The Musicology Department sponsors a Symposium series with prominent guest speakers from other institutions, plus works-in-progress talks from students and faculty; and professional development workshops organized by the Graduate Musicology Association. All of these events are open to the Eastman community and take place on Thursdays at 4:00 p.m. in NSL 404 (Sibley Library seminar room), unless specified.
The Musicale: “Performance Plus” series showcases outstanding young performers from the Eastman School of Music, “plus” lively in-concert commentary provided by the school’s Ph.D. students in Musicology. Performances take place at 3 p.m. on the third Sunday of each month of the academic year at the George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave.), and the concert is included with museum admission. The Musicale: “Performance Plus” series at the George Eastman Museum is made possible in part by Joanna and Michael Grosodonia.
Events during neither of these standing times are marked with asterisks.
This talk considers the genealogies of trans and queer performance in Cuba and its diaspora and asks what work such performances are doing today in both Miami and Havana. It relies on three sites in particular: the Wigwood drag festival in contemporary Miami, an album recorded by a Chinese Cuban diasporic drag queen in New York City in the 1980s, and the ongoing work of a prominent Black lesbian drag king in Havana. In each context, Santana will discuss the social and aesthetic lineages and contents of the drag performers’ aesthetic choices, focusing on how they might offer insight into the performances’ interventions in dominant LGBT rights discourses in the Americas and the groundswell of political repression of trans and queer people.
In 1994, the Czech National Library acquired a previously unknown sixteenth-century choirbook of central European provenance. Now housed under the shelfmark 59 R 5117, the source contains eight four-voice mass-cycles, as well as choral settings of the mass-responses. Of the masses, three have up to now been considered unique: a Missa Presulem ephebeatum, attributed to Heinrich Isaac; and two anonymous, title-less cycles. This paper evaluates the latter two cycles for what they reveal concerning the source that contains them and the circulation of music in central Europe at the time in which the source was produced. One of the anonymous masses is chant-based. Martin Horyna, the first, and, to date, only scholar to study Ms. 59 R 5117 in any detail, identified this cycle as a Missa dominicalis in a short study from 2002. Since then, the mass has received no further scholarly examination. My paper identifies concordances and a composer for the mass. The other anonymous cycle can be identified as having been modelled on a motet with the text Vulnerasti cor meum. It too turns out not to be unique. The mass bears the hallmarks of having been composed in western Europe, possibly at the French royal court. I assess the piece, its sources, compositional techniques, and model.
Music for brass trio by Jean-Désiré Artôt, J.S. Bach, and Leó Weiner
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the piano was ubiquitous across the world and diverse segments of societies. Drawing on recent approaches to the global circulation of the instrument, my talk expands these discussions by tracing the connections embedded in the piano’s materials—specifically ivory, one of the prime materials for the construction of piano keyboards. I show that this commodity mediated a series of encounters between environment and music cultures, as well as between East Africa, Europe, and the United States. From the warehouses of European and American traders in Zanzibar to ivory auction houses at London and Antwerp, and from these sites to US keyboard factories and consumers’ homes, pianos’ ivory enabled differentiated experiences of a globalizing world, revealing hitherto unexamined entanglements between music, ecology, and empire. All in all, my talk shows the value of material approaches to instruments for a “remapping” of music and sound studies, and the reciprocal benefit of global and postcolonial perspectives for eco-musicological conversations.
A stroll through the newly restored Palazzo Grimani in Venice invokes a theatrical realm saturated by fantasies about the past. Frescoed rooms narrate the tales of Callisto, Psyche, and Apollo; a flying statue of Jupiter abducting Ganymede beckons provocatively from the ceiling; niches display ancient busts and statues that were part of the vast collection of antiquities that Giovanni Carlo Grimani donated to the Republic of Venice at the end of the sixteenth century. My paper explores how the next generation of Grimani (along with other noble families) would draw upon this legacy by promoting a newly expansive, erotic and visually-compelling brand of opera where the influence of Ovid’s eclecticism was especially evident.
Historical performance practice is a main concern in 21st century music performance, pedagogy, and research. This talk presents the results of two case studies in computational analysis of Baroque performance practices at the modern piano.
String quartets by Franz Joseph Haydn and Sergei Prokofiev.