SELECTED RECORDED LECTURES
Due Lezioni sul Dies Irae
Pisa, Aprile 2024
Introduction to Music History
Sample lectures
As part of a unit that traces the beginning of notated music and the power of musical writing in Europe, we venture into the beginning of notated polyphonic music: the music of Léonin and Pérotin at the newly built cathedral of Notre Dame in 13th century Paris.
What does it mean for music to be superior to, and emanicipated from not only the other arts (literature, visual art, dance), but the world that encompasses it? When did such an idea become desirable and necessary to some composers, and what are the results of such an idea being pushed to the very limit? Here we trace the path from the emergence of the construct of musical autonomy to the beginnings of Austro German modernism: Arnold Schoneberg's depiction of interplanetary flight in his Op. 10 String quartet
Music and Laughter
sample lectures
In this lecture I consider the definition of parody and what it might mean in relation to music; then, I survey critical musicological literature on an important cultural and political icon of musical creativity: Ludwig Van Beethoven. How and why has Beethoven been parodied, and what can these parodies tell us about the composer and our own evolving relationship to his figure and work?
In this lecture I focus on what is arguably the first mass-produced recording in history: George W. Johnson's Laughing Song (1892). I invite you to consider the relationship between the emergence of mass phonography in North America, the genre of "coon songs" (songs related to the minstrel tradition that traded in racial stereotypes of urban-dwelling Blacks) and the phenomenon of laughter as a form of vocal and political expression.
More Laughing Songs
In this lecture, taking our cue from the lecture on race and phonography above, we consider laughing songs in the early twentieth century as a global phenomenon, focussing on two famous examples of contrafacts and unlawful appropriations of Johnson's famous Laughing Song: one from Naples, the other from London. How does the relationship of race, laughter and personhood embodied in Johnson's seminal song get erased, translated, or transformed in its unauthorized contrafacts? Why was it acceptable, desirable, and even inevitable for Johnson's laugh to be handled and mishandled this way?