recordings made by collector Laura Boulton in the 1930s and 40s. I argue that it is not only possible, but ethically obligatory for ethnomusicological archivists to form partnerships with Native communities and descendants of performers to restore long-dormant and forgotten musical heritage to the condition of living musical practices as an aspect of the "return" of these musics to Native communities, and despite the fact that this can be an expensive and time-consuming, slow process.

Bio: Aaron A. Fox is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. He earned the PhD in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995, and has also taught in the anthropology department at the University of Washington. His 2004 book Real Country was published by Duke University Press.

March 18: The Son is from Oriente. Or is it? Reconsidering Cuban Music History
Peter Manuel/John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center

Please note special venue: Grant Recital Hall.
Presented in collaboration with Brown's Center for Latin American Studies.

Speaker's abstract: The son, which has been the predominant Cuban popular dance music genre for the last century, is generally regarded as having emerged from prototypes in eastern Cuba around 1910. However, examination of documentation, including contradanza scores, from the 1850s-60s provides fresh insights into Cuban popular music pre-history and resituates Havana as its primary crucible.

Bio: Peter Manuel teaches ethnomusicology at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A former editor of the journal Ethnomusicology, he has researched and published extensively on musics of the Hispanic and Indic Caribbean, India, Spain, and elsewhere.

April 15: Performativity, Ideologies of Liveness, and Listener-Consciousness in Electronic-Music Performance
Mark Butler/University of Pennsylvania

Speaker's abstract: In DJ sets and laptop performances, an unprecedented level of technological mediation comes into conflict with the expected “liveness” of performance. As a result, musicians frequently express various techno-performative anxieties in explanations of their performance approaches. In particular, they are concerned that the audience experiences a performance, one that is imbued with a sense of live presence, rather than simply the playback of a recording or the clicking of a mouse. They work to convey this “presence” in a number of ways, which include dancing, other significant physical gestures, and the use of carefully selected electronic hardware. The audience responds in kind, thereby completing the liveness of the event. My talk will address these issues in both theoretical and analytical terms, drawing material for discussion from interviews and field recordings made in Berlin in 2005–2007.

Bio: Mark Butler is a music theorist with interests in popular music, rhythm and meter, music and sexuality, musical meaning and aesthetics, and the history of music theory. Butler's research integrates theoretical, historical, and anthropological approaches to music, with particular emphasis on the use of ethnographic methodology to address music-theoretical questions. His book Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (Indiana University Press, 2006) explores the rhythmic and metrical organization of electronic dance music from the measure to the complete DJ set, drawing upon field research with audiences and creators of electronic dance music as well as musical analysis. His current research includes a book focusing on relationships between technology, improvisation, and composition in electronic–music performance. (From Prof. Butler's UPenn bio.)

fall 2007 [completed]

September 18: Musicality and Objecthood in Recent Electronic Music
Joanna Demers/University of Southern California

Speaker's abstract: In electronic music appearing within the past thirty years, the primacy of sound over structure and rhetoric has led to a crisis in ontology, in which it is often unclear whether the piece in question is even music at all. This paper examines experimental electronic music and sound art since 1980, and argues that traditional theories of musical semiotics, in which music is "read" as a language, prove inadequate in this new territory. Instead, I propose an aesthetics of electronic music that borrows from the debates concerning minimalist sculpture, specifically Michael Fried's theory of "objecthood".

Bio: Joanna Demers holds a PhD in musicology from Princeton University (2002) and a DMA in contemporary flute performance from UC San Diego (2002). Her doctoral dissertation, "Sampling as Lineage in Hip-Hop," was awarded an Alvin Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship in 2001. Her book Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (University of Georgia Press, 2006) explores how attempts to combat music piracy are adversely impacting musicians and composers. (Condensed from Professor Demers's USC profile.)

September 28: Musical "Icons," Designer Labels, & 21st-Century Culture
Lewis Rowell/Indiana University

Speaker's abstract: A philosophical commentary on some related trends in music and musical life: the practice of excerpting, the role of compositions that have achieved "celebrity" status, the trivial in music, the consequences of familiarity, a look back at some prophetic observations by Theodore Adorno, and, if music can serve--as Plato suggested--as a form of social criticism, what is it trying to tell us?

Bio: Lewis Rowell holds the PhD from the Eastman School of Music and has had a distinguished career as a scholar of time and rhythm, the music of India, and the philosophy of music. He is the author of Music and Musical Thought in Early India (University of Chicago Press, 1992), for which he received the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society in 1993. He is also a former editor of Music Theory Spectrum, the flagship journal of American music theory. (Condensed from Professor Rowell's Indiana University profile.)

October 5: Luke DuBois/Interactive Sound+Image Artist

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia's Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with numerous artists and organizations. His music (with or without his band, the Freight Elevator Quartet), is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling'74, and Cantaloupe music, and his artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City. (Condensed from www.lukedubois.com.)

October 30: Ontologies: Surfing Community & Surfing Music
Timothy Cooley/University of California at Santa Barbara

Speaker's abstract: Never has a research project sent me back to basic ontological questions. My current research seeks to understand and interpret "surfing music" as a regional Californian cultural practice. Yet if music is at the center of this study, what is that music? I seek a surfing community and music in the water off California's coast, on shore at beachside parties and surfing cultural events, and also in mediated environments we might call "virtual."

Bio: Timothy Cooley holds the Ph.D. from Brown's ethnomusicology program and is currently editor of the journal Ethnomusicology. He is the author of Making Music in the Polish Tatras and co-editor of Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. His research specializations include Eastern European folk music, American vernacular and popular music, and theories of ethnicity, nationalism, globalization, and tourism. (Condensed from Professor Cooley's UCSB profile.)

November 2: Master Class with Composer-Performer DBR
[made possible through a collaboration with FirstWorks Providence]

Known for fusing his classical music roots with a myriad of soundscapes, Haitian-American artist Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) has carved a reputation for himself as a passionately innovative composer, performer, violinist, and band leader. His exploration of musical rhythms and classically-driven sounds is peppered by his own cultural references and vibrant musical imagination. His unique hybrid style continues to capture new music lovers worldwide. From Australia's Sydney Opera House to Boston's ICA Museum, DBR is scheduled to premiere solo works and pulsing duets off of his debut international solo album etudes4violin&electronix (Thirsty Ear Recordings). Described as a "demonstration of unquestionable virtuosity and commitment to the violin's expressivity" (All About Jazz), the album showcases a unified dialogue between DBR and ambassadors from today's contemporary musical landscape including Philip Glass, Ryuichi Sakamoto, DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid and DJ Scientific. (From www.dbrmusic.com.)