Lecture Series

Lecture: Dr. Robert Walser (Case Western Reserve University)

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.

Medieval Song from Head to Tail: a Lecture by Anna Zayaruznaya (Princeton University)

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.

Lecture: Anna Nisnevich on Naturalizing Chaikovsky

Around 1940, Pyotr Ilyich Chaikovsky, a 19th-century Russian composer of  ostensibly non-proletarian social origins and lifestyle, became the musical and ethical symbol of the Soviet state in its Stalinist prime. Nisnevich will discuss her book in progress “How Chaikovsky Became Soviet,” which aims to  make sense of this incongruity, and will read from the chapter entitled “Naturalizing Chaikovsky.