Seminar Series

Listening with Debussy

Presented by Professor Julian Johnson (Royal Holloway, University of London)

ABSTRACT

Why did artists like Monet and Cézanne paint the same scene over and over again, in different seasons and at different times of the day? One explanation is that they were less concerned about representing a ‘subject’ (a haystack, a mountain) than exploring the nature of seeing itself. What if we approach music in a similar way? Not to think about what it might represent, how it is made, how we might interpret it, let alone the contexts of its composition or performance, but in terms of how it frames the act of listening?
 
In this paper I invite you to listen again to Debussy’s Préludes for Piano. I suggest that, under the cover of their titles, these short pieces have very little to do with pictorial imagery and much more to do with listening as a mode of heightened attentiveness to the world. In other words, if these pieces are ‘about’ anything at all, they are about listening. I conclude by suggesting that this might be both timely and productive in the current context of musicology’s bitter and noisy disputes.

Atlantic modernities on stage: Italian opera during Mexico' postcolonial transition (1800-1830)

Presented by Dr Francesco Milella González Luna (University College Dublin)

ABSTRACT

Italian opera and the end of the Spanish empire: sounding modernities in Mexico City between 1780 and 1830.

Modern historiography situates the rise of the modern world in the years between 1770 and 1830: the global spread of the Enlightenment, the Atlantic revolutions of the United States of America, France and Haiti as well as the dissemination of what Christopher A. Bayly defined as ‘global uniformities’, that is habits and fashions, from Europe to the world, contributed significantly to unite entire continents under a similar idea of modernity. Italian opera played a significant role in this process: as one of the most successful forms of entertainment in Enlightened Europe, it soon travelled across the Atlantic ocean first as a tangible byword of modernity and a laboratory for social interaction and cultural exchange between European and non-European societies. 

As one of the main colonies of the Spanish empire, Mexico became a critical arena for the reception and production of Italian opera outside Europe. Even though it relied on a solid urban structure able to accommodate cultural products coming from Europe, its cultural frameworks, largely influenced by Madrid and its culture, turned this encounter into an unsettling process which continued even the crisis of the Spanish empire. From the early arrival of Cimarosa’s and Paisiello’s operas in the late 1790s until the problematic debut of Manuel García with Rossini in the late 1820s, the operatic stage acted not only as a conveyor of new values and habits but also as powerful mirror on which Mexican elites processed their difference from the rest of the Western world and projected their yearning for modernity and desire to be part of a larger cosmopolitan discourse.

Ultrasonic Tastemaker: A Critical Gastromusicology

Presented by Dr Alisha Lola Jones (University of Cambridge)

ABSTRACT

Shortly after the term “soul food” was popularized on the heels of the “soul music” genre, culinary anthropologist and Sun Ra touring musician Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor published the cookbook-memoir Vibration Cooking or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970). In the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic research and Ms. Edna Lewis’ culinary culture-bearing, Vibration Cooking challenged the primacy of the “soul food” concept by centring on food as a source of pride, a site of sensuality, an art of multisensory storytelling, a validation of Black womanhood and Black consciousness-raising. Smart-Grosvenor wrote, “When I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration.” Through her cultural anthropological writing, she pinned an intersection of music/sound, sensuality, and culinary perception that has yet to be explored through the lens of music or sound studies.  
 
Probing that constellation of soulful, musical, sensual, and culinary perception, Alisha Lola Jones’ forthcoming textbook Ultrasonic Tastemakers: A Critical Gastromusicology is a ground-breaking critical investigation into the interconnectedness of African American embodiment, oral transmission, cultural production, wealth extraction, and consumption in the global marketplace as emblematic of what I coin as gastromusicophysics or multisensory “taste.”  Highly competent culture-bearers in the marketplace that I call “ultrasonic tastemakers” resonate with and register their talent, tapping into high vibrations, and frequencies of creative expressions, decision making and influencing what is, will be, and their products endure as en vogue, succulent, and mellifluous.

Screening Rites

Presented by Professor Miguel Mera (University of Southampton)

ABSTRACT

How does the process of screening orchestral music direct and focus audience attention? Nicholas Cook suggested that musical enjoyment of a screened concert is spoiled by the “monstrous close-up” and Keith Negus explained that broadcasters believe that audioviewers direct their attention to whatever instrument is most noticeable to the ear, “as if music audiences are similar to those following the ball in a tennis or football match.” In this presentation, I analyse three different BBC Proms broadcasts of The Rite of Spring, focusing on a striking passage near the beginning of ‘Part 1: The Adoration of the Earth’. Samuel Adler described this section as “counterpoint at its most sophisticated,” and Walter Piston called it an “ensemble of many elements, none of which emerges as a primary element.” I examine how different constructions of the sequence grapple with the challenge of representing the complex, multi-layered aural texture through visual direction, and show how this shapes musical attention, impacting on the way the music is heard. This analysis will allow me to build towards some foundational principles of orchestral visualisation. I also consider broader approaches to screening concerts, including post-Covid-19 implications for music in an age where audiences will increasingly encounter orchestral music via screened presentation rather than through physical attendance at live concerts.

In Pieces: Introducing the BROKENSONG Project

Presented by Professor Karen Desmond (Maynooth University)

ABSTRACT