Music Department 2025-2026 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. See our department website for a list of past colloquium visitors. All meetings take place in person.
Spring 2026, 4:30–6:00pm, Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall 003 (*unless otherwise noted)
Full Schedule to be announced soon!
Feb. 12 Stu Duncan (Dean of Graduate Student Affairs at Wesleyan University)
“Singing Out of Turn: Metric Disruption and Queer Temporality in Britten’s Peter Grimes”
Prior to his current role as Dean of Graduate Student Affairs at Wesleyan University, Stu Paul Duncan earned a PhD in music theory from Yale University (2017) and a DMA in music composition from Cornell University (2010). Following his graduate studies, he served as an adjunct faculty member in the University of Connecticut’s Department of Music and later as Director of Programming and Diversity Recruitment at UConn’s Graduate School while also teaching graduate students in Neag School of Education. In 2022, Stu co-authored Music-Making in U.S. Prisons: Listening to Incarcerated Voices, building on earlier publications in the Journal of the International Society for Music Education and a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education titled “Behind Different Walls: Restorative and Transformative Justice and Their Relationship to Music Education.” More recently, Stu has returned to research on the music of Benjamin Britten, expanding on the chapter “Hypermetric Alienation: Fishing for Meter in Britten’s ‘Old Joe’ from Peter Grimes,” published in Inspiration: Essays on Benjamin Britten from a Centenary Symposium. Stu is also active as an organist and choir director at St. Peter’s Church in Cheshire, Connecticut, and is the parent of two young children.
Abstract. This presentation examines Benjamin Britten’s distinctive use of metric and hypermetric disruption in vocal music composed between 1943 and 1945, focusing on moments where vocal entries emerge as temporally “out of place” within an established metric order. Drawing on recent developments in metric theory (Malin, Cohn, Krebs, Mirka), I present several analytical vignettes from the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (1943) and the Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1945). In each case, an accompanimental introduction establishes a metric or hypermetric framework that fails to prepare the voice’s subsequent entry, producing grouping or displacement conflicts that destabilize listeners’ expectations at precisely the moment a subject begins to speak or sing.
Building on this analytical framework, the paper reconsiders the pivotal pub round “Old Joe has gone fishing” from Peter Grimes. I argue that Grimes’s interruption of the Borough is fundamentally hypermetric: he enters a measure early, with a durationally expanded and metrically reoriented version of the tune that disrupts the Borough’s otherwise unwavering four-measure hypermetric stability. Unlike the earlier song examples, however, Grimes’s intervention does not simply coexist with the surrounding texture but actively reshapes it, forcing the Borough to regroup and ultimately to reassert collective control by sustaining multiple, conflicting hypermetric layers simultaneously. Hypermeter thus functions not merely as background structure but as a musical agent through which social belonging, authority, and exclusion are negotiated.
Heard through a queer analytic lens, these recurrent moments of metric misalignment take on broader expressive significance. Britten’s repeated staging of voices that enter early, late, or according to an incompatible temporal logic suggests an aesthetics of temporal nonconformity, in which difference is articulated through being out of sync with normative structures. In Peter Grimes, Grimes’s failure to align with the Borough’s hypermetric order mirrors his inability to assimilate to its social and moral codes, rendering queerness audible as a problem of timing as much as identity. Such a perspective does not reduce metric conflict to biography; rather, it situates Britten’s temporal disruptions within a queer aesthetics of misalignment, offering a richer account of how metric structure participates in the opera’s dramatic and political work.
Feb. 19 Andrea Moore (Associate Professor of Music, Smith College)
“New Music at the New Ends of History”
Andrea Moore is Associate Professor of Music at Smith College. Her research interests are centered on new music and musical institutions, and include questions of musical value and prestige, contemporary Bach culture and other post-canonic traces, and cultural memory. Recent publications include a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology and her 2025 book, Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory (Fordham University Press).
Abstract. Since 1945, global memory culture has often been driven by the convictions behind Holocaust remembrance: that remembrance prevents recurrence, and that to “never forget” is to embrace specific moral lessons. These lessons have aligned with democratic principles of tolerance, equal protection for all citizens, and freedoms of speech, religion, and press. In the post-Cold War era, the convergence of memory’s lessons with state democracy seemed complete, and grandly declared the “end of history” by political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the apex and termination of a long dialectical process.
These memory imperatives have produced a surfeit of commemorative projects, further inflated in the U.S. by the memorial culture of 9/11. In the face of such excess, forgetting, rather than remembering, can seem aspirational, suggesting a future in which historical lessons, especially those whose recognition was hard-won, no longer require the same vigilance. Yet since 2025, history itself has been rapidly repurposed: unwritten and rewritten, stripped from public sites, and suppressed. With these "new ends of history"—where history is terminated and repurposed toward authoritarian aims—the assumption that memorials can offer a perpetual account for future audiences can no longer be taken for granted.
In this talk, I suggest it is here that musical memorials can make a distinctive intervention. Their liveness and ephemerality—which may otherwise render them less legible as memory— become strengths in a moment when other forms of memory can find the very histories they address into question. Taking Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed as a case, I suggest that these pieces operate not just as musical works but flexible and repeated memory acts that, with new urgency, eschew monumental permanence.
Mar. 5 Aaron Siegel (MA Wesleyan; composer; co-founder and executive director, Experiments in Opera), Phil Kline (composer and sound artist), and Shannon Sindelar (MFA Carnegie Mellon; adjunct professor Barnard College; producer and director, Experiments in Opera).
“Experiments in Opera, Form and Story”
From vast electronic symphonies to chamber music and song cycles, Phil Kline's work has been hailed for its originality, beauty, and subversive subtext. Raised in the suburbs of Akron, Ohio, Phil came to New York City to study poetry with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro at Columbia. Shortly after graduation, he moved to the East Village, cofounded the rock band the Del-Byzanteens with Jim Jarmusch, Jamie Nares, and Lucy Sante, collaborated with Nan Goldin on the soundtrack to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and played guitar in the notorious Glenn Branca Ensemble. Many of his early compositions evolved from performance art and used large numbers of boomboxes, such as Bachman’s Warbler and the outdoor Christmas cult classic Unsilent Night, which is now an annual holiday tradition celebrated around the world. Other notable works include Exquisite Corpses, written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars; the politically-charged Zippo Songs and Rumsfeld Songs; John the Revelator, a setting of the Latin Mass written for early music specialists Lionheart; the song cycles Out Cold and Florida Man, both written for Theo Bleckmann and the orchestral work In a Handbasket. Phil is currently immersed in music theater projects, including Ghost Story, a site- specific cycle for soprano Nicoletta Berry with Yarn/Wire, recently premiered at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; and BLINK, an upcoming opera about a fugitive family encountering the spectre of Nikola Tesla in the ruined New Yorker Hotel at the end of time.
Shannon Sindelar is a theater director and producer based in New York City. Recent directing work includes the NYC premieres of Experiments in Opera’s Five Ways to Die and Lisa Clair’s Willa’s Authentic Self, and regional premieres of Madeleine George’s Hurricane Diane, Clare Barron's Dance Nation, and the Southern premiere of Jaclyn Backus’ Men on Boats. She currently serves as producing director for the Obie Award-winning company The Builders Association and is managing producer with Experiments in Opera. She’s an adjunct professor at Barnard College and an affiliated artist with New Georges. She serves on the advisory board for the Edward F. Albee Foundation and is board president of the performance ensemble Object Collection. MFA: Carnegie Mellon (John Wells Directing Fellow).
Aaron Siegel has worked as a musician, composer, writer, photographer, organizer and educator for 25 years in New York City. Celebrated as a composer of works for percussion (“hypnotic clouds of chiming tones” – The New Yorker) and the stage (“softly shattering” – NY Times), Siegel has a long history as an improvising percussionist and bandleader. Since 2011, Siegel has co-led the radical opera collective Experiments in Opera (“Raw, funny, surreal, and disarmingly human”- Opera News), helping to bring to the stage countless works by composers and writers and expanding the boundaries of musical storytelling. He is also an accomplished photographer and filmmaker, working in experimental forms to illuminate everyday wonders. Always happy to explore in community with others, Siegel has created work with A.M. Homes, Mallory Catlett, Tracy K. Smith, Emily Manzo, Mantra Percussion, Anthony Braxton, Memorize the Sky, Anthony Roth Costanzo and the EiO Writers Room among others.
Abstract. Composer Phil Kline, Stage Director Shannon Sindelar and Composer/Producer Aaron Siegel (Wes MA '05) visit the CFA campus to share their perspectives on experimental opera practices and concerns. Kline is in the midst of his development of a new opera work entitled BLINK, which will be directed in its premiere production by Sindelar. The two will discuss the origins of the piece and their evolving collaboration, including contributions from artist Jim Jarmusch, and share some of the work in progress. Siegel, one of the co-founders of Experiments in Opera, a NYC-based opera collective, will help facilitate the conversation.