Lectures from Pitt's Department of Music
Lectures from Pitt's Department of Music, Spring 2012
Each semester the Department of Music presents a series of lectures featuring scholars, composers, and performers who are leaders in their fields. All lectures take place in Room 132 Music Building at 4 p.m. unless otherwise noted and are free to the public. For more information call 412-624-4125 or e-mail concerts@pitt.edu.
Transcribing the Body: the Music of Ken Ueno
January 13, 2012
Multiple shocks transformed Ken Ueno's life. The shock of an injury transformed him from a West Point Cadet into a composer. The shock of hearing Bartok and Stravinsky made him into a composer, but it was the shock of hearing Jimi Hendrix's music that made him into a musician. Related to post-Hendrixian values, Ken composes "person-specific" music with frequency-based harmonies analyzed from the specific performance possibilities of the performers with whom he collaborates. The lecture will also include a demonstration of Ken's extended vocal techniques, as part of his discussion on his "person-specific" vocal concerto. Read More…
Daniel Goldmark on "Pixar and the Sounds of Nostalgia"
January 20, 2012
While Disney has long dominated animation, its supremacy has been challenged of late by Pixar, its greatest competitor (and now subsidiary). Among the many things that puts Pixar ahead is a very holistic approach to creating the world of the cartoon, both visually and sonically. Combining unusually nuanced attention to the soundtrack with a particular longing for bygone eras of popular culture, the Pixar films show that animated films can be made with as much care and precision as live-action films. In this paper, I explore Pixar’s approach to music and the soundtrack to show how advances in sound design, as well as an evolving approach to film scoring taken by veteran Hollywood composers, have brought a new level of complexity and even respectability to the long-maligned animated feature. Read more…
Jeffrey S. Sposato: Bach, the Mass, and the Leipzig Lutheran Service
February 24, 2012
What can we learn about Johann Sebastian Bach’s church music practices by looking at his Leipzig successors? Scholars have previously assumed that when Gottlob Harrer took over as Thomaskantor after Bach’s death in 1750, he fundamentally rethought the musical priorities of the Leipzig service, increasing the importance of the concerted Latin mass and diminishing the role of the cantata. This paper uses Leipzig church diaries and the contents of Bach’s and Harrer’s libraries to demonstrate that the shift in musical focus from cantatas to masses attributed to Harrer was likely more gradual and began with Bach during the 1730s. Read more…
Glenda Goss: Biography in Musical Scholarship Today
March 30, 2012
Biography – the story of a person’s life – is one of the most popular types of literature today. Yet biography also holds an important place in scholarship. Biographies invite us to consider what effect, if any, an individual may have on the larger course of events. Biographies of creative personalities bring up the further question of whether connections exist between a life and times and an individual’s music, art, or literary works and if so, what those connections might be. Read more…
