Music Department 2024-2025 Colloquium Series

This lecture series showcases new work by performers, composers, and scholars in ethnomusicology, musicology, music theory, sound art, and cultural history. The colloquia also invite dialogue with professionals working in the arts, music journalism, and in librarianship. A brief reception follows each formal presentation, offering a chance for collegiality. All meetings take place in person.

Thursdays | 4:30–6:00pm | Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall 003 (unless otherwise noted)

SPRING 2025

Thursday, February 6, 2025
Roger Mathew Grant (Professor of Music, Dean of Arts and Humanities, Wesleyan University)
"The Colonial Galant Style: Eighteenth-Century Music from Chiquitania, Bolivia" 

Roger Mathew Grant is Professor of Music and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University.  His research focuses on eighteenth-century music and the history of music theory, and his journal articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Music Theory Spectrum, and the Journal of Music Theory.  His first book, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, won the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory.  His most recent book, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical, was selected for the “Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory” for 2020.  His current projects concern eighteen-century music by Indigenous composers from Jesuit missions in South America; his first article on the topic, titled “Colonial Galant,” was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and won the 2024 SMT Outstanding Publication Award.

Abstract: During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Indigenous musicians in rural South America created a distinctive musical style music under conditions of Jesuit colonization. These musicians had been forcibly relocated to mission communities in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, which is now eastern Bolivia. There, they participated in vibrant scenes of choral and orchestral performance; they trained and retrained each other in apprenticeship systems of singing, conducting, composition, and instrument building. Today a substantial corpus of their music is preserved in Bolivian archives. The extant repertoire includes several large-scale operas and liturgical compositions attributed to teams of Indigenous composers. In this talk, I offer a systematic analysis of this repertoire and its distinctive style, which I call “colonial galant.” I argue, first, how the style of this repertoire is genuinely galant and very much a part of the eighteenth-century European intellectual and aesthetic movement that shares that name. I also define the colonial galant style as a distinct sub-set of the galant and demonstrate its particular features. I hope to show that close scrutiny of this colonial repertoire can help us reframe the historiography of European art music.

Thursday, February 13, 2025
Yvette Janine Jackson (Assistant Professor in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry, Department of Music, Harvard University)
“Radio Opera Workshop: Transformation of Sound and Process” 

Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer and installation artist whose early experiences with tape splicing, analog synthesis, and computer music led to her work as a sound designer for theatre. Building on these experiences, she developed her unique aesthetic of narrative soundscape composition and radio opera. Jackson’s projects often draw from history to examine relevant social issues. Her album Freedom is described as “one of the most unique releases to chronicle the Black American experience” (The Wire). Recent projects include solo modular synth performance for King Britt’s Blacktronika stage at the Big Ears Festival; T-Minus, A Radio Opera commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble; Extant, for bass clarinet, cello, and game engine at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe; and Hello, Tomorrow! for orchestra and electronics co-commissioned by American Composers Orchestra and Carnegie Hall. Her Radio Opera Workshop ensemble premiered Left Behind at the Venice Music Biennale and gave the U.S. premiere at UC Irvine for the Gassmann Electronic Music Series. Jackson’s permanent installations Underground (Codes) and Destination Freedom can be experienced at Wave Farm in Acra, New York, and the International African American Museum in Charleston, respectively. Jackson is an assistant professor in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry in the Department of Music at Harvard University.

Abstract: Composer Yvette Janine Jackson explores her relationship with radio opera as a compositional and performance practice. She will highlight the ways she synthesizes radio drama, electroacoustic music, and soundscape composition to create immersive sonic narratives through her solo works and the Radio Opera Workshop ensemble. This presentation will examine her use of text, spatialization, and repetition as creative tools, while sharing examples of the collaborative and technological processes that shape her works.

Thursday, February 20, 2025
Joshua Lubin-Levy (Director, Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University)
“’E.G. [Evening Gown] Orgy’: Jack Smith And Abstract Gender in the 1960s”

Joshua Lubin-Levy is a scholar, dramaturg, and curator. He is the Director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University and the Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal. He received his doctorate from the Department of Performance Studies, New York University (2020). He served as Curatorial Researcher Associate on the exhibition “Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum. He previously held positions as Associate Director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, as the Senior Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and served as Interim Director of Visual Arts at Abrons Arts Center, and taught in the Department of Visual Studies, Eugene Lang, The New School. He was also 2016–2017 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow in the Whitney Independent Studies Program.

Abstract: The scandal surrounding Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures (1963), with its overt display of naked bodies writhing in ecstasy and agony, marks a turning point in the history of 1960s sexual liberation—one that often overshadows the artistic experimentation at the core of Smith’s practice. This talk will look to the live performance work that predates Smith’s renowned film (still banned in New York State) in order to consider the entanglements of Smith’s better known filmmaking with his relationships across the avant-gardes of painting and music (including the work of Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Marian Zazeela, and others) to think about an alternative legacy for how Smith came to animate a queer world where “image” and “sound” come together.

Thursday, February 27, 2025
Nathaniel Mitchell (Visiting Assistant Professor of Music, Wesleyan University)
“On Meter and the Social Dynamics of Cueing in Bill Monroe’s ‘Muleskinner Blues’”

Nathaniel Mitchell is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Wesleyan University whose research explores the cognitive foundations of musical creativity in genres ranging from eighteenth-century opera to bluegrass and video games. He received his Ph.D. in Music from Princeton University, where his dissertation on musical form in eighteenth-century opera was awarded the Holmes / D'Accone dissertation fellowship from the American Musicological Society. In 2023, his article "The Volta: A Galant Gesture of Culmination" was awarded the Roland Jackson prize by the American Musicological Society. Additional research has appeared in Music Theory Online, the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, SMT-V, and SMT-Pod.

Abstract: “Muleskinner Blues,” the signature song of bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe, is at once central to the bluegrass canon and yet metrically enigmatic, featuring a flexible timing structure that fluctuated wildly between performances. This article engages in a longitudinal study of 165 performances of “Muleskinner Blues” across Bill Monroe’s career to explore how the musicians that rotated through his band, the Blue Grass Boys, cognitively grappled with the song’s flexible structure. Through a series of analytical vignettes, I will detail the distributed cognitive system that drives performances of “Muleskinner Blues,” giving special attention to musical cues as tools for calling collective attention to structurally important moments of action. Additionally, I show how the song’s flexible meter was weaponized by Monroe in acts of musical hazing, antagonizing his musicians in the high-stakes environment of a live performance. Through these analyses, I show how the song’s peculiar meter centered Monroe musically, structurally, and socially, transforming “Muleskinner Blues” into a potent vehicle for the masculine ideology of the father of bluegrass music.

*Tuesday, April 1, 2025 RING HALL     *Different Date and Location
Oliver Muco Nicholson (Composer, performer, producer)
“Creative Troubadourism: Cultural Identity and the Interpretation of Medieval Music”

Oliver Muco Nicholson is a multi-instrumentalist, specializing as a vocalist. He also plays the piano, viola and the koto. He has performed his original compositions in the United Kingdom, Burundi, Rwanda, Portugal, and the United States, including opening for Sudanese-Canadian artist Emmanuel Jal and Rwandan singer Meddy Saleh as well as collaborations with musicians from East Africa including Deejay Pius and Amalon. His solo work, which he releases under the name 'Muco’ has been streamed over 1.5 million times worldwide and has been described as “charming”, “compelling”, featuring a “kaleidoscope of contrasts” by Come Here Floyd. DNÜ says Muco finds “a balance between being haunting and spiritual”, with “dreamy production making room for stunning vocals”. Earmilk calls his songwriting “dazzling” and “wistful" with music which “brushes away all your thoughts, leaving just enough space for its alluring lyrics.”

Abstract: This session explores the interplay of cultural identity and creative interpretation in the reimagining of medieval music. Drawing upon my dual heritage as a British-Burundian musician, I have developed a practice I term "creative troubadourism," blending historic folk traditions with contemporary sensibilities. Through my reinterpretations of medieval songs - particularly in Old and Middle English - I aim to bridge the temporal divide, crafting performances that resonate with modern audiences while honoring their historical roots. My work seeks a dialogue between musical and linguistic traditions, integrating a diverse range of instruments (autoharp, lyre, koto, and viola) and languages (Swahili, Kirundi, French, and Modern, Old and Middle English). Central to my compositional interests are how disparate cultural tools and world instruments can work together to find new ways of understanding and performing the music of the past. This session invites reflection on how the revival of medieval music, when informed by personal heritage and cross-cultural exploration, can challenge traditional notions of authenticity and inclusivity in historical performance. I am seeking to stimulate discussion on approaching medieval music as a living art form, a space for both historical engagement and creative reimagination.