Music Department Colloquium Series 2023-2024

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

Colloquium Series on CFA website

Spring 2024

Aaron Bittel (Wesleyan University World Music Archives)
“Archival Doings, Participatory Collective Remembering, and the CFA’s 100th ”
Thursday, February 1, 2024 at 4:30pm
Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall 003

Broadly speaking, as a culture group we tend to think of encounters with archives as discoveries of fixed records – flawed, incomplete, and contested, but nonetheless fixed at some point in the historical past. On the other hand, professional archivists speak in terms of an archival life cycle: one which classically followed a cradle-to-grave trajectory, but which in more recent tellings includes conceptions of reincarnation, feedback, or simply ongoing exchange. Archives – by which we might mean individual documents, collections of those documents, the institutions tasked with sustaining them, or the socio-cultural experiences they embody – are constantly and continually being created, collected, organized, preserved, consulted, disseminated, and recreated. They allow us to engage with memory and remembering across time, a kind of trans-chronological dialogue among past, present, and future interlocutors. Our role in this conversation need not be restricted to hearing from the past. So, in the year that we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Center for the Arts, this presentation is an open call for anyone and everyone to get archivally engaged with both the CFA’s beginnings and it’s eventual (we hope!) centenary. I’ll lay out the projects already planned or underway for this year, opportunities for participation, and a bigger vision for how we as a creative community can have ongoing exchange with our past and future.

Aaron M. Bittel is Director of the World Music Archives and Music Librarian at Wesleyan University, where he works to promote creative ways of engaging with a diverse collection of cultural heritage materials, from unique to common. Previously, he served as Archivist-Librarian and Head of Digital Projects at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, and was also an adjunct faculty member, teaching courses on audiovisual archives and oral history at UCLA. He has regularly contributed to the cultural collections field, especially in the areas of education and training, and research archives, as part of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), the Music Library Association (MLA), and the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA). Aaron is also an active musician with scholarly and performing interests in free reed instruments and traditional musics of Quebec, Ireland, and the Balkans.


 
Sunny Jain, composer/performer, jazz and North Indian (Punjabi) music
"Never a Dhol Moment: Punjabi rhythms into jazz into story telling"
Thursday, February 8, 2023 at 4:30pm
Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall 003

Daniel Weintraub, director of the documentary film Deep Listening: The story of Pauline Oliveros
“Still Listening; The Legacy of Pauline Oliveros in Life and Film ”
Thursday, February 15, 2024
  - Film Screening 2:45
  - Colloquium immediately following the screening
Ring Family Performing Arts Hall



Libby Van Cleve, oboist and director, Yale Oral History of American Music project
Transcription and Transformation: the challenges and joys of creating oboe performance editions of great string repertoire by Mozart and Bach"
Thursday, February 22, 2024 at 4:30pm
Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall 003

 

 

Charlotte D'Evelyn, Skidmore College
"Mongolian Throat Singing on the Global Stage; More than Meets the Ear"
Thursday, February 29, 2024 at 4:30pm
Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall 003
 


Donald Berman, Longy School of Music of Bard College; Tufts University; President, Charles Ives Society
“Challenging Authority in Editing Ives”
Thursday, March 28, 2024 at 4:30pm
Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall 003

 

Nye Ffarrabas, sculptor, musician, and conceptual artist
"The Early Days of Fluxus and the Flux Divorce"
Wednesday, April 3, 2024 at 4:30pm
TBA