NYU Music Department Colloquium Series, 24 Waverly Place, Room 320, New York, NY (2026)

The NYU GSAS Department of Music Colloquium Series hosts a diverse range of scholars and artists who present their work to our community of musicologists, ethnomusicologists, composers, and sound artists.

04/23/2019

DEBORAH WONG | Professor of Music, UC-Riverside

"Insurgent Genealogies: The Black Woman as Scholar-Subject"

May 2, 2019 | 5:30pm
NYU, 320 Silver Center
http://as.nyu.edu/music.html

ABSTRACT: What genealogies have ethnomusicologists forgotten or never learned? Who do we claim, remember, and cite as part of our disciplinary history? Reclamation politics have been dismissed as impossibly second-wave – too much like salvage work – but I embark unabashedly on a recovery project to revisit the female/queer/minority scholar-subject in ethnomusicology. When African American literary critics rediscovered Zora Neale Hurston and claimed her as a radical Black feminist forebear, folklorists and anthropologists sat up and took notice, but ethnomusicologists didn’t. I trace the White liberal progressive politics of mid-20th-c. ethnomusicology and then reflect on the genealogical practices of our discipline, “shadow feminisms” (Halberstam 2011), and a Black girl magic lurking in our bibliographies. Can we undo the White gender normativity of ethnomusicology? Can I learn how to listen for gendered color in my discipline (Beckenstein 2017)? I take a long look at the work of Eileen Southern to consider Blackness as a parallel lineage to ‘American ethnomusicology’, and what it means to listen to “a quiet revolutionary” (Floyd 1992).

04/14/2019

STEVE WAKSMAN | Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor of American Studies and Professor of Music, Smith College

“New Thing at Newport: Creating an American Festival Culture”

April 18, 2019 | 5:30pm
NYU, 320 Silver Center
http://as.nyu.edu/music.html

ABSTRACT: Upon its founding in 1954, the Newport Jazz Festival set the modern evolution of U.S. music festivals in motion and its founding producer George Wein became the single most significant entrepreneurial figure in the field. That Newport was established as a nonprofit enterprise says much about the motivations that informed it. While British scholar George McKay has stressed the “carnivalesque” elements of music festivals in England during the same era, at Newport any suggestion of the carnivalesque was balanced by a strong impulse toward cultural elevation and legitimation. As such, it typified the ambivalent status that jazz writ large occupied in mid-20th century American culture, teetering between popular music and high art. When enthusiastic dancing broke out during Duke Ellington’s epochal 1956 appearance, George Wein found his vision of aesthetic and cultural order unsettled. When four years later, the 1960 Festival was disrupted by a riot that was motivated primarily by young college students on summer break, Newport had reached a crisis point. Although jazz by 1960 was not commonly viewed as “youth music,” the events at Newport laid the groundwork for festivals to become perhaps the defining medium of the burgeoning youth culture.

03/20/2019

CARA STROUD | Assistant Professor of Music Theory, Michigan State University

"The Web of Meanings in John Corigliano’s Tarantellas"

March 28, 2019 | 5:30pm
NYU, 320 Silver Center
http://as.nyu.edu/music.html

ABSTRACT: The same tarantella refrain is featured in the finale to John Corigliano's Gazebo Dances (1972) and in the second movement to his Symphony No. 1 (1988). How can identical tarantella refrains function both in a witty, virtuosic finale and in the dance movement of a symphony dedicated to the composer's friends lost to AIDS? In this presentation, I incorporate the cultural context of traditional Italian dance as well as Byron Almén's phases of the ironic narrative archetype to explore how the tarantella’s web of meanings enables the composer to work out the two pieces in drastically different ways. Corigliano's two tarantella movements can help us better understand both the tarantella as a topical field in twentieth-century music as well as the opposed comic and tragic phases of Almén's ironic narrative archetype.

03/05/2019

ALISHA L. JONES | Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, Indiana University

“When and Where I Enter”: Marian Anderson, Florence B. Price, and a Womanist Musical Rebuttal of UnSisterly White Women’s Movements

March 14, 2019 | 5:30pm
NYU, 320 Silver Center
http://as.nyu.edu/music/events/2018-2019.html

Address

24 Waverly Place, Room 320
New York, NY
10003

Opening Hours

5pm - 7:30pm

Telephone

(212)9988300

Website

http://music.as.nyu.edu/page/home

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NYU Music Department Colloquium Series