Guthrie Ramsey will present a lecture titled “The Amazing Bud Powell: His Tests and Triumphs.” The presentation will comprise a reading from Guthrie's new book on Bud Powell followed by a discussion of jazz, Afromodernism and mental health, topics linked to the life and career of Bud Powell.

Louise Meintjes (Duke University) will give a lecture titled “The Crossing: World Music and Zulu Ngoma at Home.” Meintjes is Associate Professor of Music at Duke University. Her research focuses on the politics of music production, the intersection of song and dance, voice, the arts, and human rights.

Co-sponsored by African Studies Program

Composer Martin Boykan (Brandeis University) will discuss his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.

Carol Silverman, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon, will give a lecture titled “Global Gypsy: Balkan Romani Music, Representation and Appropriation.”

Ryan Skinner, Assistant Professor of Musicology at Ohio State University, will give a lecture titled “Music as Biopolitical Culture in Contemporary Mali.” 

Dr. Neil Newton, Lecturer in Music Theory in the University of Pittsburgh Department of Music, will give a lecture titled “The Inner Life of Harmonies: An Examination of the Middle Voice in Pop, Classical, and Early Post-Tonal Music.” 

Dr. Robert Walser will present a lecture titled "Why Are There So Many Songs?" Dr. Walser earned doctoral degrees in both musical performance and musicology, and has since acquired certification as a Pro Tools Operator and an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician. He has published extensively on jazz and other popular musics, including his books Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, and Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History.

From the heads and tails of individual notes to the foreheads and feet of song stanzas, medieval musical writings are replete with body parts. Sometimes the terms are used by convention, or in the service of simple mnemonics. But in other cases, the reasons for acts of musical anthropomorphization are less clear. Tracing the rhetoric of musical animation from the treatises into the realm of musica practica can give us fresh insight into some of the best-known songs of the later middle ages.

In the subtitle of her 1999 release Sound Characters: Making the Third Ear, American experimentalist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) implicitly frames her record as an intervention on the very material constitution of listening. By listening to Sound Characters, it seems, we will be “making the third ear.”

Pitt’s Film Studies Program presents Gregory D. Booth, an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. He will speak on the subject of Language, Culture and Music: Film Song, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Creation of “Youth Music” in India.