9/16 Scott Marcus: Documenting Eastern Arab Modal Practice Across Maqam Families

(Music Studios 301)

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, theorists of eastern Arab modal practice have focused on documenting the characteristic features of the individual melodic modes, the maqamat (s. maqam). In his colloquium presentation, Scott seeks to move beyond his focus by examining aspects of the performance practice across entire families of modes. Please note: On Tuesday, Scott will offer a companion hand-on workshop, Modern Eastern Arab Modal practice: The Case of a Single Maqam). 

Professor Scott Marcus earned his B.A. and M.A. (1977) from Wesleyan University before completing his Ph.D. at UCLA. He has taught at UC Santa Barbara since 1989, focusing on Music of Northern India and the eastern Arab world. His publications on maqam appear in Ethnomusicology, Asian Music, and in his Oxford University Press volume, Music in Egypt. In addition to lecture and seminar classes, Scott leads the UCSB Middle East Ensemble and the UCSB Music of India (sitar) Ensemble.

9/23 Wang Siqi: " Issues in China's Contemporary pop Music Studies (1986-1992)"

(Seminar Room, Mansfield Center of East Asian Studies)

Since 1978, with the implementation of the Reform and Open Door policy, significant changes have taken place in China's society and culture. An important cultural form - China's contemporary pop (CCP) has flourished and become an important component of today's popular culture. In its near thirty years of evolvement, CCP has moved from its initial marginalized statues to become an active part of the cultural mainstream, and the most influential music culture in China's society. The talk will discuss the different periods in CCP's history, focusing on the periods between 1986 to 1992. It will demonstrate the interactive dynamics between CCP and its social-cultural environment, as well as explore the characteristics of their relationships.

Professor Wang Siqi received his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Fujian Normal University. Professor Wang has published widely in China on the subject and was awarded the prestigious Visiting Scholar Fellowship by China's Ministry of Education Study Abroad Fund Committee in 2007. Currently, he is spending his visiting year at Wesleyan's Music Department.

 

9/30 Matthew Allen "In the Land of Navaratri: On the Road in South India with T. Viswanathan, 1998"

(Music Studios 301)

Professor Matthew Allen is the Chair of the Music Department at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. He studied Karnatak vocal music with T. Viswanathan at Wesleyan from 1984-92 and their co-authored book "Music in South India" was published by Oxford University Press in 2004.

 

10/7 Erik Westberg: Choral Music in Sweden of our time

(Music Studios 301)

Erik Westberg will present music from Scandinavia with a focus on Swedish Choral music.

Erik Westberg is professor on choral conducting and choral singing at the Pitea College of Music, Lulea University of Technology. He has conducted numerous first performances of works commissioned for his own Vocal Ensemble, the Barents International Chamber Choir as well as the University Chamber Choir. he is currently visiting Wesleyan under the sponsorship of the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education.

 

10/24 Patrick McCreless (Yale) "Because I See --New Englandly"

(Music Studios 301)

A musician's reading of an Emily Dickinson poem. The structural rhythm of the poem strikingly resembles a technique of phrase construction common in tonal music, as well be seen in music examples from works of Mozart, Beethoven, and (especially) Cesar Franck.

Patrick McCreless is professor of music history and theory at Yale University. Much of his work has focused on Wagner and on the music of the late nineteenth century. From his work on Wagner he has branched out to consider a much wider range of topics including larger problems of harmony and chromaticism in late tonal music, the history and practice of music theory in the United States, and on music and rhetoric. In the past few years he has begun again to address aspects of chromaticism in tonal music.

 

11/11 Juraj Kojs (Yale University)

(Music Studios 301)

Action can define, guide, and inform all aspects of compositional process and foster musical expression. This talk will formalize a language of action-based music in physical world and cyberspace. Typologies of actions form lexica from which such music emerges. Physical modeling synthesis is an excellent vehicle for conceptualization of actions and instruments in the digital domain, yielding replica extended, hybrid, and abstract cyberinstruments and cyberactions. Compositional examples will situate proposed theoretical principles in musical practice.

Juraj Kojs is a performer, composer, producer, and educator. He is a Postdoctoral Associate in Music Technology and Multimedia Art at Yale's Department of Music. In May 2008 Kojs received his Ph.D. in Composition and Music Technologies at the University of Virginia.

11/18 Music Department Interdisciplinary Colloquium, Aki Sasamoto

(CFA Hall)

Aki Sasamoto's performance/installation works revolve around everyday gestures on nothing and everything. Sasamoto's installations are careful arrangements of sculpturally altered found objects, and her performance with them activates the bizarre emotion behind daily activities. She creates the improvisational system that creates feedback, responding tp sound, objects, and moving bodies. Today's performance/installation builds on and shifts out of yesterday's, remembering, modifying, developing.

Sasamoto will show some of her recent works that use personalized symbols and attempt to answer why we need metaphors in telling stories. She will also channel into mathematics as an ultimate expression of metaphor-makings. Can Math have feelings?

Aki Sasamoto is a New York-based Japanese artist who works in dance, sculpture, performance, and ... Sasamoto co-founded and co-directs Culture Push Inc., a new arts organization, in which diverse professionals meet through artist-led projects and cross-disciplinary symposia. She also collaborated with a number of current and former members of the Wesleyan Music community, including Reese Archibald, Matt Bauder and Dan St. Clair. This semester she is teaching sculpture at Wesleyan.

 

 

12/9 Katherine Kuenzli and Yonatan Malin "Max Klinger's Brahms Fantasy: performance, music analysis, art history"

(Music Studios 301)

This colloquium will explore Max Klinger's Brahms Fantasy (1894) from performative, analytical, and art-historical perspectives. The Brahms Fantasy is a graphic cycle in book format with etchings, engravings, and lithographs combined with scores for five songs and a choral work by Johannes Brahms. The colloquium will feature a performance of the songs by Neely Bruce (Wesleyan, Music) and Christopher Grundy, an analysis of the interactions between poetic texts, music, and images by Yonatan Malin (Wesleyan, Music), and an examination of Klinger's motivations for combining music and the visual arts by Katherine Kuenzli (Wesleyan, Art History).

The colloquium will also introduce a new online version of the Brahms Fantasy developed by the New Media Lab at Wesleyan.