Spring 2008 Colloquia

The Music Department Colloquium is free and open to the public, and convenes on select Fridays from 3:30pm to 5pm in Old Cabell Hall Room 107, unless otherwise noted. Invited speakers have represented a broad range of backgrounds and interests; recently, we have enjoyed visits by Ann Cooper Albright, Milton Babbitt, Scott Burnham, Mark Butler, Suzanne Cusick, Walter Frisch, Kyle Gann, John Gibson, Katherine Hagedorn, Berthold Hoeckner, Melissa Hui, Elisabeth Le Guin, Susan McClary, Louise Meintjes, Roger Parker, Lara Pellegrinelli, Douglas Irving Repetto, Deidre Sklar, Robynn Stilwell, Troika Ranch (a digital dance theater company), Dan Trueman, Gayle Wald, Kendall Walton, James Webster, and Deborah Wong, among many others. Please see below for the colloquium guests that have been scheduled for the current academic semester.

Dates and guests are subject to change, so please check back to this page for any subsequent updates to the colloquium schedule.

February 1st - Fred Frith and Evelyn Glennie

"Lore of Moments" - Joint Colloquium on Improvisation (Arts Board)

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Tuesday, February 5th, 10:30am - Fred Frith

Composing Fast and Improvising Slowly - What's the Difference Between a Duck?

Newcomb Hall, Kaleidoscope Room
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February 8th - Ben Broening

Odd Angles/Intersecting Lines: Interactions of Pitch, TImbre, TIme and Perceived Space

Benjamin Broening is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. His numerous commissions include works for the Charlotte Symphony, the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, the Band and Orchestral Division of Yamaha Corporation of America, the Arts Now Series at North Carolina State University and the James River Singers, among many others. A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Estonia, Broening has also received recognition and awards from the American Composers Forum, Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Presser Music Foundation. His music has been recorded on the Centaur, everglade, Equilibrium, MIT Press and SEAMUS labels. Broening is founder and artistic director of Third Practice, an annual festival of electroacoustic music at the University of Richmond, where he is Associate Professor of music. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Cambridge University, Yale University and Wesleyan University.

Colloquium Abstract
Our experience of viewing sculpture from different angles or seeing colors in a range of contexts tells us that these stimuli becomes richer and more engaging as we view them from different perspectives. This notion is the motivating factor behind a series of my recent works for instruments and electroacoustic sounds: as a composer I am interested in looking at a few small things from different vantage points. Broening will talk about interactions of pitch, timbre, time and a sense of space in his work and how distinctions between these musical parameters collapse when viewed from different vantage points in two recent pieces (like dreams... for sextet with electroacoustic sounds and Dark Wood , for cello and electroacoustic sounds).

February 15th - Brad Garton

"Process Improvisation"

Brad Garton (b. 1957) is currently on the Music Faculty of Columbia University, where he serves as Director of the Computer Music Center (formerly the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center). He originally studied engineering/biology at Purdue University, ultimately receiving a BS in Pharmacology. At the same time, he co-founded (with Richard K. Thomas) Zounds Productions, a multi-track recording facility specializing in sound design work for live theater. He entered the graduate program in Speech and Hearing Science at Purdue, doing psychoacoustic research under the supervision of Edward Burns and Larry Feth.

Soon his professional sound activities became time-consuming (and lucrative!) enough that he left graduate school, picking up a grant from the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns to work with local governments in developing noise control programs. After several years, Garton decided to "get serious" about his music again, and entered the graduate program in music composition at Princeton University. He received his PhD. from Princeton in 1989, studying primarily with Paul Lansky and Jim Randall. His dissertation was the development of a natural language/learning system for doing loosely-described signal processing tasks, along with a series of compositions realized using the system.

He has assisted in the establishment and development of a number of computer music studios throughout the world, and is an active contributor to the greater community of computer musicians/researchers, formerly serving on the Board of Directors of the International Computer Music Association as editor (with Robert Rowe) of the ICMA newsletter and artistic director/co-organizer of several high-profile festivals and conferences of new computer music.

His current work includes focused research on the modeling and enhancement of acoustic spaces as well as the modeling of human musical performance on various virtual "instruments". He is also the primary developer (with Dave Topper) of RTcmix, a real-time music synthesis/signal-processing language. His most recent work includes writing "Looching" apps: jlooch (JSyn) and mlooch (Max/MSP). The point of all this work is to continue to make fun new pieces of music, which he does every day.

Colloquim Abstract
In this talk Garton will discuss his work with algorithmic compositional processes, from the ancient days of clunky old non-real-time computers to the use of fast contemporary machines in improvisational contexts. He will be touching on the use of computer and music programming languages such as LISP and RTcmix in both real-time and non-real-time contexts, especially as they relate to the development of different kinds of presentation interfaces and my recent work with the mandolin + 2 laptop ensemble "PGT".

February 22nd - Steven Friedson

"Crossroads to Cross-rhythms: Being-in-the-World in a Musical Way"

Steven Friedson has been professor of music and professor of anthropology at the University of North Texas since 1989. He received his bachelor's degree from Cornish Institute of the Arts and his doctorate from University of Washington. Friedson's research interests include music of Africa, music and healing, phenomenology and rhythmic theory. He received a Fulbright research fellowship to Malawi in 1987-88 and published his research results in the book, "Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing", with the University of Chicago Press in 1996. He will be discussing his recent field research on Brekete relligious practice in Ghana, for his book currently in press with University of Chicago Press entitled , Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land. A Study in Ontomusicology.

March 14th - Alison Knowles

Undermining Spectacle Culture

Fluxus artist Alison Knowles will speak on major works such as Big Book, Identical Lunch and House of Dust, present images of a new piece called Shore Line, and demonstrate a collection of new instruments to be used in the performance of Onion Skin Song.

Bio and additional information available at www.aknowles.com

March 28th, 5:00pm, Campbell Hall, Room 158 Architecture School - Bill Fontana

Acoustic Simultaneity and the Sculpture of Sound

Pioneering Sound Artist to Speak at U.Va. School of Architecture

Bill Fontana, pioneer of sound art for more than 30 years, will give a Dean's Forum Lecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Co-sponsored by the McIntire Department of Music, the lecture, "Acoustic Simultaneity and the Sculpture of Sound," will be given Friday, March 28 at 5 p.m. in Campbell Hall, room 158.

Fontana creates "sound sculptures" based on the ambient noise of various environments with the intention of triggering visual imagery in the mind of the listener. He has presented his sound sculptures extensively, including at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1991), the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (1995), the Venice Biennale (1999), and Tate Modern in London, where he presented "Harmonic Bridge" in 2006. His work is also held in permanent collections at major museums around the world, has been published on CDs, and has been reviewed internationally.

Recent work features experiments with live listening networks, on land, underground and underwater, with a particular interest in capturing vibrations from seismic waves. His lecture at U.Va. will explore the delineation of space through sound, among other topics.

Samples of Bill Fontana's sound sculptures his works are available for listening on the artist's Web site: www.resoundings.org.

On Friday and Saturday, April 11 and 12, the Department of Music will host three visitors for a symposium and workshops on "Music, Art, and Embodiment." The presenters include two music theorists, Roger Graybill and Alexandra Pierce (assisted by Roger Pierce), and a philosopher, Richard Shusterman. All three have been important advocates of conscious, careful consideration of movement and embodiment in relation to music, the arts, and many other aspects of life. See Cbelow for brief biographies of the visitors.

The events are sponsored by the McIntire Department of Music, with co-sponsorship from the Comparative Literature Program and the Department of Drama.

April 11th, 3:00pm - Alexandra Pierce, Richard Shusterman, and Roger Graybill

Symposium on Art, Music, & Embodiment

3:00-4:30

Presentations by Roger Graybill, Alexandra Pierce with Roger Pierce, and Richard Shusterman

4:30-4:40

Break

4:40-5:30

Discussion

Roger Graybill is Chair of the Theory Department at New England Conservatory, where he has been on the faculty since 2000. Prior to his arrival at NEC, he served on the theory faculty at the University of Texas at Austin (1984-2000). His research has focused on rhythm and gesture, the music of Brahms, and theory pedagogy, and he has co-authored (with Stefan Kostka) the Anthology of Music for Analysis (Prentice-Hall). A member of the Executive Board of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) between 1998 and 2001, he also served as chair of the program committee for the national joint AMS/SMT meeting in 1997. In addition to his work as a theorist, Graybill has extensive experience as a church organist.

Alexandra Pierce, Ph.D., is a pianist, composer, music theorist, movement educator, Professor of Music and Movement, and presently Emerita Research Professor at the University of Redlands, California. In addition to the recent book Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation (Indiana University Press, 2007), she has co-authored two books on enhancing human movement in daily life, sports, and the performing arts. She is a member of Moving Voices, an ensemble that performs poetry with movement and music. In her presentation and workshop at UVa, she will be assisted by Roger Pierce, Ph.D., writer, Rolfer, and movement teacher (formerly taught theater at Stanford University, and UC, Riverside).

Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities. Educated at Jerusalem and Oxford, he was chair of the Temple University Philosophy Department before coming to FAU in 2005. He has held academic appointments in Paris, Berlin, and Hiroshima and was awarded senior research Fulbright, NEH, and Humboldt fellowships. His widely translated research covers many topics in the human and social sciences with particular emphasis on questions of philosophy, aesthetics, culture, language, identity, and embodiment. Authored books include T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (Columbia), Practicing Philosophy (Routledge), Performing Live (Cornell), Surface and Depth (Cornell), Pragmatist Aesthetics (Blackwell, 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield, and translated into 12 languages), and most recently Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge). His non-technical essays have been published in the Nation and the Chronicle of Higher Education and in various art reviews and catalogues. A certified Feldenkrais practitioner, he directs the FAU Center for Body, Mind, and Culture (www.fau.edu/bodymindculture).

Saturday April 12th, 9:30-4:00 - Alexandra Pierce, Richard Shusterman, and Roger Graybill

Workshop with symposium speakers.

Workshops are free and open to the public. However, each is limited to 25 participants. In order to attend, you need to register in advance. We hope that everyone who wishes to attend will be able to do so. However, if workshops fill, we will need to create a waiting list.

To register for workshops, please send an email message to fmaus@virginia.edu. In the message, state which workshops you wish to attend (give order of preference if appropriate); if you are associated with one of the co-sponsors (Music, Comp Lit, Drama), please mention this in your message. You will hear back confirming your registration (or, if necessary, placing you on a waitlist) around Tuesday, April 8.

9:30-11:00

AM Alexandra Pierce with Roger Pierce

11:30 AM-1:00 PM

Richard Shusterman

1:00-2:30

Lunch break

2:30-4:00 PM

Roger Graybill

The Colloquium schedule is subject to change. All changes and additions will be announced as soon as they have been made.

All lectures are held in room 107, Old Cabell Hall at 3:30pm to 5:00pm unless otherwise noted, and are free and open to the public.