Each semester, CCM welcomes distinguished experts for a series of free Friday afternoon musical discussions. This spring, the Thinking About Music lecture series will present five free public talks, beginning with a presentation by Tufts University Professor Joseph Auner on Friday, Feb. 6.
Sponsored by the Joseph and Frances Jones Poetker Fund of the Cambridge Charitable Foundation, these music theory and history discussions feature diverse topics presented by distinguished experts from all over the United States and are designed to engage participants’ imaginations and to consider music in new ways.
This semester’s guest lecturers also include University of Minnesota Professor Michael Cherlin (Feb. 20), Cornell University Professor Annette Richards (March 6), National Jazz Museum Artistic Director Loren Schoenberg (March 13) and Eastman School of Music Professor Ellen Koskoff (April 17). See the listings below for more information on this semester’s presentation topics.
Since its inception in 1997, the Thinking About Music Series has presented over 120 lectures and one symposium by guests from a number of different colleges, universities, schools of music, foundations, institutes, museums and publications.
The subjects of the lectures have covered historical musicology, music theory and ethnomusicology, along with the ancillary fields of organology, dance, music business and law, cognitive psychology, and the philosophy, theology and sociology of music.
Event Information
Unless otherwise indicated, all Thinking About Music lectures take place on Fridays at 2:30 p.m. in the Baur Room of CCM’s Corbett Center for the Performing Arts, which is located on the campus of the University of Cincinnati.
These events are free and open to the public. All event dates and programs are subject to change. Visit ccm.uc.edu for the most current event information.
Parking and Directions
Parking is available in the CCM Garage (located at the base of Corry Boulevard off Jefferson Avenue) and additional garages throughout the UC campus. Please visit uc.edu/parking for more information on parking rates.
For detailed maps and directions, please visit uc.edu/visitors. Additional parking is available off-campus at the new U Square complex on Calhoun Street and other neighboring lots.
For directions to CCM Village, visit ccm.uc.edu/about/directions.
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2015 SPRING JOSEPH AND FRANCES JONES POETKER THINKING ABOUT MUSIC LECTURE SERIES
Guest speaker Joseph Auner.
2:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 6
THE STOPPED CLOCK: SOME MOMENTS IN TONALITY AND TECHNOLOGY SINCE 1950
Joseph Auner, Tufts University
This talk will focus on the second half of the 20th century and two technologies that have contributed to different ways of working with tonality and tonal materials: namely, voltage controlled modular synthesizers and the tape loop. With reference to a wide range of music, Professor Joseph Auner will argue that the synthesizer and the tape loop, and related technologies like a tape-delay system, facilitated and required a kind of close listening to and manipulation of sound that could open up new perspectives on any acoustic phenomenon, including triads and tonal materials.
Location: Baur Room
Admission: FREE
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Guest speaker Michael Cherlin.
2:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 20
LUIGI NONO’S FRAGMENTE-STILLE, AN DIOTIMA AND THE INEFFABLE
Michael Cherlin, University of Minnesota
The Romantic fragment, in poetry and music, points toward something that is ineffable – the sounds listeners hear point toward those that cannot be realized. Whether it is beyond or still within Romanticism, it is this aesthetic that Michael Cherlin associates with Schoenberg and Webern, most particularly. Nono’s string quartet, a meditation on Diotima, continues that tradition. The lecture will explore the implications of this composition for a poetics of musical interpretation (whose falsifying “scientific” name is analysis).
Location: Baur Room
Admission: FREE
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Guest speaker Annette Richards.
2:30 p.m. Friday, March 6
This talk has been postponed due to weather-related flight delays.
SENSIBILITY TRIUMPHANT: C. P. E. BACH AND THE ART OF FEELING
Dr. Annette Richards, Cornell University
In Goethe’s Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (1777), sensibility, feeling and sympathy are brutally exposed as trivial obsessions with postures and props. Excess, bad taste and poor behaviour are the focus of Goethe’s hilarious critique of the craze unleashed by his own Sorrows of Young Werther. Embodied in this strange and funny text is satire aimed not only at the cult of Empfindsamkeit and at the works of the artist himself, but also at the conspicuous blurring of public and private spheres, the untoward exposure of personal proclivities and private feeling. Given the ubiquitous text-book designation of C. P. E. Bach as the architect of the ‘Empfindsamer Stil’ in music, Dr. Annette Richards takes another look at what ‘Empfindsamkeit’ might mean, especially for Bach’s late keyboard works. Revisiting the broader cultural contexts within which Bach lived and worked, she will map out the contemporary landscape of feeling constructed by critical and literary texts, as well as musical and visual artworks (including portraits in Bach’s collection). She hopes to suggest that some of Bach’s late music, especially the rondos and fantasias, complicate humour with satire and pathos with parody, in a way that presents a complex and disconcerting picture of what it might mean to sympathise, and to feel, musically. In the process, Bach’s own claims about the competing aesthetics of public and private music will be reconsidered.
Location: Baur Room
Admission: FREE
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Guest speaker Loren Schoenberg.
2:30 p.m. Friday, March 13
LESTER YOUNG: NEW DISCOVERIES
Loren Schoenberg, Artistic Director, The National Jazz Museum in Harlem
As an American jazz tenor saxophonist and a member of Count Basie’s orchestra, Lester Young was one of the young genre’s most influential forces. In the last few years, a significant amount of previously unheard recordings have shed new light on his innovations. As Loren Schoenberg will attest, every surviving sound recorded by Young is vital, since there are no documents that capture the qualities that his peers remember most vividly.
Location: Baur Room
Admission: FREE
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Guest speaker Ellen Koskoff.
2:30 p.m. Friday, April 17
IS ETHNOMUSICOLOGY INHERENTLY FEMINIST?
Dr. Ellen Koskoff, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
Dr. Ellen Koskoff will present excerpts from her recent book, A Feminist Ethnomusicology. In the process, she will raise several important questions. What, if anything, is feminist about ethnomusicology? What do fieldwork, ethnography and music contribute to the process of dismantling hierarchies of power based on gender? Furthermore, what does feminism contribute to a deeper understanding of social and musical difference? These questions will set the stage for a lively discussion.
Location: Baur Room
Admission: FREE
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CCM Season Presenting Sponsor and Musical Theatre Program Sponsor: The Otto M. Budig Family Foundation
Community Partner: ArtsWave
CCM’s Thinking About Music Series is sponsored by the Joseph and Frances Jones Poetker Fund of the Cambridge Charitable Foundation, Ritter & Randolph, LLC, Corporate Counsel; along with support from Dean Landgren’s Office, the Graduate Student Association, and the Division of Composition, Musicology and Theory at CCM.
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