Sunday, December 16, 2012


Deadline extended

The deadline for the Third Stony Brook Graduate Music Symposium has been extended until December 29th. Please submit 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers or 40-minute lecture recitals on the topic, "Music of the Spectacle" to musicgradsymposium@stonybrook.edu.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

CFP: Music of the Spectacle


Third Annual Stony Brook Graduate Music Symposium

CFP:  “Music of the Spectacle” 


The Stony Brook Music Department announces its third annual Graduate Music Symposium, to be held February 22-23, 2013. We welcome graduate students from all disciplines to submit paper proposals on aspects of music and spectatorship, broadly conceived. The symposium will feature a keynote address by David J. Levin (University of Chicago), as well as a performance of a new chamber adaptation of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel

In The Emancipated Spectator (2009), philosopher Jacques Rancière presents what he calls the "paradox of the spectator." Without the spectator, the theater (auditorium, concert hall) would not exist; but the spectator's gaze is a bad thing. On the one hand, without the spectator-listener, the performance would remain unheard. On the other, the gaze is construed as othering or irresponsibly passive. Scholars often oscillate between these two poles––the first celebrating, the second denouncing. We invite papers that critically explore the space between these two poles.

Musical spectacles have assumed many guises from the earliest examples to modern practices. What strategies have compositions, performances, and stagings used to connect or disconnect the gaze? A musical spectacle addresses itself to both the ear and the eye. How can we understand the relation between these two senses? What is the relationship between the bodies on display in performance and the spectator-listener? How are identities of performers and audiences created or dissolved? How does technological mediation enable or short-circuit spectatorship?

Possible topics for our symposium include:

            Ethics of spectatorship
            Critical readings of spectacular works/productions
            Technological mediation  
            Emancipated spectating/listening
            Visual texts vis-a-vis audible or other texts
            Musical ekphrasis
            Depictive musical works
            Visual musical practices
            Visible production of identities

We invite submissions of 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers and 40-minute lecture recitals. Please submit proposals to  musicgradsymposium@stonybrook.edu  by Friday, December 29. Stony Brook is accessible via JFK and MacArthur Airport, the Long Island Rail Road, and the Bridgeport/Port Jefferson ferry. Housing with Stony Brook graduate students may be available for presenters staying overnight. For more information, please visit http://sbugradsymposium.blogspot.com

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

2012 Stony Brook Graduate Music Symposium: Program

The program for the 2012 Stony Brook Graduate Music Symposium is below. Information about getting to Stony Brook can be found here, and campus maps are available here. We hope to see you at the conference!


Between Indifference and Engagement: Music and Politics

Friday, February 17 (1006 Humanities Building)

9:00 Coffee and Registration
9:45 Opening Remarks
Professor Judith Lochhead, Chair, Department of Music
David Blake, Symposium Chair

10:00-12:00 Occupying, Protesting, Transgressing
David Blake, chair

Heather Buffington Anderson (University of Texas, Austin)
Just Who Do You Think I Am?’: The Politics of Categorizing Nina Simone's Protest Music”

Travis Holloway (Stony Brook University)
“A Democracy of Music: Polyphony and the Athenian Revolution of 507 BCE

Patrick Nickleson (University of Toronto)
“#Occupy Satyagraha: The Politics of an Aesthetic Work/The Aesthetics of a Political Movement”

Timothy Cuffman (Stony Brook University)
“Punk Music and the Transgressive Ethos

12:00 Lunch break


1:30-2:30 Gender and Blackness
Sarah Feltham, chair

Stephanie Gunst (Tufts University)
Don't Let Him Down: Considering Gender Norms and Disidentification in Foxy Brown

Sarah Geller (University of California, Davis)
“‘Behind Bars but the Bars Don't Stop’: Performing the Penitentiary in the Music of Lil Wayne

2:45-4:15 Fashioning the European State
Bethany Cencer, chair

Danielle Sofer (Stony Brook University)
History under the Rubric of Soviet Music

Giulia Giovani (Università di Roma)
“Italian Printed Cantatas in the Habsburg Court

Anna Parkitna (Stony Brook University)
“Renaissance Music as a Tool for Communist Propaganda in Poland”


4:30-5:45 Keynote Address
Professor Judith Lochhead, chair

Professor James Currie (SUNY, Buffalo)
“Forgetting in a Troubled Time: Music and Politics at the End of Modernity

Reception to follow
Staller Center, Music Wing


Saturday, February 18 (2322 Staller Center, Music Wing)

8:30 Coffee
9:00-11:00 Music in Divided Germany
Katherine Kaiser, chair

Martha Sprigge (University of Chicago)
“Performing Dresden: Rudolf Mauersberger's Dresdner Requiem (1947/48) and the (Re-)Construction of an East German City”

Daniel Cooperman (McGill University)
“The Politics of Politics: Hans Werner Henze's Der Junge Lord

Andrew Kohler (University of Michigan)
“‘They Have Brought an Innocent to Death: Carl Orffs Crisis of Conscience in Die Bernauerin (Lecture-Recital)


11:15-12:15 Denaturalizing Modernism
Benjamin Downs, chair

Andrew Moylan (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
“Post-Tonality and the ‘EvolutionaryReading of Music History

Michael Lupo (CUNY-Graduate Center)
“Luigi Nonos Promoteo: Listening for the Organic Intellectual

12:15 Lunch break


1:30-3:00 Race and Class in the Americas
Kassandra Hartford, chair

Chelsea Burns (University of Chicago)
“Children’s Songs and Brazilian Dolls: Villa-Lobos’s Racial Politics

Krystal J. Grant (Stony Brook University)
“‘A Felicidade’: Musical Genres and the Pursuit of Happiness in Black Orpheus and Orfeu

Lauren Eldridge (University of Chicago)
The Gift of Music: A Community Music School in a Culture of Aid


3:15-4:45 Music Across Borders
Alecia Barbour, chair

Jack Blaskeiwicz (Stony Brook University)
“Belgium's La Muette de Portici

Karin Heim (Northeastern University)
“Beats not Bombs: Hip-Hop to Create Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”

Woo Chan Lee (University of Chicago)
“Exercising the Korean Self, Exorcizing the Western Other”


8:00 Tragédie de Carmen (Peter Brook's adaptation of Bizet's Carmen)
Recital Hall, Staller Center for the Arts