Musicology Colloquium Series
Semester 1, 2012
All sessions will take place at 4pm in Room 3003 unless otherwise advised.
- 15 March - Richard Toop (Honorary Reader)
- 28 March - Daniel Grimley (University of Oxford)
- 18 April - Joseph Toltz (Musicology, Arts Music and University of Western Sydney)
- 2 May - Neal Peres Da Costa (Early Music)
- 23 May - Kathleen Nelson (Musicology)
- 6 June - Anna Reid (Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning)
15 March - Richard Toop (Honorary Reader)
‘What's in a Name?’: Towards a Genealogy and Taxonomy of New Music Titles”
The titles that post-war composers have given to their works have long been a source of (often disapproving) comment. Conservative commentators in particular have asked why, when there were perfectly good and tested titles like sonata, suite, symphony etc., a composer should want to call a purely instrumental work something like Metastasis, Pithoprakta or Acchoripsis (to cite some early Xenakis titles). Conversely, many radically orientated composers have been inclined to say, ‘who, these days, would seek to taint their reputation by using superannuated work titles?’
The present paper seeks, however provisionally, not only to outline the nature and intentions of such titles over the past fifty years or more, but equally to locate the preferences of individual composers within perspectives that are both individual and collective, but also synchronic and diachronic, genealogical and taxonomic. Adorno once wrote “Nothing is harmless anymore”. Maybe that even applies to work titles too.
28 March - Daniel Grimley (University of Oxford)
“Delius and the Sound of Place: Hearing Song of the High Hills”
2012 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Delius, and this paper focuses on one of Delius’s richest but most critically neglected works: The Song of the High Hills for orchestra and chorus (1911-2). I examine the music’s compositional genesis, critical reception, and its relationship with other works no less preoccupied with ideas of place, including Appalachia and The Mass of Life. Conventionally heard (following Thomas Beecham and Eric Fenby) as an account of a walking tour in the Norwegian mountains, The Song of the High Hills in fact offers a more multilayered response to landscape and nature. Moving beyond purely pictorial notions of landscape representation, I shall draw from recent literature in cultural geography to account for the music’s ambivalent sense of place. Hearing The Song of the High Hills from this perspective promotes a keener understanding of our phenomenological engagement with sound and the natural environment, and underscores the parallels between Delius’s work and contemporary developments in continental philosophy, notably the writing of Henri Bergson.
18 April - Joseph Toltz (Musicology, Arts Music and University of Western Sydney)
“Hidden Testimony: musical experience and memory in Jewish Holocaust survivors”
Considering music as a feature of testimony is not a new endeavour in the field of Holocaust studies. The collection of musical memories and songs of those times began as early as 1945, with individual zamlers (song collectors) such as Szmerke Kaczerginski, and ethnographers such as David Boder and Israel Adler. For the past fourteen years, I have also undertaken a similar project of sorts, collecting musical testimonies from over ninety survivors in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel. My interviewee subjects were asked to focus primarily (but not exclusively) on musical experience in the period 1939-1945, in camp, ghetto, hiding or partisan groups, as well as contextualising and reflecting their personal musical backgrounds before, during, and afterwards. Throughout this process, survivors spoke not only of extant melodies and experiences, but also added subtle and significant nuances to existing knowledge as well as adding to the general body of musical experience with new works and newly described musical experiences. Interviews were conducted in English, and songs collected in Yiddish, Czech, German, Polish, Hebrew, Hungarian, French and Russian.
Musical experience and its memory is a unique testimonial construct, arguably distinct from the more judicial process of historical testimony. From the earliest accounts arising out of the Holocaust, to recollections from survivors 65 years after the events, it speaks in a profoundly subjective manner about many difference life experiences during times of trauma. Whereas the musical form in testimony can complement and add nuance to historical readings of the Holocaust, musical testimony as a theoretical construct and practice can offer the possibility of new approaches to the Holocaust, treating survivors as living rather than dying witnesses, and preserving the Holocaust in perhaps the most durable form of testimony itself: narrative song.
2 May - Neal Peres Da Costa (Early Music)
"The Lost World of espressivo Playing"
In 1953, the Hungarian pianist Etelka Freund (1879-1977) recorded Johannes Brahms’s Piano Sonata in F minor Op. 5 for Remington. Freund had a strong association with Brahms having met him every week for a year in 1895, during which she played his music to him and received his advice. When I first heard her performance of the second movement—Andante espressivo—I was immediately moved and transported by her exquisitely lyrical touch, which I felt was greatly enhanced by her employment of expressive devices that are undoubtedly rooted in nineteenth-century practice. For me there was a strong feeling that the term espressivo had somehow given Freund permission to be free in a way that is scorned in modern mainstream performance today.
This talk uses Freund’s performance as a springboard for exploring the implications—the hidden or lost meanings—of the term espressivo not only for Brahms’s music but also for the nineteenth century and earlier. Recorded examples of the oldest pianists on record together with a range of written evidence will be presented as a window to a lost world of espressivo playing.
23 May - Kathleen Nelson (Musicology)
"Braga, Toledo and Seville: The Example of the Exultet"
As part of the processes of Christian reconquest in the Iberian Peninsula of the Middle Ages, the re-establishment and development of the dioceses of Toledo and Braga during the late eleventh century and of Seville during the mid thirteenth century naturally led to the gathering of manuscripts for the celebration of the liturgy. Although not always readily identified with a particular church and rarely with precise dating, remaining manuscript sources provide some evidence for practices of the early centuries and for understanding of transmission of practices. This paper focuses on the Easter vigil prayer known as the Exultet as an example, and looks at its occurrences in manuscripts from the three centres with the main focus being on the Exultet as it appears in Braga’s Missal of Mateus (Braga, Arquivo Distrital, MS 1000). I identify differences between early representations of the Exultet’s practice in sources associated with Braga and Toledo, these differences pointing to the independence of their traditions; and, on the other hand, I demonstrate the existence of close connection between Toledo’s early Exultet and that of Seville.
6 June - Anna Reid (Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning)
“Creativity, Creation and Contrasts – Actions and Perceptions.”
Musicians, and others, have implicit understandings of the role of creative thinking and activity for their practice. For some a person is deemed creative, for others it is a product that is so deemed, and for others it is the process through which the product is formed. These views impact on pedagogical approaches and outcomes when they are conflated with assessment. In this presentation we will look at the intersections between creativity theories and practice and contrast the implications of these theories using, dare I say it, evidence from 'non-creative' disciplines and 'creative' ones. The evidence presented comes as the result of a decade long research project involving the fields of music, statistics, business, sustainability and law.
Semester 1, 2011
All sessions will take place at 4pm in Room 3003 unless otherwise advised.
9 March - Jonathan Stock (Associate Dean, Research)
Pig-killing, beer-drinking, collective prayer and communal musical performance: sharing values and valuing shared experience in a Taiwanese aboriginal village
23 March - David Larkin (Musicology)
'One of the past’: Richard Strauss’s self-image and the dynamics of history
6 April - Chris Coady (Musicology)
AfroModernist subversion of the jazz deviance trope in the French film noir scores of John Lewis and Miles Davis
20 April - James Wierzbicki (Arts Music)
Shedding Light on a Sydney Oddity: In Search of Alexander B. Hector’s Colour-Organ
11 May - Michael Webb (Music Education)
Music liturgies, the Lutheran social imaginary, and encountering Pentecostalism in the postmissionary church in Lae, Papua New Guinea
13 May - Graduate Symposium
Room 2174, timetable TBC
25 May - Rachel Campbell (Musicology)
'This Music Evokes Australia’s Loneliness’: Landscape music’s Australian inflections
Semester 2, 2011
All sessions will take place at 4pm in Room 3003 unless otherwise advised.
3 August - John Griffiths (University of Melbourne)
Spinacino’s Twelve-tone experiment of 1507
17 August - Alan Maddox (Musicology Unit)
“Ah! che fier tumulto d’affetti!”
Affect and expression in the performance of Italian recitative
31 August - Keith Howard (Professor, SCM and SOAS)
Exploring the Politics of Collaboration:
Bridging the Scholarly Divide in the Kyrgyz Manas Epic
16 September - GRADUATE SYMPOSIUM
21 September - Lewis Cornwell (Musicology Unit)
Ifukube Akira and Japanese exoticism
12 October - Charles Fairchild (Arts Music Unit)
An Endless Torrent of Sound from a Seemingly Empty Room: Understanding the Mediation of Music
26 October - Helen Mitchell (Research Unit)
Do you need to see me to hear me? How listeners recognise performers