Seminar Series

Implicit Trust: Collaboration in New Music

Presented by Dr Seán Clancy (University College Dublin)

ABSTRACT

Music making across the world can be thought of as an essentially collaborative activity - it is something people do together. Think hard enough, and you can conceive of a way of describing even solo performances as a collaboration.
In a continuum that traditionally centres and celebrates the sole author, what unique and exciting possibilities could emerge if we make the collaborative nature of music the fundamental principle steering a body of work?
Drawing on the practices of visual artist Sol LeWitt, Fluxus, and the AACM, I will discuss how unique and exciting compositional strategies have been formed in my own work by finding the Other, trusting them implicitly, and aiming for utopia.

The Turncoat Composer. Enquiries into the Lifewriting of Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842)

Presented by Dr Michael Fend (King's College London)

ABSTRACT

When Cherubini moved from Florence via London to Paris in 1786, he was soon presented to the notorious Queen Marie-Antoinette. After the French Revolution had started in 1789, he continued to be employed by a monarchical opera company and he composed a hymn in praise of the King, which is the equivalent of the British anthem "God save the King". But in 1795 he conducted an official music corps to celebrate the beheading of King Louis XVI and in 1797 he busied himself to steal an Italian Music Library for the new Library of the Paris Conservatoire. His political loyalties were also totally up in the air at the end of the Napoleonic Regime in 1815.
Did he not have other choices? What did his musical colleagues do at the time? What is the freedom of a composer in politically violent and economically rocky conditions? Can a black mark on his character - if that is the conclusion - be remedied by his musical creativity?

The Dancer′s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India.

Presented by Professor Rumya S. Putcha (University of Georgia)

In The Dancer’s Voice Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood. Putcha argues that the public persona of the Indian dancer has come to represent India in the global imagination—a representation that supports caste hierarchies and Hindu ethnonationalism, as well as white supremacist model minority narratives. Generations of Indian women have been encouraged to embody the archetype of the dancer, popularized through film cultures from the 1930s to the present. Through analyses of films, immigration and marriage laws, histories of caste and race, advertising campaigns, and her own family’s heirlooms, photographs, and memories, Putcha reveals how women’s citizenship is based on separating their voices from their bodies. In listening closely to and for the dancer’s voice, she offers a new way to understand the intersections of body, voice, performance, caste, race, gender, and nation.

The Tyndall Effect

Presented by Professor Grainne Mulvey (TU Dublin)

ABSTRACT

Breaking the Symphonic Glass Ceiling: Emilie Mayer in Berlin in the 1850s

Presented by Dr Nicole Grimes (Trinity College Dublin)

ABSTRACT