PRESENTERS AND ABSTRACTS

Ms. Jennifer Buchanan

Music Therapy: The Music Advantage in Health, Wellness and Recovery

Music brings meaning to moments -- and on a profound level, its elements—tone, lyric, groove—influence our emotions and behaviours. With over thirty years of experience as a music therapist, Jennifer has witnessed these elements merge into a powerful catalyst for change, transforming the lives of all ages. Music consistently proves its efficiency and effectiveness in elevating mood, strengthening memory, and igniting motivation. In this presentation, I will explore how music therapy is impacting areas such as mental health, education and dementia care; delve into the research at the intersection of music, neuroscience, and our well-being; and discover “JenX’s 8-Track:” eight tips for more intentionally incorporating music into everyday life.

Ms. Jennifer Buchanan MTA, MBA is the President and Founder of JB Music Therapy, Canada’s largest employer of Certified Music Therapists, renowned for its innovative approach to healthcare, education, and corporate wellness. Under her visionary leadership, JB Music Therapy has served as a launchpad for new professionals, making a significant impact across diverse medical, educational, and community settings. She has served as President and Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Music Therapists and is currently a Director at the National Music Centre. Her award-winning book, Wellness, Wellplayed, explores the profound connection between music and the brain, making her a sought-after speaker and consultant, recognized by esteemed media outlets across North America.

Dr. James Deaville

Zombies, Musicology and Disabilities

The walking dead share certain characteristics with living humans, however they cannot communicate through lexically recognizable vocalities, whether speaking or singing. In this as well as their shambling gait, popular culture has compared them with disabled individuals, as metaphors for people with visible and non-visible disabilities. Such comparisons are problematic, however, since they dehumanize those who experience disability, including those who like the undead are mute or non-verbal. This paper explores the “zombification” of non-speaking characters in audiovisual media, on the one hand critiquing the non-linguistic vocalizations of the undead in popular television series (for example The Walking Dead), on the other considering those who find alternative musical voices for their verbal silence (e.g. Ada in The Piano).

Dr. James Deaville teaches music at Carleton University. He edited Music in Television (Routledge, 2010) and co-edited Music and the Broadcast Experience (Oxford, 2016) and the Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising (2021). He is currently co-editing with Ron Rodman, Jessica Getman, and Brooke McCorkle the Oxford Handbook of Music and Television (2025). Regarding music, sound, and horror, he has published the book chapters “The Beauty of Horror: Kilar, Coppola, and Dracula” in Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, Neil Lerner, 187-205 (New York: Routledge, 2010) and “Evil Medieval: Chant and the New Dark Spirituality of Vietnam-Era Film in America,” Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, Stephen Meyer and Kirsten Yri, eds., 709-28 (New York: OUP, 2020) and the articles “The moaning of (un-)life: Animacy, muteness and eugenics in cinematic and televisual representation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 4, no. 2 (2019): 225-46 and “Conspiracy of Terror: Music, Sound Design, and the Female Scream in Horror Trailers,” Filigrane 27 (2022), https://revues.mshparisnord.fr/filigrane/index.php?id=1360.

Dr. Jamie Meyers-Riczu

Melancholy Genius in Franz Liszt's Tasso

When Franz Liszt accepted the position of Kapellmeister to the Weimar court (1842), he perhaps recognized an opportunity to symbolically align with the great men – geniuses – of Weimar Classicism. His tenure yielded a significant corpus of compositions, including five single-movement “heroic” symphonic poems. One of the most popular of these includes Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo, a work that centers on nineteenth-century reimaginations of the life and experiences of Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso. To Romantic-era artists, including Liszt, Tasso represented a monumental heroic genius, codified by tension between melancholy and sanity. This paper, therefore, is an exploration of Liszt’s fixation on this tension by musically signifying an affective space between Tasso’s internal and external experiences. My analysis, in particular, examines the extra-musical content in conjunction with musical form and thematic development. In doing so, I suggest that Liszt’s symphonic poem explores tension as a metaphor for the creative process, at once tangible and inexplicable.

Dr. Jamie Meyers-Riczu is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Carleton University and an instructor in music history at Concordia University of Edmonton. She is also the English-language Reviews Editor for Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music. She obtained her PhD from the University of Alberta in 2021 with a SSHRC-supported dissertation that examined expressions of heroic masculinity in Franz Liszt’s symphonic poems Tasso and Mazeppa. Jamie’s research interests vary, from music-text relationships in nineteenth-century program music to local music histories. Her most recent article, “‘Away, Away:’ Franz Liszt’s Mazeppa and the Bonds of Freedom” is forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Music Review. Jamie’s two-year postdoctoral project, Selling Black Gold: Audiovisual Mediations of Alberta’s Petroculture, draws from the field of energy humanities/petrocultures and cultural geography to examine how audiovisual media—particularly those that incorporate music and sound—have participated in constructing, reflecting, and critiquing Alberta’s oil culture from 1946 to the present day. Her first publication based on this research, a chapter entitled “‘Goin’ to the Big Oil Show:’ Celebrating Oil in Song in Devon, Alberta” will appear in Critical Perspectives in Petrosonics (2026).

Dr. Alyssa Aska

Music, AI and Technology for Video Games

The proliferation of accessible technology, including apps, has allowed for gamification to be used for learning, exercise, and many other normally non-gamified activities. This has extended into the humanities as well, with gamification being used in artistic works. The term “gamified” or, more recently, “ludified” is used to describe art that uses game-like elements. This could include gameplay mechanics, gameplay references, or purely aesthetic elements. I will discuss at length my approaches to gamified, or ludified, audiovisual compositions, with focus placed on an approach that involves the use of a type of game called a “non-game”. Through the extensive analysis of a non-game inspired work I composed titled The Missing Piece, I examine the potential of integrating game-like elements but without the clear competition and goals that are normally present in games.

Dr. Alyssa Aska is fascinated with the architecture of music, both spatially and temporally. She composes works which explore extremes in time and space, using rigid proportions to generate forms in acoustic works and exploring the unpredictable duration and lack of control in gamified works. This is closely tied to her compositional style, which is concerned with a delicate balance between elements of functional form and elements of pure aesthetic purpose. As much structure as possible, as many ornaments as necessary (and vice versa). She studied composition in the United States with Robert Kyr, David Crumb, and Jeffrey Stolet, in Canada with Robert Pritchard, Keith Hamel, and David Eagle, and in Graz, Austria with Marko Ciciliani and Klaus Lang. Alyssa’s work and research are performed worldwide at various concerts and festivals such as Wien Modern, Ars Electronica Linz, Forum Wallis, ICMC, EMS, Impuls, Darmstadt Summer Courses, Musikprotokoll, Tonraum21, ComposIt, Mirkofest Helsinki, Microtonal Festival Prague, and many others. She was selected for participation at many academies and workshops such as WasteLAnd Academy (2019), CrossROADS Festival (2019), Kalv Festival Academy (2020), and reMusik.org (2021). She was also selected for performance at the Gamified Audiovisual Performance and Performance Practice (Gappp) Symposium 2019. Alyssa is a founding member of the Graz facere collective, which presents every year concerts in various formats, and is a current member of the Graz collective Die Andere Saite. Her scores are published by Babel Scores and Verlag Zeitschleife.

Dr. Arsh Khaira

Philosophy and Ethics of Music Affect for Conflict Resolution

My presentation will focus on the role music plays in healing for communities with partition histories. I will share my research which looks at musical exchange beyond borders, and the idea of recreating ancient kinship bonds for groups divided as a result of colonization. I will explore how intergenerational trauma exists as a result of colonization and that music can play a role in healing these wounds, particularly through the way it facilitates the recreation of mutual cultural interdependence for groups that were forcibly separated during the creation of nation-states along artificially created and exaggerated lines of ethnic and religious demarcation.

Dr. Arsh Khaira was born in Edmonton where he lived until 2004, when he moved to Ardrossan where he has lived since. He completed his BA and MA from Concordia University and then his MBA and PhD from the U of A. He has been a musician since 1994 when he began his journey with electric guitar. He has played in bands for most of his life and has released several albums that have been recognized in Edmonton’s press and media. He has also released many professional music videos. He performs heavy rock music in English as well as Sufi music in Urdu, Persian and Panjabi. He is a multi-instrumentalist (drums, piano, organ, bass, guitar) and also plays Kashmiri/Afghan Rubab. Arsh is a polyglot who speaks Dari/Farsi (Persian), Urdu, Hindko and Panjabi. Please visit www.ArshKhaira.com and consider subscribing to his YouTube channel YouTube.com/@arshkhaira

Mrs. Jennifer Maxfield

Bach's Magnificat: The Musical and Spiritual Affect of the Lullaby

J. S. Bach was the consummate practitioner of the conventional Baroque approach to composition. He frequently incorporated rhetorical gestures into the fabric of his musical works, engaging listeners intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. In one of his settings of the biblical story of the Magnificat–Mary’s song of praise as she is greeted by her pregnant cousin Elizabeth–Bach employs an array of techniques to express the canticle of joy as a story more complex, structurally and dramatically, than it appears. By examining the contours of rhetoric in his musical treatment of this biblical episode, especially the counterpoint of joy and lament, I will explore how Bach transmits the theological and emotional resonance of the story to evoke a dramatic impact that transcends the affective power of its constituent parts.

Mrs. Jennifer Maxfield is a longtime editor for theological publisher The Luther Academy, the Director of Music at Concordia Lutheran Seminary in Edmonton, an organist, proud wife and mother of four adult children, and a closet writer. She has a BA in English, has been playing the piano since age 6 and organ since her feet could reach the pedals, and now relishes the opportunity to write and continue her organ training at an advanced level. While a passion for and involvement in music has always informed her life, it was only ten years ago that she started to bring her more formal background in reading literature and patterns to the music she was playing, after Bach’s rhetorical language started to speak to her in an endearing yet seemingly contrary organ chorale. She finds in his music the ultimately stimulating nexus of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual engagement.

Dr. Bill Anderson

Where Are We Going? Ludomusicology and Zombie Philosophy

Ludomusicology is the “study of video game music”. Music is integral to the success and popularity of video games. It creates the atmosphere, mood and tone of the game play. I argue that Sherwood’s employment of the Greek philosophical concept of the Doctrine of Ethos is effective in conveying the philosophy of zombies. This is because Sherwood’s zombie songs with their haunting ethos raise existential angst in the gamer, and at least implicitly and subconsciously, confront the gamer with the philosophical concepts of mortality, ethics, meaning and teleos (end purpose in life). These are, perhaps, best encapsulated in the simple yet philosophically profound question of Sherwood’s song “Where Are We Going?” . . . .

Dr. Bill Anderson did his Ph.D. in Biblical Studies and Theology in Postmodern Literary Critical Circles at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Bill is Professor of Pop Culture, Philosophy and Religion at Concordia University of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. He has worked interdisciplinarily throughout his academic career and has published numerous books and peer-reviewed articles in international publications. He is married to Joan, a Music Therapist, and lives in the shadow of his COD zombie wrecking son, Liam (a computer programmer).

Page updated

Report abuse