Late breaking information

MUSICOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

19/12/2019

Historicizing hype: 1995-present

Colloquium Musicology
Christopher Haworth, University of Birmingham

Thursday 23 January 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Popular music is often understood to have a special purchase on hype as a promotional and communicative strategy. As a Sunday Times article from 1968 put it, hype is ‘an American word for the gentle art of getting a tune into the pop charts without actually selling any records’ (quoted in Powers, 2011). The increasingly centrality of the internet over the last twenty years has if anything intensified the relationship between popular music and hype. Recommender services like ‘hype machine’ hard-code the ‘positive feedback loop’ (Ibid) of hype into their systems, as the music people discuss on music blogs and Twitter is crawled through and served back to consumers, fuelling further discourse on social media which in turn fuels algorithms. On the side of production, recent ‘net native’ microgenres like vaporwave, seapunk and witch house use the affordances of the internet to exaggerate hype-like qualities of simulacra and speculation. By invoking vapourware, the term used for software that is promoted without going into production, vaporwave drew implicit links between the anti-innovative excesses of predatory capitalism and the pre-emptive hype characteristic of the music press. Vaporwave was a term before it was a genre, and the genre was ‘dead’ as soon as it was formed.

The challenges of analysing hype are multiple. How does one historicise phenomena whose constituent parts are excess, whether all or in part? What approaches are appropriate to the analysis of phenomena whose dimensions—material, textual, discursive—may be in contradiction? How do internet technologies amplify and multiply the capacities for hype-generation in relation to music? This talk will analyse a group of musicians, critics, theorists, and philosophers whose collective influence on contemporary internet culture is great, even if the work they produced is little understood: the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), active from 1995-03. Cultivating, spreading, and theorising hype were central features of CCRU activity. The group spread misinformation about their formation and existence, as though deliberately obscuring their tracks for later historians. They participated in the propagation and ‘spreading of hype’ related to contemporary technoculture — most notably with Y2K, the computer bug that threatened to bring down the world economy. Hype was also central to the theoretical and practical work of the CCRU. They theorised hype, first, through the cybernetic concept of positive feedback (‘cyberpositivity’), which was the material driver of what would later (retroactively) be termed ‘accelerationism’; and second, through the concept of ‘hyperstition’—fictions which make themselves real—which informed the group’s writing in theory-fiction. Central to much of this play with authenticity, at least in the later years, was the internet. Using www.ccru.net as an informal base for they operations following their departure from Warwick University, they experimented with its capacities for inauthenticity, ahistoricism, and mythos in ways that directly anticipate the strategies of simulacral-genres like vaporwave.

Yet despite the clear centrality of hype to the CCRU’s work at the time, its pertinence is most striking in the present day, as a new generation of musicians and web-users rediscover the group and in the process amplify and expand the fictive universe they created. Was the hype self-fulfilling, or do media experiences of the present create new conditions for the CCRU's reception?

Christopher Haworth is Lecturer in Music at University of Birmingham. He is currently the PI on the AHRC funded Leadership Fellowship (2019-21) Music and the Internet: Towards a Digital Sociology of Music. In 2018 his article 'From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-mediated musics, online methods and genre' was awarded the Westrup Prize for the best article published annually in the journal, Music and Letters. 

05/12/2019

Making Sundanese music local again: Galengan Sora Awi

Colloquium Musicology
Henry Spiller, UC Davis

Thursday 12 December 2019 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Since the fall in 1998 of Indonesia’s authoritarian regime headed by President Soeharto, and the beginning of the era of reformasi, residents of Bandung—the capital city of the province of West Java and the cultural center of Sundanese traditions—have experimented with ways to affirm their regional Sundanese identity. Musicians in particular have looked to musical instruments made of bamboo to bring a sense of place and Sundanese-ness to their musical expressions.

This presentation introduces one such bamboo musical group—Galengan Sora Awi (hereafter GSA)—and examines how the group expresses a bottom-up approach to reconnecting to a Sundanese identity that is rooted firmly in a unique place—Bandung’s Dago neighborhood on the Cikapundung river. They achieve this connection by performing an eclectic repertory of Sundanese styles and genres, deploying idiosyncratic, homemade bamboo musical instruments, for audiences and events that are associated closely with Bandung’s physical environment and nascent grassroots environmental movement. I mobilize Bernard Stiegler’s notions of primary, secondary, and tertiary retention (Technics and Time, 1998) to examine how GSA’s bamboo musical instruments help them achieve their goals.

GSA’s musical activities fit well with the post-modern “do-it-yourself” (DIY) principles that drive alternative music scenes all over the world and are also associated with environmental and social reform movements. For GSA, however, it is the revival of a very old technology— bamboo—that enables them to perform a variety of musical genres once limited to specialists. For GSA, the path to renewing and reviving their connections to human groups and to the landscapes that nurtured them, even in contemporary Bandung, is paved with bamboo.

Henry Spiller (BA, UC Santa Cruz; MM, Holy Names University; MA and PhD, UC Berkeley) is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on Sundanese music and dance from West Java, Indonesia, on gender and sexuality. His award-winning books include Gamelan: The Traditional Sounds of Indonesia (ABC-CLIO, 2004), Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java (Chicago, 2010), and Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance (Hawaii, 2015). At UC Davis, he teaches world music classes and graduate seminars, and directs the Department of Music's gamelan ensemble. Currently he is a fellow at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences) in Amsterdam.

07/11/2019

How to open a musical composition?

Colloquium Musicology
Em. prof. dr. Rokus de Groot, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Thursday 21 November 2019 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01


Performers-cum-improvisers and composers have to deal with the task to conduct the listeners – as well as themselves – from non-musical time to time ordered by music.

Among the ways to open a piece of music two approaches stand out, which are each other’s opposite: ex nihilo and in mediis rebus

With the approach of in mediis rebus one is thrown into musical time ‘unawares’. In fact, since one finds oneself in mediis rebus, one may feel inclined to assume that the music has been going on already for some time, and only now is sounded and becomes audible.

A quite different approach to open a composition is the one ex nihilo. We should add that this ‘nihil’ is relative, it is a playful one, listeners have been accustomed to pretend to themselves that they are open to what comes, while actually quite some previous knowledge is required to enter into this process of opening. While the in mediis rebus entry is abrupt, the alleged ex nihilo one is gradual and gentle.

In this presentation examples of both approaches from European and Indian sources will be discussed.

26/09/2019

The Evolution of Dance: How and when do new genres emerge in electronic dance music?

Colloquium Musicology
Alex van Venrooij, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Thursday 17 October 2019 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

In the thirty years since house music first emerged from the club scene of Chicago, this cultural form has transformed from a local subculture into a global field and in the process spawned a large number of new subgenres. How do these new subgenres develop? What is the process by which they emerge and are formed? And does the emergence of new genres perhaps show some underlying pattern? In this presentation, I will present some key findings from my research on the evolution of the electronic dance music field and provide a sociological analysis of the process of genre emergence.


Alex van Venrooij is assistant professor in cultural sociology at the department of sociology at the University of Amsterdam. His work has focused on the emergence, dynamics and effects of classification systems, such as genre categories, in cultural fields.

19/09/2019

Steelband music and decolonial love

Colloquium Musicology
Charissa Granger, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Thursday 3 October 2019 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01


Discarded 55-gallon oil barrels were used for music-making in 1930s colonial Trinidad and Tobago – a period deeply shaped by discrimination of these performers. Often standing at the beginning of personal and political consciousness, music empowered participants, giving a sense of self-regard and -respect by mixing and transforming materials and musical structures, forming symphonic steelorchestras.

Many music-making practices throughout the Caribbean are tightly connected to discourses of resistance. Such attempts to understand music always depart from a conception of music in response to hegemony, marginalization, and colonial oppression. In this colloquium, Charissa Granger wants to delink from exclusively understanding music as resistance and to create alternatives that reflect a border practice (Mignolo & Tlostanova 2006) that embraces a love-ethic (hooks 2000; 2001) that is not solely in response to the colonial matrix of power, but moves beyond it through performance and music. She seeks to analyze musical performance as the epistemology of the exteriority. Such an exploration engages with self-knowledge, self-determination, self-critique and self-possession and how this takes place in the communion generated by performing together. Granger examines steelpan music and performance as a decolonial epistemology, asking:

What would an understanding of coloniality, decoloniality and border thinking contribute to understanding steelband music and performance? How can we take into account non-textual forms of knowledge, generated by marginalized people, in the distribution of intellectual and political labor?

Considering steelband as a decolonial practice and thereby examining the epistemology of the exterior necessarily entails understanding the creation of strategies in music not to simply respond to the colonial matrix of power, but to disengage from it, particularly through recomposing/arranging music.

Charissa Granger is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoc LEaDing Fellow at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. Charissa’s research foci are on how Caribbean and Afro-diaspora music-making practices generate knowledge, concentrating on music’s relationship to postcolonial and decolonial experiences.

12/09/2019

Ethnomusicology and arts-based research: a case study by Horacio Curti

Colloquium Musicology
Horacio Curti, Catalonia College of Music in Barcelona


Thursday 12 September 2019 15:30-17:00 uur 
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

This presentation is centered on a currently ongoing research that combines ethnomusicology and arts-based research. It originates from the author’s own experience as professional shakuhachi player educated in Japan. The methodology is based on literature review of sources related to diverse Japanese Arts, fieldwork processes centered on interviews and a trans-disciplinary arts-based research process.

The findings of the ethnomusicological research that are going to be presented provide theoretical depth to the re-contextualized, practice-based research. These will include issues related to the characteristics of sound that are cultivated and valued inside the Japanese hōgaku,邦楽, identifying a series of significant concepts that include: maneirosawarior yūgen among many others. 

Beyond these significant elements the concept of ‘obstacle’ is proposed as a construct that could help to develop an understanding of sound production processes favored and at the same time the label of ‘un-pure’ is proposed to describe the general characteristics of it.

Finally, from the framework of arts-based research, the artistic creation processes in progress and their problematics will be discussed.

06/06/2019

Classical Music as a Site of Political Emotions

Colloquium Musicology
Olga Panteleeva, Universiteit Utrecht

Thursday 13 June 2019, 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

In this talk, Olga Panteleeva analyses the highly emotional discussions about the genre of Regieoper – a revisionist approach to operatic staging associated in Russia with Western European music culture. As a part of her research project about online classical music fandom in contemporary Russia, she positions these discussions in the long tradition of morality politics that presents Russia as culturally and morally superior to the West. Classical music has been a trump card for Russia in the power struggle with the “bourgeois West” since the 1930s. Appropriation of Western European masterpieces for the Soviet artistic canon during that time further contributed to the idea that Russia is heir and guardian to the great Western European culture. Locating contemporary discourses within the long tradition of equating aesthetic with ethics, this project demonstrates how the “cultural heritage” became paramount in constructing the discourses of national superiority in Putin’s Russia.
Arguing, after Sara Ahmed, against the psychologizing understanding of emotions as something that belongs exclusively to the private sphere, Olga Panteleeva interrogates the ways in which the politics of emotion in Russia creates the Other and solidifies a sense of national identity perceived to be under threat from the West. While this theoretical perspective aligns with a recent trend in political science to analyze the current anti-Western attitudes in Russia through the lens of Nietzschean ressentiment and feelings of resentment, this is the first research project that brings theory of emotions to bear on the contemporary politics of music in Russia.

Olga Panteleeva is a Lecturer in Musicology at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. She received her Ph.D. in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley. Engaging with different periods of Russian and Soviet music culture, her research focuses on the relationship between music and power, the intersections between musical and scientific discourses, and contemporary politics of classical music. In 2017-2018 she was a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University as a part of a cohort working on the topic titled "The Culture and Politics of Resentment." She is currently working on a monograph, "The Making of Soviet Musicology," to be published by Indiana University Press. As a music critic Olga Panteleeva wrote for the Russian business daily Vedomosti and the independent online magazine Colta.ru.

23/05/2019

The Laws of Performance

Colloquium Musicology
Rebekah Ahrendt, Universiteit Utrecht

Thursday 6 June 2019, 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

This colloquium is a preview of a new project Rebekah Arendt is developing, “The Laws of Performance.” This project builds on prior research she carried out on performance, migration, and international relations. Concentrating on the long eighteenth century, she explore the historical labor migration of a specific group--musical performers—in order to begin to answer questions about the free movement of labor (including enforcement of foreign contracts), the construction of citizenship, and the (moral) principles of public policy.
Her primary thesis is that a shared European legal foundation—the ius commune based on Roman and canon law—enabled performer mobility and the establishment of durable performing institutions. The transposibility of legal norms provided a common understanding of entitlements and obligations across Continental Europe, shaping the foundation of opera companies, theater troupes, and orchestral ensembles. However, local ordinances and case law overlaying the ius commune could create confusion or frustration for mobile populations that, like performing troupes, depended on the good will of local authorities. Moreover, performers faced moral objections due to social mores regarding their profession and to the fact that they often maintained no permanent residence (unlike merchants, for example).
To date, performance studies writ large has primarily considered law in terms of intellectual property rights or institutional organization, or as evidence for who was employed where, how, and at what time, particularly in studies of the early modern period. Ahrendt proposes reading legal documents from a different angle: for what they can tell us about the gradual, historical integration of performers and their ensembles into the urban landscape. In this, I respond to recent calls for recognizing law and the legal as cultural constructions, as dependent upon and constructive of place as any other aspect of cultural geography. I intend not merely to show that law partakes of culture or that culture refracts law, but to demonstrate that they are mutually constitutive. For example, legal agreements helped constitute the urban opera house, its inhabitants, and even its repertoire. Only through these agreements could the opera house become a site of performance and a feature of urban geography. In other words, it was through legal documents—themselves negotiated through acts of performance—that opera became a legitimized space. And opera in turn helped shape law: it caused cities to rethink urban planning projects, to regulate performance spaces, to legislate the identities of (foreign) performers in relationship to natural citizens, to reform tax laws to accommodate mobile populations and sporadic performance.
Ahrendt’s colloquium will focus on the establishment of opera in the Dutch Republic. How an opera house ended up on the early modern map of The Hague (and not of Amsterdam!) is a tale of urban renewal and spatial reorganization in line with many such accounts of opera’s participation in civic life. But it is also a story of how opera and law interacted, of how savvy entrepreneurs worked within (and on the margins of) a legal system. Drawing on an extraordinarily long paper trail created by an opera company around 1700, she examines the unique governmental and juridical structures of The Hague and their interaction with the institution of opera. From obtaining permission and funding to hiring a theater and performers, the company’s participation in the town’s legal geographies transformed what was essentially outsider space into a signifier of prestige, a provider of social welfare, and a successfully redeveloped theatrical center.

Rebekah Ahrendt is Associate Professor of Musicology in the Department of Media and Culture Studies. Prior to joining Utrecht’s faculty, she was Assistant Professor in the Yale University Department of Music and a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. A specialist in music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ahrendt’s work centers on the importance of mobility—whether through migration, exchange, or long-distance actor networks—in the construction of identity. Her current monograph project illuminates the musical networks maintained by the refugees, exiles, and migrants who traversed the landscape of the Dutch Republic. Much of her recent scholarship has focused on music and international relations, including the co-edited book Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Ahrendt is also a co-director of the international research project Signed, Sealed, & Undelivered, which has garnered worldwide media attention since its formal launch in November 2015. A graduate of the Royal Conservatory, The Hague, Ahrendt continues to perform and record on the viola da gamba.


09/05/2019

[ Cancelled ] The Evolution of Dance: How and when do new genres emerge in electronic dance music?

Colloquium Musicology
Alex van Venrooij, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Thursday 23 May 2019, 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

In the thirty years since house music first emerged from the club scene of Chicago, this cultural form has transformed from a local subculture into a global field and in the process spawned a large number of new subgenres. How do these new subgenres develop? What is the process by which they emerge and are formed? And does the emergence of new genres perhaps show some underlying pattern? In this presentation, I will present some key findings from my research on the evolution of the electronic dance music field and provide a sociological analysis of the process of genre emergence.

Alex van Venrooij is assistant professor in cultural sociology at the department of sociology at the University of Amsterdam. His work has focused on the emergence, dynamics and effects of classification systems, such as genre categories, in cultural fields.

07/03/2019

"When" in Musical Rhythm: Is Beat Perception Special?

Colloquium Musicology
Fleur Bouwer, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Thursday 21 March 2019, 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01


A packed Museum-square collectively swaying to the music of André Rieu. Going crazy on Lowlands festival. Kids singing a song together. As humans, we seem to all be capable of moving and synchronising to a musical beat. But is it indeed so easy to hear a beat in musical rhythm? How does the brain allow us to perceive a beat in sound and to predict when the next tone will be heard in a musical rhythm? In this talk, cognitive musicologist Fleur Bouwer will address these questions. Moreover, she will present data from her recent experiment in which she aimed to find out whether the perception of a beat in musical rhythm is "special" or uses general timing processes in the brain.

Fleur Bouwer is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, supervised by Heleen Slagter and Henkjan Honing. Using methods like EEG and fMRI, she examines how predictions shape the perception of music in general and musical rhythm in particular. Fleur obtained her PhD in 2016. She holds both a Master in Psychology (UvA) and a Master of Music (Amsterdam Conservatory). In 2016, Fleur received an ABC Talent grant, enabling her to continue her research combining her fascination for the human brain and her passion for music. In addition, Fleur is an enthusiastic educator, both in teaching courses at the UvA and in bringing the science of music cognition to the public.

07/02/2019

Modelling Melodic Patterns: Findings and Open Questions

Colloquium Musicology
Peter van Kranenburg, Meertens Instituut

Thursday 21 February 2019, 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

From music theory it is widely accepted that music can be modelled hierarchically, score notation being just one level in that hierarchy. For example, for Western tonal music, theories such as the Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM) or Heinrich Schenker's reduction methods are considered to result in valid analyses, revealing higher-level structures encompassing multiple individual notes, or even entire pieces. For the specific musical dimension of melody, no such well-established methodology exists. In this contribution, he will talk about a number of studies in which he uses computational methods to extract melodic patterns from monophonic music, both represented symbolically and as audio recordings. He will report some successes in detecting melodic cadences and relating melodic gestures in Jewish Torah recitation. Next, he will present some open questions, mainly on interpretation and evaluation of the findings of melodic pattern discovery algorithms.

Peter van Kranenburg is a researcher at the Meertens Instituut in Amsterdam. As a musicologist, he is interested in how and why we make and experience music. As a computer scientist, he investigates how we can use computers to support research on music. He is continuously searching to connect humanities and scientific approaches; a very intriguing challenge. Van Kranenburg has developed a method to automatically recognize the personal style of certain classical composers. Moreover, he worked on analyzing melodies that are used to recite the Qur’an, and he developed a way to compute to what extent two melodies are similar.

03/01/2019

Creativity & Innovation: North Bali’s Signature

Colloquium Musicology
Henrice Vonck, University of Amsterdam

Thursday 17 January 2019, 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Last summer, Undiksha University in Singaraja (North Bali) expressed their wish to set up a research centre for an in-depth and long-term study of North Balinese art and culture in cooperation with the Musicology department of the University of Amsterdam. This research will result in an online database, accessible for local and (inter)national interested parties, and researchers, and aims to revitalize the local culture and performing arts.

Recent studies increasingly show that innovation and creativity are the main style characteristics of North Balinese art and culture, compared to the more traditional and standardized South Balinese culture. Besides that, the region North Bali is a highly cultural diverse area, which led to a high sense of artistic competition among artists. In this dynamic whole, around the year 1915 a new and vibrant – and now omnipresent gamelan style – arose, called gong kerbyar. Sadly enough, the particular North Balinese style went out of vogue and has almost disappeared, because of the economic and cultural dominance of southern Bali.

In her colloquium she will shine a new light on the style characteristics of North Balinese art and culture, and then explain how we aim to (re)discover, describe and revitalise this local culture, and bestow it its rightful place in the artistic world.

Henrice Vonck is a musician-researcher and ethnomusicologist, whose dissertation Manis and Keras (1997) about gender wayang in Tejakula (North Bali) remains one of the few musicological studies of North Balinese music. Since 1987 Henrice is artistic leader of Irama Foundation, which has a longstanding history of concerts, theatre productions and summer schools with renown Balinese artists, like dalang Wayan Wija, dancers I Wayan Catra and I Wayan Dibia, composer I Made Asnawa, and teacher and gamelan maker I Nyoman Sudarna. Vonck was also programme coordinator of the two editions of the International Gamelan Festival Amsterdam (IGFA), in the Tropentheater Amsterdam.

Out of enthusiasm for the enormous diversity of the no longer in vogue North Balinese art and culture, she initiated and organized the International Conference and Festival for North Balinese Arts & Culture in Singaraja (2010, 2013). Following up on the recommendations from the 2013 edition, she is now establishing a Research & Education Centre for North Balinese Arts, in cooperation with Undishka, Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha (Singaraja, North Bali) and the Musicology department of the University of Amsterdam. In her working life Henrice is affiliated as Artistic Research coordinator to the Master of Music of Codarts University for the Arts, Rotterdam. Last but not least she works as a mindfulness trainer at Codarts and the Centrum voor Mindfulness in Amsterdam.