Spring 2018
Venezuelan Música Llanera, through Crisis and Migration
with Elaine Sandoval
Elaine Sandoval is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She spent the last academic year conducting fieldwork on music education in Venezuela, and her current work with Venezuelan music in New York is as a Public Humanities Fellow through Humanities New York. Due to the current economic, social, and political crises in Venezuela, musicians are increasingly leaving the country to pursue livelihoods elsewhere, including New York. This presentation looks at some of these new musical initiatives in the city as well as how the crisis is currently affecting musicians and music education programs remaining in Venezuela.
Monday, March 19, 2018
11 a.m.
Jefferson-Williams Lounge, Student Center
Blackface, Blacksound, and (Mis)Appropriation in Early American Popular Music
with Matthew D. Morrison
Matthew D. Morrison is an assistant professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and will be a 2018–19 Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Through specific moments of blackface performance, this paper introduces the concept of Blacksound to trace how popular music both erases and renders hypervisible and hypersonic aspects of black expressive culture in ways that inform how whiteness and blackness—and what might be considered "black music" or "white music"—have been constructed within America's racial caste system.
Monday, April 9, 2018
2:15 p.m.
Tanger Auditorium, Library
Brazil in Jazz & Jazz in Brazil
with Joca Perpignan
A resident of Tel Aviv, Israel, though born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Joca Perpignan is an internationally recognized percussionist, singer, and songwriter with a strong interest in multicultural music. His first solo album, Entreventoss (2006), was followed by Manso Balanço (2011), which featured guests Mira Awad, Din Din Aviv, Delcio Carvalho, clarinetist Anat Cohen, and pianist Alon Yavnai. Perpignan will present a clinic/class about Brazilian music styles, the influence of the Brazilian music in jazz and the jazz in Brazilian music from the Bossa Nova, through Afro-Brazilian rhythms, to the modern MPB (Musica Popular Brazilera).
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
4 p.m.
Tanger Auditorium, Library
Beyond Category: Muhal Richard Abrams’s Creative Universes
with Marc Hannaford
Marc Hannaford is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at Columbia University, as well as a composer and performer. The creative output of Muhal Richard Abrams (1930–2017) exceeds both simple genre classifications—such as "jazz" or "free jazz"—and binaries such as individual versus collective, composition versus improvisation, and theory versus practice. In this talk, Hannaford discusses and explores some of the ways Abrams and his work problematize these themes. Hannaford uses historical, music-theoretical, and performative methodologies to discuss Abrams' creative philosophies, key recordings and compositions, and influence as a composer, improviser, and pedagogue/mentor.
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
4 p.m.
Tanger Auditorium, Library
