Lecture Series

Fall 2023

Thursday Oct. 26, Raymond Knapp

Take Me to the World: Lessons Learned from Sondheim’s 90th Birthday Celebration

A month and a half into the pandemic lockdown, on April 26, 2020, Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday was celebrated in an online event hosted by Raúl Esparza: Take Me to the World, a virtual concert of (mostly) celebrities from the worlds of Broadway and film musicals singing Sondheim songs, interspersed with spoken birthday greetings and tributes. Due to technical difficulties, the event got underway well over an hour late while Sondheim fans waited impatiently, texting and Tweeting alternative websites and appropriate Sondheim lyrics to each other. I want to consider this tribute/birthday event contextually, more holistically, in an attempt to understand how and why it mattered so much to so many, as a site to celebrate and rediscover Sondheim, to connect to others celebrating and rediscovering his songs and their ever-renewing significance, to make sense of an extended, worldwide moment of disconnection, and, perhaps, to renew a desperately missed sense of human communion through song.

Raymond Knapp is Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Humanities at UCLA, where he directs the Center for Musical Humanities and chairs the Department of Musicology. His books include The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (winner, Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (co-edited with Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf), and Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism. He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the Television Musical with Jessica Sternfeld and Holley Replogle-Wong..

Archive

Fall Quarter 2023

Thursday 12 Oct., Marc Hannaford (University of Michigan), "Black Fire, Judgment, and Points of Departure: Creative Practice and Music Theory in Andrew Hill’s Archive,"" CAC conference room, 4pm

Spring Quarter 2023

Thursday 11 May, Nick Zangwill (University College London), “Bach and Beauty: Finding the Light in Richard Taruskin’s Dark Vision,” MM302, 4pm

Thursday 18 May 2023, Roger Moseley (Cornell University), “Turning Sideways in Musical Spacetime,” CAC Colloquium Room (3rd floor)

Thursday 4 May, Music 243 Presentations of Doctoral Students in the PhD in the History and Theory of Music:

Jonathan Gerrard, “Erotic Agency and Queer Embodiment in Martines–Metastasio’s Secular Chamber Cantata La Tempesta (1778)”

Kevin Jellison, Rubin Goldmark: Composer, Teacher, and Advocate for Art Music in the United States”

Deirdre Toh, “The Waltz as Critique in Hallyu 2.0 K-dramas”

Monday 17 April 2023, Wolfgang Marx (University College Dublin), “Post-Truth, Politics, and Music,” CAC Colloquium Room (first floor) 4pm.

Winter Quarter 2023

16 February 2023, Silvia Kargl (Historical Archives of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra) and Dr Friedemann Pestel (University of Freiburg/University of California, Berkeley), “The German Reich’s Other Flagship Orchestra? The Vienna Philharmonic, National Socialism and Beyond”

23 February 2023, Dillon Parmer (University of Ottawa), “Infratextuality and Music: Towards a Generative Model for Musical Meaning and Expression”

Spring Quarter 2022

14 April 2022, Bernard Gordillo (Yale University), “Mission Sensoriums: Spanish Colonization, Church Bells, and the California Indians”

28 April 2022, Joao Martins, “Pedagogical applications of jazz theory: strengths, limitations, possibilities”

28 April 2022, Grigorios Mathioudakis, “Keeper of the Seven Keys: Aspects of Literary Imagination on Helloween’s Work”

26 May 2022, Yvonne Liao (University of Edinburgh), “‘Global Winds’: Circulations, Circularity, and Coastal Historiography”

Winter Quarter 2022

Nicole Grimes (UCI), ““The Political Faces of Clara Schumann on German Film,” 20 January 2022, 4pm.

Benjamin Korstvedt (Clark University), “Declarations of Disgust, or the disciplining of the ‘proper’ ear, ca. 1900,” 10 February 2022, 4pm, online.

Julian A. Ledford (Sewanee: The University of the South), “Undoing Black Mozart: Towards a Truer Legacy of Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George,” 3 March 2022, 4pm, online.

Fall Quarter 2021

Mark Burford (Reed College), “Music in Crisis: Rethinking ‘Race Music’ through W. E. B. Du Bois,” Thursday, 2 December, 4pm, online.

Stephen Rodgers (University of Oregon), “Marie Franz and the Deep Nineteenth Century,” Thursday 18 November, 4pm, online.

David Metzer (University of British Columbia), “Teardrops and Calldrops: Letters and Phone Calls to the Incarcerated in Hip Hop,” Thursday 21 October, 4pm, online.

Spring Quarter 2021

Joe Davies (University of California, Irvine/Maynooth University), “Rethinking Strangeness: Franz Schubert and the Gothic,” Thursday 27 May 2021 at 4pm

John Michael Cooper (Southwestern University), “Black feminism, Margaret Bonds, and the Credo of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Thursday 6 May at 4pm

Ana R. Alonso-Minutti (University of New Mexico), “Cage-the-Jaula: Performative Interpretations and Misinterpretations of John Cage in Mexico,” Thursday 29 April 2021 at 4pm

Winter Quarter 2021

Sumanth Gopinath (University of Minnesota), “Minimalism as Musical Ideology,” Thursday 25 February 2021 at 4pm

Gavin Lee (Soochow University), “More Difference! Epistemic Delinking from US Music Studies,” Thursday 14 January 2021 at 4pm

Fall Quarter 2020

Elisabeth Le Guin (UCLA), “One Fine Night in Veracruz,” Thursday 15 October 2020 at 4pm

Jairo Moreno (University of Pennsylvania), “Spectres of Rameau: The Corps Sonore, between Otology and Ontology,” Thursday 29 October 2020 at 4pm

Jessie Ann Owens (UC Davis), “Long-form Composition in the Renaissance,” Thursday 19 November 2020 at 4pm

Spring Quarter 2020

Due to COVID-19, we postponed the Musicology Guest Lecture series in Spring Quarter 2020.

Winter Quarter 2019

Cesar Favila, “Sonic Thresholds in Colonial Mexican Convents: The Grates of the Cloister and the Lips of Nuns, or Who was Sister Rosa?,” 27 February 2020

Martha Sprigge (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Musical Widowhood and the Gendered Labour of Mourning in East Germany,” 6 February 2020

Colleen Reardon (University of California, Irvine), “Writing a Tenor’s Voice: Cesare Grandi and the Siena Production of Il Farnaspe (1750),” 16 January 2020

Fall Quarter 2019

Lisa Cooper Vest (University of Southern California), “Bogusław Schäffer vs. the Polish Composers’ Union: Defining Avant-Gardism in Postwar Poland,” 10 October 2019

Amy Bauer (University of California, Irvine), “World in Constant Motion: Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days,” Thursday 24 October, 4pm

David Kasunic (Occidental University), “Chopin’s Piano Technique in the Context of the Romantic Ballet Technique,” Thursday 5 December 2019

Spring Quarter 2019

Stephan Hammel (University of California, Irvine), “Red Musicology: The Concept of Style and the Materialist Conception of Music History,” Thursday 25 April, 5pm, CAC Conference Room, first floor

Lee Rothfarb (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Taking Hanslick at His Music-theoretical Word,” Thursday 9 May 2019, CAC Colloquium Room 3201, third floor

Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl (Universität Salzburg/University of California, Irvine), “Schubert the Successful,” Thursday 30 May 2019, 4pm, CAC Colloquium Room 3201, third floor

Winter Quarter 2019

Alexandra Monchick (CSU Northridge), “The Craft of Paul Hindemith’s Electronic Compositions,” Thursday 24 January 2019, 5pm, CAC Conference Room 1021

Leonora Saavedra (UC Riverside), “Whose Canon?” Thursday 14 February 2019, 4pm, CAC Colloquium Room 3201

Andrew Aziz (San Diego State University), “Merging the Sonata and the Concerto: Analysis of ‘Compositional’ Improvisation in the High Classical Sonata,” Thursday 28 February 2019, 4pm, CAC Colloquium Room 3201