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MUSICOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

20/05/2020

"Orpheus, or philosophy": early opera and early modern science

Online Colloquium Musicology
Nicholas Till 

Monday 8 June 16:00 via Zoom 
Want to join? E-mail s.muziekwetenschap@uva.nl for the Zoom-link.


In the third act of Striggio's and Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), Orfeo seizes the boat of Charon, the ferryman of the dead, and propels himself across the river Styx. As he does so a chorus of Infernal Spirits extols Orfeo's courage in penetrating the underworld, comparing it to the navigational feats of Jason and the Argonauts, Daedalus’s mechanical conquest of flight, and Phaeton's seizing of the chariot of the sun. Although such exploits were commonly deployed in classical and medieval times as warnings against curiosity, hubris or political overreaching, by the early modern period Jason and Daedalus/Icarus were more commonly being adduced to represent the navigational and scientific achievements of the era. Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci were regularly represented as Jason by poets, painters and theatre-makers, and in turn all of these explorers navigational and intellectual, mythological or historical, came to stand for Galileo (e.g. Kepler’s reference to Galileo as “the Florentine Argonaut”). Furthermore, although historians have often noted the co-incidence of early modern science and early modern opera, the sheer extent of the relationship has not been adequately documented. Galileo himself was not present at the performance of the first surviving opera, Euridice, in Florence in 1600, but Nicholas Till demonstrates that the event brought together a remarkable constellation of Galileans amongst both its creators and the audience.  
In this colloquium, Till wants to explicate these relations in detail and wants to attempt a hypothesis as to what lays behind these relations in terms of social, cultural and intellectual synergies, examining the function of science and experiment in early absolutist courts, the epistemological presuppositions of early science and early opera, and Claudio Monteverdi’s own scientific interests.
The title of the talk is taken from an essay by Francis Bacon in his De Sapienta veterum of 1609, his reading of the Greek myths as allegories of science, an Italian translation of which was published in 1618 and dedicated to Galileo’s employer Cosimo III de’ Medici. In this essay Bacon proposes that Orpheus’s descent into the realm of the dead should be read as an allegory of the scientist’s “noblest work of all, nothing less than the restitution and renovation of things corruptible”. In place of the esoteric/occult Orpheus of the Renaissance, Till will propose an understanding of Orphic opera as an artform well aware of the new scientific paradigm that constituted the modern age, and of its own modernity.
Nicholas Till is Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at the University of Sussex, and Pierre Audi Chair at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include Mozart and the Enlightenment (1992) and The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies (2012), in addition to numerous articles and book chapters involving historical, theoretical and critical studies of opera and music theatre. His current research includes projects on early opera and modernity, cultural representations of nomadism and nation, and a history of one of London’s oldest working-class music halls.



02/04/2020

Musical and pedagogical changes in dutar ensembles in Uzbekistan and beyond

Online Colloquium Musicology
Tanya Merchant (UCSC)

20 May 2020 17:00 via Zoom 
Want to join? E-mail s.muziekwetenschap@uva.nl for the Zoom-link.

Dutar ensembles, groups of musicians (usually women) playing the two stringed lute with the purpose of preparing and performing concerts, have been a hallmark of Uzbek music since the mid-20th Century. Considering these ensemble’s trajectory through the Soviet period and independence era and their transmission abroad to the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere, the ensemble’s repertoire and technique have remained somewhat stable. However, the rhetoric surrounding the ensembles has changed significantly, from uplifting folk music to propagandizing the nation, to engaging in broader discourses of world music and its role in university systems. The dutar ensemble is common throughout musical institutions in Uzbekistan from elementary schools through higher education. This talk will consider the ensembles’ pedagogical goals and techniques, as well as the stakes of concertizing non-concert-oriented music, the contrasts between ensembles that employ reconstructed dutars and those that use dutars labeled as traditional in Uzbekistan, and the dutar ensemble’s place in the pantheon of world music ensembles in the United States. It explores how tropes of national pride and tradition translate through changing settings and contexts.

Tanya Merchant, Associate Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests include music’s intersection with issues of nationalism, gender, identity, and the post-colonial situation. With a geographical focus on Central Asia, the former Soviet Union, and the Balkans, she has conducted fieldwork in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Russia, the United States, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is an avid performer on the Central Asian dutar and has given concerts in the U.S. and Uzbekistan. Her book, Women Musicians of Uzbekistan: From Courtyard to Conservatory, was published in 2015 by the University of Illinois Press.


27/02/2020

Preservation as performance: liveness, loss and viability in electroacoustic music

Colloquium Musicology
Hannah Bosma, University of Amsterdam

Thursday 12 March 15:30-17:00

Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

It is very difficult to preserve experimental electronic music and to re-perform it later. The unique software and equipment become obsolete quickly. Knowledge and information are dispersed through interdisciplinary collaboration. Sound and performance are volatile. How to keep this music for future generations? Or is loss essential for this music? What remains?

This lecture presents Hannah Bosma’s research project Preservation as performance: liveness, loss and viability in electroacoustic music (2019-2023). After giving an outline of this project, she will zoom in on her current research at STEIM, studio for electro-instrumental music in Amsterdam since 1969, where Michel Waisvisz developed the Crackle Box and The Hands and numerous international musicians-artists worked on their projects.

Hannah Bosma is a postdoc researcher at the University of Amsterdam for this NWO funded Veni research project. Other projects include MA-courses on Archiving Art (UvA) and on gender, voice and music technology (Kunstuniversität Graz 2017-2019), the conference The Art of Voice Synthesis (UvA 2016) and The Electronic Cry: Voice, gender and electroacoustic music (PhD UvA 2013).

06/02/2020

Performing The Raven: David Bispham’s melodramatic Poe, revisited

Colloquium Musicology
Jed Wentz, Leiden University

Thursday 20 February 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

David Bispham (1857-1921) was a celebrated American operatic singer famed for his acting skills. In 1910, with the composer Arthur Bergh accompanying at the piano, he performed a melodramatic version of Poe’s The Raven in which he spoke Poe’s text in time to the music. He would go on to perform the highly successful piece all over the United States. By all accounts, Bispham’s energetic and pathetic acting style had an overwhelming impact on the audience, guaranteeing the work’s artistic and commercial success. Indeed, the published score was supplemented with 10 photographs of Bispham in affective attitudes, associated with specific lines of text, encouraging purchasers to act out The Raven for themselves. This combination of images, text and musical score had the potential to create a shared physical bond, associated with a beloved poem, between audience and performer.

This lecture demonstration places Wentz’s own performance of Bergh’s musical setting of The Raven in the context of the original Bispham interpretation: research carried out in the New York Public Library has revealed the singer’s own score (with performative annotations), newspaper reviews and numerous photographs of the actor in the heat of the moment. A performance without music will close the presentation.

Jed Wentz has, in the course of a long career in Early Music, turned his hand to various tasks and has engaged with diverse disciplines. He has performed on historical flutes and conducted staged opera productions. He has done archival research and published in scholarly journals. He has had a light-hearted relationship with journalism: for years, he had a cooking column in a Dutch early music journal dedicated to recreating 18th-century recipes. He has worked intensively with Baroque dancers, and was declamation and acting coach to a HIP production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s melodrama Pygmalion at the Baroque theatre in Cesky Krumlov. He is artistic advisor to the Utrecht Early Music Festival, teaches at the Amsterdam Conservatory, is assistant professor at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University and has performed with the Newcastle Kingsmen.