Past Events
2018-19
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 21 Sept. | Leslie Blasius, University of Wisconsin |
Musical Tempo at the Close of the Long 19th Century |
| 5 Oct. |
Robert Clarida, Reitler Kailas and Rosenblatt, LLC Judith Finell, Judith Finell Music Services Inc. |
Scales of Justice |
| 26 Oct. |
Matthew Mugmon, University of Arizona |
Mahler, Bernstein and Jewish Identity |
| 29 March | Jennifer Iverson, University of Chicago |
Fraught Adjacencies: The Politics of German Electronic Music |
| 5 April |
Stephanie Shonekan, University of Massachusetts, Amherst | We Insist: Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite |
| 12 April |
Datta Ram Purohit, Hemwati nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University |
Folk Musicians and the Traditional Theater of Uttarakhand, India |
2017-18
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 26 Jan. |
Kate Van Orden, Harvard University |
Songs in Unexpected Places: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Music and Mobility |
| 9 Feb. |
Douglas Shandle, Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University |
Finding Florence Price: On Archives and Spectral Legacies |
| 23 March |
Kyle Adams, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music |
How Did Chromaticism Become an "-Ism"? |
2014-15
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 12 Sept. |
Kenneth Kreitner, Univ. of Memphis |
Peñalosa: Some Mysteries |
| 24 Oct. |
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Univ. of Arkansas |
Repetition, Music and Mind |
| 6 Feb. |
Joseph Auner, Tufts University |
The Stopped Clock: Some Moments in Tonality and Technology Since 1950 |
| 20 Feb. |
Michael Cherlin, Univ. of Minnesota |
Luigi Nono's fragmente-stille, an diotima and the Ineffable |
| 6 Mar. |
Annette Richards, Cornell University |
Sensibility Triumphant: C. P. E. Bach and the Art of Feeling |
| 13 Mar. |
Loren Schoenberg, independent scholar |
Lester Young: New Discoveries |
| 17 Apr. |
Ellen Koskoff, Eastman School of Music |
Is Ethnomusicology Inherently Feminist? |
2013-14
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 20 Sept. | Susan Neimoyer, Univ. of Utah |
After the Rhapsody: George Gershwin in the Spring of 1924 |
| 11 Oct. | Anthony Tommasini, Chief Classical Music Critic for the New York Times |
A Critic Reflects on Wagner and Wagner Productions |
| 15 Nov. | Gregory Booth, Univ. of Auckland |
"The New Music Establishment" and the "Bollywood Amendments": Globalisation, Copyright and Transformations in India's Culture Industries |
| 21 Feb. | Richard Will, Univ. of Virginia |
Don Giovanni in Boots: The Poetics of 'Traditional' Opera Productions |
| 14 Mar. | Mark Spicer, Hunter College |
Fragile, Emergent and Absent Tonics in Pop and Rock Songs |
| 28 Mar. | Kofi Agawu, Princeton University |
Topic Theory and Music Analysis |
| 4 Apr. | Alajandro Enrique Planchart, Univ. of California Santa Barbara |
Guillaume du Fay 'Musicus': The Career and Self-Image of a 15th Century Composer |
2012-13
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 14 Sept. | Andrew W. Mead, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
Cultivating an Aire: Natural Imagery and Music Making |
| 21 Sept. | James Borders, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
New Perspectives on Old Books: Pontificals and the Study of Medieval Chant |
| 9 Nov. | Deborah Campana, Oberlin College |
"A Ping Qualified by a Thud:" Reflections on the Life and Work of John Cage |
| 16 Nov. | Kim Kowalke, Univ. of Rochester |
What Makes Weill Weill |
| 22 Feb. | Craig A. Monson, Univ. of Washington in St. Louis |
Self Morification and Conflict in Convent Choirlofts |
| 1 Mar. | Howard Pollack, Univ. of Houston |
"Oh the Shark Has Pretty Teeth, Dear:" Marc Blitzstein's Historic Adaptation of The Threepenny Opera |
| 8 Mar. | David Neumeyer, Univ. of Texas at Austin |
Music Production & Composition Aesthetics in the Classic Hollywood Sound Film |
| 12 Apr. | Louise Meintjes, Duke Univ. |
The Digital Homestead: Recording Men's Sociality and Zulu Music |
2011-12
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 13 Jan. | Sander L. Gilman, Emory Univ. |
"Mark the Music" Jews, Music and Modernity |
| 17 Feb. | Steven Rings, Univ. of Chicago |
On Tonal Hearing: Quale And Chroma Revisited |
| 2 Mar. | Sarah Fuller, Stony Brook Univ. |
Confronting Dissonance Theory and Practices in 14th-Century French Musical Culture |
| 20 Apr. | Beverly Diamond, Memorial Univ. in Newfoundland |
"Re" Thinking: Revitalization, Return and Reconciliation in Contemporary Indigenous Culture |
| 18 May | Stefano Mengozzi, Univ. of Michigan |
Sacred Words Through Ordinary Sounds: Rethinking Musical Humanism |
| 25 May | Julian Hook, Indiana Univ. |
"Spelled Heptachords" |
2010-11
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 22 Oct. | Jairo Moreno, Univ. of Pennsylvania |
Music Theory and Technical Being |
| 12 Nov. | Edward Nowacki, Univ. of Cincinnati |
Reflections on the Antiphon: Greek and Latin Sacred Music |
| 28 Jan. | Yayoi Uno Everett, Emory Univ. |
Faustian Parable in John Adam' Dr. Atomic (2006) |
| 11 Feb. | Thomas Turino, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign |
Peircian Phenomenology and the Study of Music Lecture by a Distinguished Ethnomusicologist |
| 25 Feb. | Lawrence Zbikowski, Univ. of Chicago |
Words, Music, and Song |
| 4 Mar. | Charles O. Nussbaum, Univ. of Texas-Arlington |
Sentiment and Sentimentality in Music |
| 8 Apr. | Mary Hunter, Bowdoin Univ. |
How Do Performers Imagine the Composer, and Why Does It Matter? |
| 20 May | Annie Randall, Bucknell Univ. |
Taking Popular Music Seriously and Why it Matters |
2009-10
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 16 Oct. | Vincent Colapietro, Pennsylvania State Univ. | Conversations Musical and Otherwise |
| 23 Oct. | Lewis Rowell, Indiana Univ. | Reflections on Tuning: Remarks, Opinions, and Sound Bites from a Skeptic |
| 20 Nov. | Kerry McCarthy, Duke Univ. |
From the Library of William Byrd |
| ? Jan. | Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times |
TBA |
| 26 Feb. | Augusta Read Thomas | TBA (in collaboration with Ensemble & Conducting Division and Visiting Composers Series) |
| 5 Mar. | Mellonee Burnim, Indiana Univ. | Celebrating Life at Death: Funerals of African American Gospel. Lecture by Distinguished Ethnomusicologist |
| 9 Apr. | Janna Saslaw, Loyola Univ., New Orleans | Teddy Wilson's Advanced Course in Modern Piano Playing and its Contribution to Jazz Theory |
| 30 Apr. | Jairo Moreno, Univ. of Pennsylvania | Music Theory as a Form of Technical Memory |
| 7 May | Howard Pollack, Univ. of Houston | Marc Blitzstein's Regina |
2008-09
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 10 Oct. | Joseph Kraus, Florida State Univ. |
Levels of Nostalgia and Narrative Collapse in the “Pastorale” from Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony |
| 21 Nov. | Bastian Clevé, Filmakad. Baden-Württemberg |
The Sound of Eternity: Making a Movie for J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor |
| 30 Jan. | Frank Samarotto, Indiana Univ. |
The Drama of the Bridge: Modulation as Process |
| 13 Feb. | Bruno Nettl, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign |
Song Ownership and Control in Native American Traditions: Excursions to Blackfoot Indian Culture Lecture by a Distinguished Ethnomusicologist |
| 27 Feb. | David Ake, Univ. of Nevada, Reno |
Jazz and the Aesthetics of Mistakes |
| ? Apr. | Warren Darcy, Oberlin Conservatory |
What Lies Buried under the Linden Tree? Form, Tonal Process, and Meaning in the Funeral March of Mahler’s First Symphony |
| 24 Apr. | Marcia J. Citron, Rice Univ. |
Gendered Reception of Brahms: Masculinity, Nationalism, and Musical Politics |
| 15 May. | Peter Cariani, Harvard-MIT |
As If Time Really Mattered: Neural Codes and Computations that Subserve Music Perception and Cognition |
| 5 June | Lawrence Kramer, Fordham Univ. |
“The Threshold of the Visible World”: Bill Viola’s Tristan |
2007-08
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 12 Oct. | Guerino Mazzola, Univ. of Minnesota |
A Mathematical Theory of Gesture in Music |
| 26 Oct. | Susan Youens, Univ. of Notre Dame |
Schubert’s Pantheist Songs |
| 7 Nov. | Philip Bohlman, Univ. of Chicago |
Music of the Mediterranean Metropole and the Making of Modern Europe |
| 29 Feb. | Allan Keiler, Brandeis Univ. |
Thoroughbass and Rameau in Their Historical Perspective |
| 7 Mar. | James Schmidt, Boston Univ. |
‘I Cannot Remember Ev’rything’: Catastrophe, Lamentation and the Musical Memorial |
| 4 Apr. | Christopher Hasty, Harvard Univ. |
Changing the Subject of Music in Theory |
| 5 Apr. | Richard Taruskin, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley |
Shall We Change the Subject? A Music Historian Reflects |
| 16 May | Rebecca Maloy, Univ. of Colorado |
Limmata interdum de industria cantibus inseruntur: Reexamining the Nondiatonic Plainsong Tradition |
| 23 May | Gretchen Horlacher, Indiana Univ. |
Stravinsky’s Stutter: Modeling Melodic Development and Repetition |
2006-07
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 6 Oct. | Mary Frandsen, Univ. of Notre Dame |
Contemplatio Christi: Music and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Lutheranism |
| 20 Oct. | Patrick Macey, Eastman School of Music |
Josquin's Celestial Vision in the Motet "Ave nobilissima creatura" |
| 17 Nov. | Roy Howat, Royal Academy of Music |
Russian Imprints in French Piano Music from 1880 to 1915 |
| 19 Jan. | Kay Knittel, Univ. of Texas, Austin |
Taking Beethoven Heiligenstadt-Testament Seriously |
| 9 Feb. | William Rothstein, CUNY Graduate Center |
How Non-German Repertories Can Affect Our Theories of Nineteenth-Century Music |
| 2 Mar. | Martha Feldman, Univ. of Chicago |
The Castrato in Nature and as Myth |
| 13 Apr. | Leeman Perkins, Columbia Univ. |
Problems of Style and Voice in Josquin's Psalm Motets |
| 4 May | Kevin Korsyn, Univ. of Michigan |
The Aging of the New Musicology |
| 25 May | Gage Averill, Univ. of Toronto |
[Annual Lecture by a Distinguished Ethnomusicologist] |
2005-06
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 4 Oct. | Massimo Ossi, Indiana Univ. |
Petrarchan Themes in Monteverdi's Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi |
| 4 Nov. | David Lidov, York Univ. |
Musical Meter and Musical Gesture as Representations of Bodily Movement |
| 18 Nov. | Alan Walker, McMaster Univ. |
Liszt as Cultural Ambassador |
| 20 Jan. | Paul von Hippel, Ohio State Univ. |
Rules of Melodic Expectation: Innate Laws or Learned Heuristics? |
| 3 Feb. | Anna Celenza, Johns Hopkins Univ. |
Kampf ums Dasein: The Impact of Popular Darwinism on Musical Aesthetics in Fin-de-siècle Vienna |
| 17 Feb. | Jeff Titon, Brown Univ. |
Music and Identity Construction: The "Good Old Boy" in Country Music |
| 21 Apr. | Elizabeth West Marvin, Eastman School of Music |
The Mystery and Science of Absolute Pitch |
| 5 May | Alex Ross, The New Yorker |
Inside Notes on Music Criticism: History and Current Practice |
| 19 May | Walter Everett, Univ. of Michigan |
Good Vibrations: The Foundations of Rock |
2004-05
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 1 Oct. | Bonnie Wade, Univ. of California, Berkeley |
Keeping Composers Connected: A Perspective on the Vitality of Contemporary Japanese Musical Life |
| 15 Oct. | Philip Gossett, Univ. of Chicago |
"Edizioni distrutte" and the Significance of Operatic Choruses during the Risorgimento |
| 29 Oct. | Rose Subotnik, Brown Univ. |
Did Tin Pan Alley Make Faulty Equipment For Living? Confronting Some Old Critical Canards |
| 28 Jan. | Charles Atkinson, Ohio State Univ. |
Alia via in Aliam musicam |
| 18 Feb. | Lev Koblyakov, Parkland College |
On Boulez's Marteau sans maître |
| 4 Mar. | Laurel Fay | Thinking about Shostakovich |
| 8 Apr. | Honey Meconi, Univ. of Rochester |
On Hildegard of Bingen |
| 13 May | Rebecca Leydon, Oberlin College |
On Music and Modern Art |
| 27 May | Charles Smith, SUNY Buffalo |
The Trials and Transformations of Tristan Chords |
2003-04
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 17 Oct. | Harold S. Powers, Princeton Univ. |
The Structure of Musical Discourse: A View from Madras |
| 31 Oct. | Jenefer Robinson, Univ. of Cincinnati |
Listening with Emotion: How Our Emotions Help Us to Understand Music |
| 21 Nov. | Steven Feld, Univ. of New Mexico |
Guitars in the Rain Forest: The Birth of a New Music in New Guinea |
| 23 Jan. | Judith Lochhead, SUNY Stony Brook |
Visualizing the Musical Object |
| 6 Feb. | Lee Rothfarb, Univ. of Calif., Santa Barbara |
The Music of August Halm: Originality, Imitation, Innovation |
| 23 Apr. | Richard Crawford, Univ. of Michigan |
A Foggy Day: Problems in Gershwin Biography |
| 7 May | Richard Kramer, CUNY Graduate Center |
Probestück |
| 21 May | Ruth Solie, Smith College |
On Railroads, Beethoven, and Victorian Modernity |
2002-03
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 4 Oct. | Thomas L. Riis, Univ. of Colorado |
The Life and Works of Frank Loesser, Broadway Giant |
| 25 Oct. | Robert Clarida, Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, P.C. |
Scales of Justice: Music as a Legal Construct |
| 15 Nov. | James Hepokoski, Yale Univ. |
Reflections in Beethoven’s Brook |
| 17 Jan. | Wye J. Allanbrook, Univ. of California, Berkeley |
Reading the Viennese “Classic” Style |
| 7 Feb. | Mary S. Lewis, Univ. of Pittsburgh |
Before and After Music Printing: Ideas of Ownership of Music in the Sixteenth Century |
| 28 Feb. | L. Poundie Burstein, Hunter College |
Parties, Tonics, and the Dangerous “Is” |
| 11 Apr. | Jane Fulcher, Indiana Univ. |
The Politics of Transcendence: Ideology in the Music of Messiaen in the Thirties |
| 2 May | Judith Becker, Univ. of Michigan |
Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Religious Trancing |
| 30 May | Robert Hatten, Indiana Univ. |
From Synthetic Interpretation to Emergent Meaning: Toward a Theory of Musical Gesture |
2001-02
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 12 Oct. | David Huron, Ohio State Univ. |
How Music Evokes Human Emotions |
| 26 Oct. | Laurence Libin, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Progress, Adaptation, and the Evolution of Musical Instruments |
| 9 Nov. | Ethan Haimo, Univ. of Notre Dame |
Schoenberg, Bach, and BACH |
| 11 Jan. | Dane Heuchemer, Kenyon College |
In the Village: Music in Electoral Saxony, ca. 1550-ca. 1610 |
| 15 Feb. | David Cohen, Harvard Univ. |
"The First Foundations of Song": The Concept of the Note as the Element of Music |
| 1 Mar. | J. Peter Burkholder, Indiana Univ. |
A Simple Comprehensive Model for Musical Meaning |
| Apr. | Kay Shelemay, Harvard Univ. |
Hearing Silent Voices: Women in the Syrian Jewish Musical Tradition |
| 19 Apr. | Robert O. Gjerdingen, Northwestern Univ. |
A Music Theorist in Dot-Com Land |
| 17 May | Hugh Macdonald, Washington Univ. |
Beethoven's Game of Cat and Mouse |
2000-01
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 6 Oct. | Brian Hyer, Univ. of Wisconsin |
Hagen's Dream |
| 13 Oct. | Luitgard Schader, Paul-Hindemith-Institut |
Gestalt Psychology in Music Theory: The Reception of Ernst Kurth's Foundation of Linear Counterpoint |
| 17 Nov. | Lewis Rowell, Indiana Univ. |
Musical "Icons" and the Aesthetics of Familiarity |
| 19 Jan. | Daniel Melamed, Indiana Univ. |
The Small Dramatic Roles in Bach's Passion Repertory and Problems of Performance Practice |
| 2 Feb. | Graeme Boone, Ohio State Univ. |
Is the French Language Anti-Musical?: Text Setting from Dufay to Bizet |
| 2 Mar. | Harald Krebs, Univ. of Victoria |
Metrical Dissonance in the Music of Chopin |
| 6 Apr. | Paul Berliner, Northwestern Univ. |
Shona Music and the Role of Music in Zimbabwe's War of Liberation |
| 4 May | Beth Glixon, Univ. of Kentucky |
The Lives and Careers of Barbara Strozzi and other Venetian Women of the Operatic Stage |
| 18 May | Warren Darcy, Oberlin College |
Rotational Form, Teleological Genesis, and Fantasy-Projection in the Slow Movement of Mahler's 6th Symphony |
1999-2000
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 1 Oct. | Peggy Seeger | A Feminist View of Anglo-American Traditional Songs |
| 19 Nov. | Leonora Saavedra, Univ. of Pittsburgh |
Carlos Chávez and the Construction of the Strategic Otherness |
| 21 Jan. | Steven Zohn, Temple Univ. |
The Sonate auf Concertenart Revisited |
| 4 Feb. | Allan Keiler, Brandeis Univ. |
The Many Voices of Marian Anderson |
| 11 Feb. | Stephen Hinton, Kim Kowalke, Michael von der Linn | Opera -- Where to? Kurt Weill and Topical Opera [Symposium] |
| 25 Feb. | William Caplin, McGill Univ. |
Why Harmonic Analysis? |
| 28 Apr. | Susan Boynton, Univ. of Oregon |
Orality, Literacy, and Hymn Transmission before 1100 |
| 12 May | Severine Neff, Univ. of North Carolina |
Schoenberg as Theorist: Three Forms of Presentation |
| 26 May | Carl Schachter, CUNY |
Elephants, Crocodiles, & Beethoven: Schenker's Political Ideology & the Pedagogy of Schenkerian Analysis |
1998-99
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 2 Oct. | William P. Malm, Univ. of Michigan |
Time, Space, and Relativity in Japanese Music |
| 13 Nov. | Michael Marissen, Swarthmore College |
On the Musically Theological in J. S. Bach's Church Cantatas |
| 15 Jan. | Anthony Seeger, Smithsonian Institution |
Running the World's Craziest Record Company: Folkway Records and 20th-Century Music |
| 29 Jan. | Wendy Heller, Princeton Univ. |
Images of the Courtesan in Monteverdi's Poppea |
| 12 Feb. | Kevin Korsyn, Univ. of Michigan |
History and Theory: Rethinking the Opposition |
| 26 Feb. | Joel Lester, Mannes College of Music |
J. S. Bach's Parallel Section Constructions |
| 9 Apr. | Michael Cherlin, Univ. of Minnesota |
Dialectical Opposition in Schoenberg's Music and Thought |
| 23 Apr. | Allen Cadwallader, Oberlin College |
Strategies for Teaching Schenkerian Analysis |
| 7 May | Hedi Siegel, CUNY |
Looking at the Urlinie |
| 14 May | Nola Reed Knouse, Moravian Music Foundation |
Researching the Music of the American Moravians |
| 28 May | James Webster, Cornell Univ. |
Haydn's Aesthetics |
1997-98
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 17 Oct. | Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., Center for Black Music Research |
Reflections on His Book: The Power of Black Music |
| 24 Oct. | Candace Brower, Northwestern Univ. |
Music as Motion: Towards a New Theory of Rhythmic Grouping |
| 30 Jan. | Joseph Kraus, Univ. of Nebraska |
Voices of "The Other" in Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony |
| 13 Feb. | Scott Burnham, Princeton Univ. |
Rehearing Music: On Listening to the Mozart String Quintets |
| 10 Apr. | Gerard Behague, Univ. of Texas |
The Ethnomusicology of Latin-American Music |
| 17 Apr. | Susan Cook, Univ. of Wisconsin |
Gender in the Social Dance of the Ragtime Era |
| 1 May | Richard Cohn, Univ. of Chicago |
The Over-Determined Triad: A Group-Theoretic Approach to Romantic Harmony |
| 15 May | Leo Treitler, CUNY |
Beethoven’s "Expressive" Marks |
| 29 May | Peter Schubert, McGill Univ. |
Motive and Opportunity: The Mystery of Renaissance Music |
1996-97
| Date | Speaker | Lecture Topic |
| 17 Jan. | David McAllester, Connecticut Wesleyan Univ. |
Traditional and Contemporary Navajo Music |
| 24 Jan. | Malcolm Brown, Indiana Univ. |
Shostakovich Appropriated and Exploited |
| 7 Feb. | Taylor Greer, Pennsylvania State Univ. |
Philosophy in an Ultramodern Key: New Perspectives on Charles Seeger's Thought |
| 14 Feb. | Dennis Slavin, CUNY |
The Binchois Game: Tonal Coherence and Compositional Style |
| 21 Feb. | Justin London, Carlton College |
Meter Casts No Shadows |
| 28 Feb. | Guthrie Ramsey, Tufts Univ. |
Toward a Cultural Poetics of Race Music: Memory, Meaning, and the "Practice of Blackness" |
| 1 Apr. | Barbara Haggh, Alamire Institute |
Elite and Popular Music in Late Medieval Ghent |
| 25 Apr. | Ellen Koskoff, Eastman School of Music |
Gender and Music among the Hassidim |
| 2 May | James Zychowicz, A-R Editions |
Mahler's Die Drei Pintos and the Taboo against Posthumous Collaboration |
| 9 May | Peter H. Smith, Univ. of Notre Dame |
Brahms & the Shifting Barline: Metric Displacemen & Formal Process in the Trios with Wind Instrumentst |
| 23 May | Thomas Christensen, Univ. of Iowa |
C.P.E. Bach and Traditions of Thorough-Bass Pedagogy |