MESS 1
14.11.2022 | 5-6.30pm GMT | David Borgo | “Sync or Swarm: Improvisation, Intersubjectivity, and Embodied Mind Reading" | Link
Abstract:: This talk with provide an overview of themes explored in Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (revised edition, 2022), and it will highlight more recent work on the ways that social cognition and coordination dynamics can inform our understandings of ensemble interaction in musical improvisation.
Bio: David Borgo is a Professor of Music at UC San Diego where he teaches in the Integrative Studies and Jazz and Music of the African Diaspora Programs. He is affiliated faculty in Ethnic Studies and Cognitive Science. David received a 2013 Distinguished Teaching Award from the African and African American Studies Research Project, a 2020 campus-wide Diversity Equity and Inclusion Teaching Award, and the 2006 Alan P. Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology for the first edition of his book, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (Continuum/Bloomsbury). David earned a B.M. degree in Jazz Studies from Indiana University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Ethnomusicology from UCLA. He joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2002 and served as the Department Chair from 2017-2020. As a saxophonist, David has released twelve CDs and one DVD of original music on a variety of record labels (Cadence Jazz, Resurgent Music, pfMentum, OA2 Records, Circumvention Music). His most recent recording is an album-length work composed during the pandemic titled Suite of Uncommon Sorrows. Later this year he will return to the studio to record a new suite of original compositions titled Cautiously Optimistic. In addition to modern jazz and contemporary improvised music, David performs electro-acoustic improvisation with KaiBorg and intricate polymetric music with Kronomorfic.
MESS 2
05.12.2022 | 4-5.30pm GMT | Vijay Iyer | "Emergent Musicalities" | Link
Abstract: The category of music aligns with the category of the human; the two should be understood as mutually constitutive, unstable constructs. Like personhood, music’s status is not freely given. Rather, it is conferred through a contingent process in which "you," the subject, experience an affective (which is to say, embodied) relation with the sensory trace of an other. Such a precarious sonic relation, which I am calling musicality, can assume many forms; we must imagine not one but many musicalities, many modes of sonic mattering, coming into existence across the anthropocene. With this argument I ask that we unthink the totalizing category of "music," and begin to theorize humankind's innumerable, diverse, emergent musicalities, via a series of scenes of mutable, embodied sonic social life.
Bio: Composer-pianist VIJAY IYER has released two dozen albums, including seven on ECM Records, and has collaborated with Amiri Baraka, Wadada Leo Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Teju Cole, Tyshawn Sorey, Pamela Z, Henry Threadgill, Jennifer Koh, Matt Haimovitz, Brentano Quartet, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and many other artists across disciplines. He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a U.S. Artists Fellowship, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German Echo Awards, and was the four-time Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat International Critics’ Poll. At Harvard University, Iyer holds a joint appointment in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies, and he founded the Department of Music’s doctoral program in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry. His recent writings appear in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century, and the journal Jazz and Culture. He earned a PhD in 1998 from U.C. Berkeley in an interdisciplinary program in Technology and the Arts; his dissertation was one of the first to advance the idea of embodied music cognition.
MESS 3
06.02.2023 | 12-1.30pm GMT | Youn Kim | "Piano Fingering. Expressing Bodily Efforts and the Performing Agency" | Link
Abstract: Despite the obvious connection between music and the body, only recently has the body been "brought back in" (Frank 1990) in musicological discourse. With the late-20th-century "performative turn," the performer’s body, in particular, has been investigated in various fields, including physiology, biomechanics, psychology, and music performance analysis. Earlier empirical studies of music performance tended to focus on how performers manipulate performance parameters to "bring out" compositional structures, and compare various sonic interpretations of a given score. Instead of assuming a single authoritative score, the present study proposes to consider both plural score editions and diverse performances to highlight the performer’s agency in music performance analysis. The "performing editions," which were prepared and edited by pianists and pedagogues of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often contain suggestions for audacious fingering that contradict the standard fingering and require greater bodily effort from the pianist. Recognizing the performer’s agency as both a "writing" and "performing" musician (Cook 2013), the fingering indications in these editions as well as various recordings of the scalar passages selected from Beethoven's piano works will be explored, collated, and analyzed to illustrate how the performer expresses the physical exertions and dynamic shaping. They express the paradox of virtuosity, both transcending the boundary yet remaining within the realm of the natural (Deaville 2008). At the intersection of performance and analysis, the fingering of scalar passages presents a rich source of embodied music cognition.
Bio: Youn Kim obtained her PhD in music theory from Columbia University. Her research interests include history of music theory, psychology of music, theory and analysis, history of listening, and in particular, the interrelationship between music theory and the science of the mind. Kim’s previous publications include a monograph, History of Western Music Theory (2006; awarded as "Outstanding Books in the Field of Basic Sciences" in 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Korea), and articles and reviews in Journal of Musicology, Psychology of Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Music and Letters, and Current Musicology, among others. She has presented papers at various international conferences, including International Musicological Society, International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Royal Musical Association, and Congress of the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, and her work has been supported by the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong under the General Research Fund (2011/12 and 2017/18). She coedited (with Sander Gilman) and contributed chapters to the Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body (OUP, 2019) and co-authored several articles in Scientific Reports and PLOS One. Her monograph, Body and Force in Music: Metaphoric Constructions in Music Psychology (Routledge, 2022), was published as a part of the SEMPRE Studies in the Psychology of Music series.
MESS 4
17.04.2023 | 4-5.30pm BST| Sarah Whatley | "Dance, disability, and keeping ‘in time’" | Link
Abstract: Dance is frequently performed with music, which often provides a structure that can lead to assumptions about how time can, or should, be regulated in dance. The dance/music relationship may pay little attention to the lived experience of time, and how normative and ableist expectations of keeping ‘in time’ neglect the potential for crip time (Kafer 2013) to rethink temporality. This talk, drawn from a forthcoming chapter, will focus on how disabled dancers embody time with reference to Candoco Dance Company’s appearance on Strictly Come Dancing in 2018. I argue that the dancers are subject to a particular reception of their work that generates what I have termed a ‘dichotomy of normalisation’, whereby the dancers are caught between their dance being judged in its own terms, and being recognised for how it transmits an aesthetic wholly tied to, or determined by, the body or bodies dancing. I seek to show that their performance is a reminder that diverse and atypical bodies should deter us from essentialising particular ways of moving and being moved, and that their dance simultaneously reveals and masks the political, ethical and aesthetic dimensions of differing temporalities that shape disability performance.
Bio: Sarah Whatley is Professor and Director of the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University, UK. Her funded projects focus on dance and disability, digital cultural content, smart learning environments for dancers, reimagining dance archives and dance documentation. Whilst her expertise is primarily in dance, her research is often interdisciplinary, collaborating with artists, designers and researchers from other disciplines including law, anthropology, psychology, digital media and computing science. She was founding Editor of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and sits on the Editorial Boards of several other Journals.
MESS 5
04.03.2024 | 3-4.30pm GMT | Alisha Lola Jones | "Ultrasonic Tastemaker: A Critical Gastromusicology"
Abstract: Shortly after the term “soul food” was popularized on the heels of the “soul music” genre, culinary anthropologist and Sun Ra touring musician Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor published the cookbook-memoir Vibration Cooking or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970). In the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic research and Ms. Edna Lewis’ culinary culture-bearing, Vibration Cooking challenged the primacy of the “soul food” concept by centring on food as a source of pride, a site of sensuality, an art of multisensory storytelling, a validation of Black womanhood and Black consciousness-raising. Smart-Grosvenor wrote, “When I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration.” Through her cultural anthropological writing, she pinned an intersection of music/sound, sensuality, and culinary perception that has yet to be explored through the lens of music or sound studies. Probing that constellation of soulful, musical, sensual, and culinary perception, the textbook Ultrasonic Tastemakers: A Critical Gastromusicology is a ground-breaking critical investigation into the interconnectedness of African American embodiment, oral transmission, cultural production, wealth extraction, and consumption in the global marketplace as emblematic of what I coin as gastromusicophysics or multisensory “taste.” Highly competent culture-bearers in the marketplace that I call “ultrasonic tastemakers” resonate with and register their talent, tapping into high vibrations, and frequencies of creative expressions, decision making and influencing what is, will be, and their products endure as en vogue, succulent, and mellifluous.
Bio: Dr. Alisha Lola Jones is an associate professor in the faculty of music at the University of Cambridge in England. Additionally, as a performer-scholar, she consults museums, conservatories, seminaries, and arts organizations on curriculum, live and virtual event programming, and content development. Dr. Jones’ book Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance (Oxford University Press) breaks ground by analyzing the role of gospel music-making in constructing and renegotiating gender identity among Black men. Dr. Jones' has been the recipient several awards for research, including: the Ruth Stone prize (SEM), Music in American Culture prize (AMS), and Philip Brett prize (AMS). She is completing two books: a gastromusicology book entitled Ultrasonic Tastemakers: Towards a Critical Gastromusicology and Sound Our Signatures: A Womanist Approach to Music Research, which sets forth anti-oppressive ways of listening to Black women. She is the album note researcher and writer for the 2022 Grammy nominated Requiem for the Enslaved by Carlos Simon, while regularly researching for the London Symphony Orchestra, the Aspen Festival and Detroit Symphony Orchestra, to name some. This international women’s day, Dr Jones will be awarded the 2023 Power of Women award for excellence as an educator at NBCUniversal in London.
MESS 6
TBA