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 Indiana University Jacobs School of Music Professor Blair Johnston on Friday, Jan. 29.
CCM’s Spring 2016 ‘Thinking About Music’ Schedule.
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 California at Los Angeles Professor Daniel Neuman (Feb. 26), Yale University Professor Brian Kane (March 11), Cornell University Professor Annette Richards (April 1) and Tufts University Professor Emerita Janet Schmalfeldt (April 15). 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 nearly 130 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.
____________________
2016 SPRING JOSEPH AND FRANCES JONES POETKER THINKING ABOUT MUSIC LECTURE SERIES
2:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 29
ORCHESTRATIONAL SCENARIOS IN THE MUSIC OF SIBELIUS
Blair Johnston, Indiana University
Orchestration—and, with it, the roles that timbre plays in musical rhetoric, expressive trajectories, and the choices made by performers—deserves more attention from scholars than it has received. In an ongoing project, Blair Johnston is examining the rich ways that orchestrational choices in post-Romantic symphonic works interact with the “structures” described by more conventional music analysis, an area that features music-theoretic vocabularies that do not always allow for easy discussion of certain dimensions of sound—in broad terms, its shapes, its colors, its densities—that are especially essential in music from this era. This talk will explore this through the use of late symphonic works by Sibelius (excerpts from the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies and Tapiola), music in which complex approaches to musical form and material are fused to a highly individual orchestrational language—indeed, music in which there may be almost no line between form, material and timbre.
Location: Baur Room
____
2:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 26
MUSIC INHERITANCE AND HEREDITARY MUSICIANS: INDIA TODAY, THE WEST IN THE PAST
Daniel Neuman, University of California at Los Angeles
In this talk, Daniel Neuman considers the role of hereditary musicians in India in the recent past as well as today, as they become increasingly rare in the Hindustani classical music world. Some comparative gestures to Western classical music (and in particular J.S. Bach) highlight the important roles that genealogy, pedigree and biography play as different kinds of authentication markers and historical sources in each classical music practice.
Location: Baur Room
____
Brian Kane’s March 11 lecture has been canceled. Stay tuned for information on his rescheduled presentation.
2:30 p.m. Friday, March 11
HEARING DOUBLE: JAZZ AND ONTOLOGY
Brian Kane, Yale University
Philosophers have often considered the ontology of music, worrying over the relation between works, scores and performances. Yet, surprisingly, jazz has not received the same consideration, even though jazz—where performances of works such as “standards” vary widely in their properties—represents an even more challenging ontological problem than found in classical music. In this talk, Brian Kane will argue for a non-essentialist, network-based ontology of jazz standards. This argument will depend on two basic operations—chains of replication and chains of nomination—that together provide a robust basis for judgments concerning a performance’s identity and individuation. Also, just as jazz is an exemplification of a network-based ontology of music, Kane will try to draw out some wider implications for the ontology of music more generally.
Location: Baur Room
____
2:30 p.m. Friday, April 1
SENSIBILITY TRIUMPHANT: C. P. E. BACH AND THE ART OF FEELING
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 behavior 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 textbook 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 the composer’s late keyboard works. By examining this music (along with then-contemporary views on humor, satire and other cultural elements), the audience may have to reconsider Bach’s own claims about the competing aesthetics of public and private music.
Location: Baur Room
____
2:30 p.m. Friday, April 15
DOMENICO SCARLATTI, ESCAPE ARTIST: SIGHTINGS OF HIS “MIXED STYLE” TOWARDS THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Janet Schmalfeldt, Tufts University Professor Emerita/Boston University Visiting Professor
Location: Baur Room
____________________
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.
CCM VILLAGE NEWS ARCHIVES 