2024
Cultural Representation in Music Life in Oslo
A day-long conversation and workshop on cultural representation in Oslo's musical life. Register Here: https://nettskjema.no/a/462636
Time and place: Nov. 18, 2024 9:30 AM – 4:00 PM, Tøyen Hovedgård
In this workshop we aim to facilitate collaboration across musical cultures, institutions, performers and ensembles. The goal is to create an arena for knowledge exchange and to learn from those with longstanding experience in the field. We hope that this project will help to support initiatives in diversity across the institutions and projects of those involved as much as we hope to strengthen IMV’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in its curricula (as specified in the recent annual plan). In addition, we aim to initiate further work to integrate the diversity of performance and educational practices at IMV and in wider musical communities in Oslo.
Part 1
9.30 - 10.00 - Arrival, coffee and refreshments/buns.
10.00 - 10.15 - Welcome / introduction
10.15 - 10.20 - Seed idea for roundtable.*See below for information
10.20 - 11.00 Conversation # 1:
11.00 - 11.15 - summary / intro / questions
11.15 - 11.20 - Seed idea for roundtable
11.20 - 11.50 Conversation # 2:
11.50 - 12.00 - summary / intro / questions
Part 2
12.00 - 13.00 - Lunch and socializing
13.00 - 14.00 - Workshop with Brandon Farnsworth
We start off after lunch by exploring how the different kinds of music we make influence our thinking about identity, representation, and globalisation. How does our map of the world change depending on our views on experimentation, critique, pursuing excellence, or the importance of coming together? By better understanding how our own views on music shape what, how, and why we include, we develop a sensitivity for our blindspots and differences.
Brandon Farnsworth is a musicologist and curator based in Berlin and Malmö. In 2024, he completed a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc at Lund University, Sweden examining the effects of diversity policy on experimental music using ethnographic methods. In 2020, he completed his PhD in Dresden with the publication Curating Contemporary Music Festivals (Transcript). Brandon has worked with, among others, Malmö Konsthall, Ultima Festival Oslo, Montreal New Musics Festival, Sonic Matter Zurich, and the Berlin New Music Society.
14.00 - 14.10 - Seed idea for roundtable
14.10 - 14.50 Conversation # 3:
The contents of the third conversation will be mutually decided by us who are in the first panel on the day of the event.
14.50 - 15.00 - summary / intro / questions
15.05 - 16.00 - Cake and coffee
16:00 End. Opportunity to go elsewhere to socialise and continue the discussion.
*Seed ideas and panel conversation topics.
Our intention is to facilitate an open and constructive dialogue, one that to the greatest possible extent is determined and unfolds based on the contributions, thoughts, concerns and suggestions of participants. The following suggestions provide a starting point for seed discussions and when deciding conversation topics (for example, but not limited to):
- What challenges are we facing and why?
- Do the kinds of music we make affect how we implement diversity work?
- What criteria govern funding mechanisms, and how do these map on to the real-world context
- What new barriers need breaking down and how should we be aware of these? (location, scale of events, genre?)
- How are cultural categories written and pitched for musicians in the performing and recording world?
- How is globalisation impacting our work?
- Discussion and planning for a future workshop in 2025
Organiser
Tejaswinee Kelkar, Kyle Devine, Áine Mangaoang, Peter Edwards, Judith I Haug and Ieva Gudaitytė
Grounded: Symposium
Multidisciplinary forays into gardens, waste, and eco-art
Time and place: Oct. 28, 2024 12:30 PM – Oct. 29, 2024 6:30 PM, Salen at ZEB-building (Blindern), and Salen at Tøyen hovedgård, Oslo Botanisk hage
This 2-day hybrid symposium hosted by the University of Oslo's Department of Musicology (IMV) explores garden-related notions of groundedness, soil, trails, reclamation, decomposition, and rewilding and considers such concepts' relevance for critical approaches to the environmental humanities. Sessions will meditate on questions such as: what role might "critical listening" (Robinson 2020) play in the cultivation of a more active understanding of human entanglements with spaces of "curated" more-than-human nature? How can we engage with these places in ways that challenge the boundaries of what constitutes a life, a relational network, or a community?
A diverse group of invited scholar-thinkers from across the humanities will discuss ideas-in-progress or offer an "object lesson" to introduce their work. The symposium will include three panel-style discussion sessions, a viewing, a reading session, and an optional group excursion along the Akerselva River.
Please visit the symposium website to register as a virtual or in-person attendee and to find out more information. Contact the organizers Sadie Menicanin (s.c.menicanin@imv.uio.no) and Cana McGhee (cana_mcghee@g.harvard.edu) with any questions.
Sámi Yoik, Childhood, and Lullabies
This Research Forum will explore Sámi traditional songs, "yoiks," as a resource for thinking about childhood education and the widespread genre of lullabies.
Time and place: Oct. 7, 2024 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM, Salen, ZEB-bygget
Viktor Johansson (Nord University) will present a paper entitled "Philosophy and/as the music of the Land." Starting with an anecdote of children yoiking during a car ride, he will explore how yoiking and storytelling challenge conventional children's philosophy practices, promoting a holistic, transformative engagement with Land. The paper will highlight Indigenous pedagogies' relevance for early childhood education and the complexities of capturing the essence of yoik in academic text, challenging Western philosophical norms and underscoring Indigenous knowledge's richness.
Stéphane Aubinet (IMV, University of Oslo) will present preliminary results from his ongoing, RCN-funded project "Dovdna: An Inquiry into Lullabies and Sámi children songs" (2021-2025). The project articulates insights from the Sámi "dovdna" tradition (personal yoik-melodies attributed to individual children) with a review of the existing literature on lullabies across cultures. While often defined as a human "universal," lullabies display significant cross-cultural variation, as well as various patterns of historical transmission and convergence. By drawing from dovdna and other practices across Europe, the project seeks to develop a situated, anthropological account of the craft of lulling children, adults, spirits, and animals to sleep.
The event is open for all.
To join via Zoom:
https://uio.zoom.us/j/67153227400?pwd=bQZBG0lbQjpkbMRPF8pU7nznobwX.1
New Horizons in Piano Performance Research
This Research Forum event explores the frontiers of research in piano performance. It celebrates the acquisition of a new self-playing piano (Disklavier) and its possibilities for future research in synthesis, motion capture, and the understanding of gesture and music.
Time and place: Sep. 17, 2024 12:15 PM – 4:00 PM, Salen, Zeb-building, Blindern Campus
Thanks to generous support from the University of Oslo, the Department of Musicology is happy to invite you to the inauguration of a new Yamaha Disklavier. This grand piano, which has advanced sensors and actuators, allows for high-fidelity recording and playback of piano performances.
Join us for an event packed with performances and discussions of innovative approaches to research in music, gesture, and interactive systems. Themes include how new technologies facilitate better learning, the possibilities of self-playing instruments, new approaches to analysing gestures in performance, and approaches to controlling and interacting with instruments. The event will also feature live motion and data capture of musicians in action,
We are particularly excited about a keynote performance-lecture by internationally acclaimed pianist Pavlos Antoniadis. He will demonstrate multiple approaches to learning complex piano music, featuring work by Iannis Xenakis, Brian Ferneyhough, and György Ligeti. Emphasis will be given to developing interactive multimodal systems for symbolic rhythm learning based on 4E cognition. Deciphering complex notated rhythms through AI-assisted physical movement, but also generating complex rhythms in AI-assisted comprovisation settings, are the main takeaways of this performance-lecture.
Stream
The event will be streamed on YouTube
Music and crisis in the age of superabundance
Roundtable research forum with special guests Nancy Baym and Nick Prior
Time and place: June 20, 2024 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM, Salen, ZEB building
All are invited to participate in this informal roundtable event with two pioneering international scholars in the field of music, new media, and society. As a point of departure, the discussion will draw on classic Marxist ideas of the crisis of over-production and streaming logics of accumulation and acceleration, all the way to AI, and the implications of this for music cultures and the environment.
Nancy and Nick will be joined by IMV staff, including Áine Mangaoang and Kyle Devine. The event will be hosted by Head of Research, Peter Edwards.
Nancy Baym is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She studies how people understand and act with new communication technologies in their relationships. A pioneer in the field of internet research, Baym wrote some of the first articles about online community in the early 1990s. With Jean Burgess, she is the author of Twitter: A Biography (2020, NYU). Other books include Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (2018, NYU), Personal Connections in the Digital Age (2010, Second Edition 2014, Polity), Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method(co-edited with Annette Markham, 2010, Sage), and Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (2000, Sage).
She was a co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and served as its second president. She has been recognized with the Frederick Williams Prize for Contributions to the Study of Communication and Technology awarded by the International Communication Association, the naming of the Nancy Baym Book Award by the Association of Internet Researchers, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg. Most of her papers and more information are available at nancybaym.com.
Nick Prior is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of Social and Political Science at The University of Edinburgh. With interests that span urban soundscapes, social theory and the sociology of music, his work explores the myriad ways technologies are sunk into everyday cultural practices and entangled within social formations. He is author of a series of articles that explore digital mediations of popular music culture in the post-1980s period, culminating in a monograph, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society, published by Sage in 2018. He works with sound and how sound recordings and music composition might be used to enliven our understandings of the multi-sensorial assemblages of cities like Tokyo. His next research project will be an exploration of collaborative music production in domestic and digital contexts. Read more about Nick on his profile page.
Boklansering: "Music and Mirrored Hybridities" av Judith I. Haug and Hanna Walsdorf
Et tverrfaglig panel vil diskutere relevansen av historisk forskning i lys av dagens flerkulturelle samfunn – med utgangspunkt i case-studiene presentert i volumet
Time and place: June 11, 2024 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, HumSam scene, HumSam-biblioteket i Georg Sverdrups hus
Judith I Haug er førsteamanuensis ved Institutt for musikkvitenskap og har sammen med Hanna Walsdorf utgitt boka: Mirrored Hybridities: Cultural Communities Converging in French, German, and Turkish Stage Productions (17th–20th Century).
“In early modern Europe, music-theatrical patterns of representing the foreign ‘Other’ helped shape relations with the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, hybridity must be understood as a dynamic practice playing with cultural blends and borrowings, albeit possibly (re-)producing inequalities, ambiguities, and clichés. Representations of Ottomans/Turks appear as musical features emerging out of vague inspirations derived from Ottoman/Turkish music, creating a particular sound that could be decoded as ‘Ottoman’ or ‘Turkish’ by contemporary listeners.”
Presentasjon av boka blir etterfulgt av paneldebatt med Professor Hanna Walsdorf (University of Basel), Professor Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati (University of Oslo), and Assoc. Professor Judith I. Haug (University of Oslo).
Ordstyrer: Peter Edwards (Head of Research, Institutt for musikkvitenskap, UiO).
Arrangement av HumSam-biblioteket i Georg Sverdrups hus i samarbeid med Institutt for musikkvitenskap, UiO.
Hanna Walsdorf received her Ph.D. in Musicology and Dance Studies in 2009 from the University of Salzburg (Austria) and completed her habilitation (Dr. habil.) at the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig in 2022. From 2009–2013, Hanna was a postdoctoral research fellow in Musicology at Heidelberg University (Germany). She was awarded the Tanzwissenschaftspreis NRW in 2011. From 2014 to 2020, she directed the Emmy Noether Research Group Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage (1650–1760), granted by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2020–2021, she was a guest lecturer at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig, and at the University of Salzburg. In autumn 2021 she was appointed Assistant Professor for Musicology at the University of Basel (Switzerland) where she is now based. In 2023, she was awarded an SNSF Advanced Grant for the project The Night Side of Music (NightMuse, 2024–2029).
Judith I. Haug received her PhD in musicology from the University of Tübingen in 2008 with a thesis on the dissemination of the Genevan Psalter in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. In 2017, she completed her habilitation with a DFG-funded project “Ottoman and European music in the compendium of Alî Ufukî (around 1640): Interpretation, analysis and (trans-)cultural context” at the University of Münster. 2016–18 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Orient-Institut Istanbul/Max Weber Stiftung (OII) in the project “Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae (CMO)”, was responsible for musicological research at the OII from 2018 to 2023 and served as Acting Deputy Director from 2020 to 2022. She is grants awarding coordinator of the COST Action “EarlyMuse”. In September 2023, Judith was appointed associate professor for music history at the University of Oslo.
Ragnhild J. Zorgati is Professor of the Study of Religion at the University of Oslo. She has published in several disciplines (the study or religion, cultural history, and comparative literature) with an emphasis on Muslim-Christian relations, religion and politics in Tunisia, and Jerusalem receptions in nineteenth century Scandinavia. She is the author of Pluralism in the Middle Ages: Hybrid Identities, Conversion, and Mixed Marriages in Medieval Iberia (Routledge, 2012) and the editor of The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750 – ca. 1920), Tracing the Jerusalem Code. Volume 3. (De Gruyter, 2021). Zorgati is the current Leader of the National Academic Council for Theology and the Study of Religion.
Innovating Historical Musicology
In this study day, scholars from different musicological fields share their approaches and discuss how they address issues of imbalance, injustice and diversity in their cutting-edge research.
Time and place: June 11, 2024 9:15 AM – 12:00 PM, Salen, ZEB building
Historical musicology as a humanities discipline has been drawing criticism during the last decades, both internally and externally. The traditional conflation of music history with the history of European art music has created imbalances and injustices that researchers are challenging now from many different perspectives. In four impulse talks, scholars from different musicological fields share their approaches and demonstrate how they address the problems of the discipline in their cutting-edge research. Starting out from the main question of who writes our music histories, they diversify the perspectives, create awareness for topics that have traditionally been marginalized in the discipline, and draw connections between university teaching and societal issues. Impulse talks will be followed by break-out group conversations and plenary discussions.
Hanna Walsdorf (University of Basel): Musicology and Dance – Notes on a consistent omission in music historiography
Johanna-Pauline Thöne (Dept. of Musicology, UiO): The Use(fulness) of Digital Approaches in Historical Musicology
Bjørnar Utne-Reitan (The Norwegian Academy of Music): On Aesthetic Value Judgements in Norwegian Music Theory
Judith I. Haug (Dept. of Musicology, UiO): Diversifying Early Music – Concepts, actions, and experiences
Open for all.
Following the event, at 2pm, there will be a book launch for Music and Mirrored Hybridities by Judith I. Haug and Hanna Walsdorf at the HumSam Stage, at the University Library.
Research Forum with Ann Powers and Eric Weisbard
Pop Music Studies: The Oxford Handbook and Joni’s Jazz:
A pairing of talks on pop music, based on a new critical biography of the great singer-songwriter and a subfield collection in progress. Open for all.
Time and place: Apr. 11, 2024 1:15 PM – 3:00 PM, Salen, ZEB-bygget, UiO
Ann Powers
Is Joni's Jazz Pop? Fusion on the 1970s Borderlines
When Joni Mitchell joined forces with saxophonist Tom Scott and his band, the L.A. Express, to make her 1974 album Court and Spark, she was trying to leave behind the adulation and scrutiny her successful career as a confessional singer-songwriter had brought. She found herself more in the spotlight than ever. The album became her best-selling work, spawning her only Top Ten single, the effervescent seduction "Help Me." Mitchell had employed jazzers before -- including Scott -- but the sound she cultivated on Court and Spark brought her to a new intersection of jazz, rock and pop in which the then-adolescent "fusion" style fully entered the pop arena. This talk surveys that moment and considers the popular embrace and critical scorn it engendered.
Eric Weisbard
Introducing the Oxford Handbook of Pop Music
This presentation will draw upon the introduction to the still in progress Oxford Handbook of Pop Music, which looks to compile work in pop music studies as an emerging subfield of popular music studies. How does current work that explores the musical mainstream, from cover songs, cassettes, and power ballads to gay Black male influence, Dolly Parton, and K-Pop, push past questions of definition to begin providing more detailed studies? Among the topics: pop’s emergence and re-emergence, pop forms, pop as music, intersections of identity, icons, and 21st century pop.
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Prior to her appointment as NPR Music’s critic and correspondent, Ann Powers worked as chief pop music critic for the Los Angeles Times, pop critic at the New York Times, and music editor at the Village Voice. Her books include Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (June, 2024) and Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music. She coauthored Tori Amos Piece By Piece and coedited Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop and Rap.
This open lecture is supported by the Fulbright Program.
Eric Weisbard is Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama and the current Fulbright Chair in American Studies at Uppsala University. The cofounder of the annual Pop Conference, he has edited three conference collections, the Spin Alternative Record Guide and The Journal of Popular Music Studies. His books include Hound Dog, Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music, and Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music. He is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Pop Music.
Musikk-opphavsrettsdag
Bli med oss på en studiedag dedikert til utforskning av musikk-opphavsrett i Norge!
Time and place: Apr. 8, 2024 10:15 AM – 4:00 PM, Salen, ZEB-bygget, Institutt for musikkvitenskap
Program for dagen:
10:15 Velkommen ved Peter Edwards, forskningsleder og førsteamanuensis ved Institutt for musikkvitenskap.
10:20 «Opphavsrett og gjennomføring av digitalmarkedsdirektivet» ved Maria Jongers, seniorrådgiver, Kultur- og likestillingsdepartementet
11:00-11:30 «Endelig rettferdig? Norsk musikkbransjes forventninger til EUs direktiv om opphavsrett i det digitale markedet» ved Yngvar Kjus, professor, Institutt for musikkvitenskap
11:30-12:30 lunsj serveres (bruk påmeldingsskjema under).
12:30-13:15 «Erfaringer fra en rettssak om musikken til Harry Potter Filmene» ved Stine Helén Pettersen, partner hos Ræder Bing advokatfirma AS, og Peter Edwards, førsteamanuensis ved Institutt for musikkvitenskap.
13:15-14:00 «Åndsverk, åpenhet, kunstnerisk forskning og forskningsbasert kunst: Erfaringer med MusicLab» ved Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Professor, RITMO og Institutt for musikkvitenskap, Solveig Sørbo, spesialbibliotekar/rådgiver UiO og komponist/musiker, og Rebecca Josefine Five Bergstrøm, universitetsbibliotekar, UiO.
14:00-14:15 pause
14:15-15:30 Boklansering for Parody in the Age of Remix: Mashup Creativity vs. the Takedown ved Ragnhild Brøvig, med Irina Eidsvold-Tøien, førsteamanuensis ved Institutt for rettsvitenskap og styring, BI, og Yngvar Kjus, professor ved IMV.
Arrangementet foregår på norsk.
Enkel lunsj/bevertning serveres. Krever påmelding:
Påmelding:
https://nettskjema.no/a/416642
Besøk fra Wikimedia Norge
Som en del av forskningsforum kommer Elisabeth Carrera, administrerende direktør ved Wikimedia Norge, på besøk for å fortelle om muligheter for samarbeid gjennom undervisnings- og forskningsaktiviteter.
Time and place: Feb. 12, 2024 1:30 PM – 2:15 PM, Salen, ZEB-bygget
Er du lærer og kunne tenke deg å teste nye måter å lage skriveoppgaver? Er du student og vil dele kunnskap og bygge formidlingserfaring? Er du forsker og vil vite mer om formidling av forskning gjennom Wikimedia? Elisabeth fra Wikimedia gir en innføring om mulighetene, og hvordan du kommer i gang.
"Millioner av mennesker verden over bruker Wikipedia hver dag. Wikipedia er faktisk blant verdens mest besøkte nettsteder. Det ikke alle vet er at det frie oppslagsverket Wikipedia skrives og vedlikeholdes av frivillige bidragsytere. Alle kan bidra med sin kunnskap på Wikipedia og på de andre Wikimedia-prosjektene! [...] Wikipedia er ett av flere Wikimedia-prosjekter. Andre store Wikimedia-prosjekter er for eksempel Wikimedia Commons og Wikidata." Les mer på Wikimedia sine nettsider.
Presentasjonen er åpen for alle.
Like før presentasjonen med Wikimedia er det forskningsforum fra kl:12:30. Les mer her.
Research Forum: Kristina Klungnes and Vincenzo Madaghiele
Presentation of two ongoing research projects at IMV: "Stories From After The End: Eco-critical Readings of the Soundtrack of Post-apocalyptic film and TV-series" and "Autonomous agents for augmented musical improvisation"
Time and place: Feb. 12, 2024 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM, Salen, ZEB-bygget
Kristina Klungnes will present her PhD project: "Stories From After The End: Eco-critical Readings of the Soundtrack of Post-apocalyptic film and TV-series"
In this project, Kristina investigates the soundtrack of post-apocalyptic films and TV-series thematizing the climate crisis. Through the use of nostalgic songs and both technological and acoustic underscores, the soundtrack may offer affordances of fear and hope.
Vincenzo Madaghiele will present his PhD project: “Autonomous agents for augmented musical improvisation”
Augmented and automated improvisation has been the subject of significant research in the field of computer music. Understanding how humans can produce meaningful improvised music interacting with computers allows us to investigate the affordances of new digital means in the context of musical expression, and also to reflect on what makes a musical improvisation among humans meaningful to listeners and musicians.
Vincenzo's project aims at developing a system for organizing musical materials in the context of free improvisation. The result of the project will be a software that is able to react to the behavior of a live musician adaptively in real-time, with a musical style that is guided by the musician. The objective is to develop a highly flexible tool for musicians, to be used in free improvisation with a wide range of sonic inputs. To do so he employs machine learning techniques with a focus on small, curated datasets and modular design.
The design of his system will be informed by close contact with musicians, throughout the whole duration of the study. The project will take place in three phases: (1) an interview study with technology-fluent improvisation musicians, (2) iterative design and prototyping of my improvisation software and (3) collaboration with musicians in the development of new musical pieces.
Visit from Wikimedia Norway at 1:30pm
Following the research presentations, there will be a presentation by Elisabeth Carrera, Executive Director at Wikimedia Norge. She will discuss possibilities for collaborating with and contributing to Wikipedia through teaching and research activities. Read more here.
Research Forum at the Opera: Bluebeard's Castle
IMV in collaboration with the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet and the Center for Gender Research at the University of Oslo. Experts from musicology, theater- and performance studies and gender studies will discuss a triple-bill of works to be staged at the opera: Robert Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und –leben (1841), Béla Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) and A Florentine Tragedy (1915–16) by Alexander Zemlinsky.
Time and place: Jan. 19, 2024 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM, Formidlingssenter/outreach centre at the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet
The triple bill, Bluebeard's castle, will be staged by Tobias Kratzer and conducted by Edward Gardner, with the premiere on 20th January. This seminar on Friday 19th January will engage with these three fascinating works and Kratzer’s interpretation of them as a story of toxic masculinities, women’s emancipation, inherited ambivalences, and complex desires embedded in relationships.
Following an introduction to the three pieces, we will take a closer look at feminist readings of the myth of the Bluebeard, setting this specific production in a broader context, before zooming in on what will be presented at the stage of the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet and how this relates to previous reiterations as well as our contemporary context.
The panel features the following speakers:
- Mary-Ann Smart, Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley.
- David Levin, Professor in the Departments of Germanic Studies and Cinema and Media Studies, and Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Chicago.
- Erling Guldbrandsen, professor i musikkvitenskap, Universitetet i Oslo.
- Jorunn Økland, professor i teologi og kjønnsstudier, Universitetet i Oslo.
- Tone Brekke, førstelektor i litteratur og kjønnsstudier, Universitetet i Oslo.
- Sadie Menicanin, postdoktor i musikkvitenskap, Universitetet i Oslo.
- Auksė Beatričė Katarskytė, doktorgradsstipendiat i kjønnsstudier, Universitetet i Oslo.
Convened by Dr. Hedda Høgåsen-Hallesby (Dramaturg / Head of dramaturgy and outreach), Peter Edwards (assoc. prof. Dept. of Musicology), and Zafer Özgen (Head of Dept. of Musicology).
Free and open for all.
2023
Research Forum with Judith Irmela Haug and Sadie Menicanin
From Ottoman Song to the Vienna Woods
Time and place: Nov. 20, 2023 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM, Salen, ZEB
This research forum is dedicated to ongoing research by two new staff members at the Department of Musicology:
Postdoc. Sadie Menicanin will present her project “The Vienna Woods, c.1875-1914: Musical Imaginaries in Social-Environmental Context”.
Assoc. Professor Judith Irmela Haug will introduce perspectives on “Ottoman song-text collections as sources for music history”.
Open for all!
David Hesmondhalgh: Music Culture in the Age of Streaming
This digital guest lecture will address recent changes and continuities in how music is produced, distributed and consumed
Time and place: Nov. 9, 2023 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, Salen, ZEB-bygget
Since around 2015, a new musical system centred on streaming has emerged, though it takes different forms in different regions and nations. That system has many elements that have long been present in many places. For example, live music performance, and radio, television and film, continue to be important ways in which people experience music. But these now co-exist with music streaming – and the dynamics specific to streaming are arguably much less well understood. In this talk, I summarise some of the main changes and continuities in how music is produced, distributed and consumed in the current era, and I report on recent research investigating music culture in the age of streaming, including debates about unprecedented abundance, personalisation, new dynamics of musical discovery, new developments in musical texts, genres and consumption habits, new controversies about musical change and musical decline, and about the conditions faced by musicians and intermediaries.
David Hesmondhalgh is Professor of Media, Music and Culture in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Cultural Industries (4th edition, 2019); Culture, Economy and Politics: The Case of New Labour (2015, co-written with Kate Oakley, David Lee and Melissa Nisbett); Why Music Matters (2013); Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (2011, co-written with Sarah Baker) and a major book-length report for the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office on Music Creators’ Earnings in the Digital Era (2021, co-written with Richard Osborne, Hyojung Sun and Kenny Barr). From 2021-26, he is PI on a five-year research project, funded by a European Research Council Advanced Research Grant, on Music Culture in the Age of Streaming.
Keynote with Ian Cross: Music in the Wild - Science and the Research Concert
This guest lecture is part of a two-day event to mark the achievements of MusicLab Copenhagen and the publication of results in a special issue of Music & Science
Time and place: Oct. 26, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:45 PM, Salen, ZEB-bygget
About MusicLab
MusicLab is an innovation project by RITMO and the University Library. The aim is to explore new methods for conducting research, research communication and education. Click here for more info.
Ian Cross' Keynote:
Scientific approaches to the experience of music emerge in their current form in the post-war cognitive revolution and maintain an uneasy relationship to other strands of music scholarship — for some integral to the proper understanding of music, for others irrelevant or even deleterious. Early approaches treated music as auditory pattern, and my own work in the early eighties conformed to that tendency. In order to probe behind appearances we investigated the perception of highly reduced and abstract sequences of sounds that we hoped would reflect some of the features of the real-life musical phenomena we were trying to explore.
In the present day technological and conceptual advances allow us to surpass earlier research by running experiments on music in the wild. A real-world concert can become the focus of multiple research perspectives, here exploring: movement, gaze and autonomic processes in interacting performers: degrees of collective movement and engagement of audience members in respect of live and recorded performance; the potential influence of visual imagery on performance experience; and the legal, logistic and ecological problems posed in treating a concert as a nexus of research across multiple disciplines.
We are no longer limited to exploring the reductionist abstractions of forty years ago in using science to make sense of music. Science's capacity to encompass and predict the experiential grain of the material world seems to license it to claim epistemic priority over other ways of knowing. But even now science still tends to rely on reductionist methods; each of the experiments here constitutes an abstraction from the vagaries and messinesses of the events that transpire in the concert. The experiments are not being conducted on the "real thing" but on reduced versions that can be controlled and interrogated in order that they may yield data that can be analysed in a scientifically-acceptable way.
So why apply science at all in attempting to know music? Why not stay with conventional humanistic methods of exploring music, if relying on science gets us no closer to the "real thing"? We can suggest three reasons:
methodological reductionism is not explanatory reductionism; just because our experiments use reduced versions of real-world phenomena does not mean that they cannot explain those real-world phenomena
the sciences are not bodies of knowledge that take the form of absolute truths, but processes that offer the possibility of developing (albeit provisional) knowledge within ramified and connectable frames of understanding in ways inaccessible to humanistic approaches
the application of multiple scientific approaches to an object of study allows us to triangulate our interpretations of it in ways that connect different perspectives for a richer understanding
Finally, when we explore music using scientific and humanistic frames of enquiry, it is important that we share what we do and do not know; we must share our uncertainties, which has to be key to unlocking any doors between the humanities and the sciences. The admission of what we do not know is every bit as important as is the proclamation of what we think we know and how we know it.
Ian Cross is Emeritus Professor of Music and Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Wolfson College. He has taught in the Faculty of Music since 1986, supervising numerous doctoral students and founding (and building) the Centre for Music & Science in 2002. His publications have had broad impact, his early work having helped set the agenda for the study of music cognition. He has since published widely in music and science, his research ranging across psychoacoustics, experimental archaeology, neuroscience, evolutionary theory and therapeutic applications of music. Recent research has involved testing a musical approach to enhancing perinatal mental health in an LMIC, The Gambia; evaluating ways in which conventional musical notation can be minimally adapted so as to make it easier to read at sight; and exploration of the ways in which common processes underpin music and speech as interactive media. He is Editor-in-Chief of the SAGE/SEMPRE Open Access journal Music & Science, a governor of the Music Therapy Charity, and a classical guitarist.
For more details see https://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/directory/ian-cross
Research Forum with Clemens Wöllner: Analysing large material that is already there - corpora in musicology
Time and place: Oct. 23, 2023 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM, Salen, ZEB-bygget
In this presentation, Clemens Wöllner will discuss corpora research. He will draw on examples from his and his team's work on 19th century symphonies (and the slow movements in particular), and a corpus of German newspaper articles during Covid19. The presentation will discuss the prospects and limits of a generalizing approach, as is often the aim with large datasets, and the role of automatic feature extraction versus human analysis. The two studies in question were carried out primarily using human annotation, which requires detailed criteria.
The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with Finn Upham, Judith Irmela Haug and Alexander Refsum Jensenius, moderated by Peter Edwards.
Clemens Wöllner is Professor of Systematic Musicology at the University of Music Freiburg, Germany. Previous positions include a professorship at the University of Hamburg (2013-2022), an interim professorship at Bremen, and a Research Fellowship at the Royal Northern College of Music Manchester (2008-2010). He has published widely on timing in perception and performance, expressiveness, attention and movement in music and beyond. His research project “Slow Motion: Transformation of Musical Time in Perception and Performance” was awarded a grant from the European Research Council. He is President of the German Society for Music Psychology, and serves in the boards of leading journals in the field. Recently, he co-edited the book "Performing Time" with Justin London, which includes several contributions from RITMO members, and was published by OUP in summer 2023.
Research forum: Research Ethics with Bjørn Ramberg
Professor Bjørn Ramberg, leader of UiO's Research Ethics Committee, will discuss the standards and ideals of research ethics and present UiO's new online resource for researchers
Time and place: Sep. 25, 2023 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM, Salen, ZEB-bygget
What are good and responsible research ethics? How are standards and ideals of research ethics discussed and clarified between colleagues in the research environment or in management? What happens in instances of plagiarism or other violations? These and other questions will be in focus in the presentation and subsequent discussions in this research forum.
The new resource pages for researchers at UiO feature guidelines and information on how possible violations of recognized norms in research ethics are handled. It also features an overview of resources, routines and tools for researchers at UiO.
Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg is a professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. He is the head of the Research Ethics Committee at UiO.
IMV at Ultima Festival
Researchers from the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, present ongoing research projects as part of Ultima Kompass.
Time and place: Sep. 14, 2023 5:00 PM – 10:00 PM, The library at the Norwegian Academy of Music
About the event
Ultima 2023 opens with a showcase of pop-up concerts, performances, sound installations, talks and workshops at the Norwegian Academy of Music. As part of this event, researchers from the Department of Musicology, UiO, will introduce a selection of ongoing research projects.
Join us to hear more about topics including: how folk music archives are coming to life thanks for new tools for searching databases; how music is changing lives in prisons; what we can learn about rhythm when we understand it thought dance and not just through listening; how new digital music production platforms are changing how we make music; and what happens when we track the movements of an entire symphony orchestra in concert.
Program
17:00-1730: PLATFORM: Transformations of production technology in the online environment. Project leader Yngvar Kjus.
18:00-18:30: PRISONS OF NOTE: Mapping music and nuances in penal exceptionalism from the periphery. Project leader Áine Mangaoang
19:00-19:30: MIRAGE - A Comprehensive AI-Based System for Advanced Music Analysis. Project leader Olivier Lartillot
20:00-20:30: DjembeDance – Multimodal rhythm in music and dance from West Africa. Project leader Rainer Polak
21:00-21:30: Motion capture and interaction with Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. Finn Upham with composer Morten Christophersen
Moderator: Peter Edwards
Research Forum: Judith Lochhead
Professor Judith Lochhead (Stony Brook) will deliver a keynote address as part of the conference "The Aesthetics of Absence in Music of the 21st Century". The title of her address is: "Affective Ephemera: Sounding Absence in the 21st Century".
Time and place: May 26, 2023 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM, Salen, ZEB-Bygget, UiO Campus
The birds are singing a Spring song outside my window right now. It is mid-February in New York and the temperature is a balmy 60F(16C). The uncanny presence of bird song at this time of year conjures up its absence in previous years, along with a sonic memory of the silence of gently falling snow. I remember back to April 2020, recalling the eerie silence of quarantine life. The uncanny absence of urban sounds during those pandemic times conjured up a past of sound-full experience, along with a longing for a future sonic fullness. Hearing one conjure the other, absence and presence cohabit our sensuous engagements with a sounding world. My paper considers the reflexivity of sonic absence and presence during musical encounters, focusing on the affective ephemera of absence. I approach the question of musical absence by considering four recent pieces that were created during the pandemic years (2020-2022). These are: Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson, “Gates and Passes” from Searching For The Disappeared Hour, 2021; Nick Dunston, Kalia Vandever, DoYeon Kim, “Inhale-Exhale” from Spider Season, 2022; Ken Ueno, Like Starlings in Winter, 2022; and Jlin, “Rabbit Hole” from Embryo, 2021. Creating during times and experiences of absence, these musicians crafted music that produces the affective ephemera of absence in sonically distinct ways. My paper explores how these four works may be understood as sonic witness to absence and how our habits—our regimens—of listening in the 21st century may have been transformed by the affective ephemera of sonic absence.
Click here for more information on the conference "The Aesthetics of Absence in Music of the Twenty-First Century".
Judith Lochhead is Professor of Music History & Theory, Stony Brook University. She is a music theorist and musicologist whose work focuses on recent musical practices of primarily North America and Europe. Lochhead has articles appearing in such English-language journals as Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Online, Theory and Practice, In Theory Only, Perspectives of New Music, Intégral, Indiana Theory Review, and others. Lochhead also has articles in several edited collections, including inTheOxford Handbook on Spectral Music and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination. Book-length publications include: Reconceiving Structure: New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis (Routledge, 2015); Music’s Immanent Future: Beyond Past and Present, co-edited with Sally Macarthur and Jennifer Shaw (Ashgate 2016); Sound and Affect: Sound, Music, World, edited by Judith Lochhead, Eduardo Mendieta, and Stephen Decatur Smith (University of Chicago Press 2021); and Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, co-edited by Judith Lochhead and Joseph Auner (Routledge 2001).
Lochhead’s current projects include: “Émilie du Châtelet, Kaija Saariaho and Heroes of the 21st Century,” The Heroic in Music from Medieval; Festschrift for Leo Treitler, special volume of Musical Quarterly, co-edited by Judith Lochhead and Vera Micznik; “The Performer’s Listener: An Aesthetic of Possibility,” Thinking Music: Praxis and Aesthetics, Special Issue of Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom; “Timbre’s Realities: A Phenomenological Study of Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus,” forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, eds, Steege, Wiskus, De Souza. (under contract with Oxford); “Situational Multiplicities: A Queering analysis of Chaya Czernowin’s Anea Crystal” to appear in Queering Music Theory, ed. Gavin Lee (under contract with Oxford).
Prisons of Note: Conversations on Music & Detention
This research seminar will introduce the work of the Prisons of Note project, exploring how music is used – and is useful – in prisons.
Time and place: Apr. 24, 2023 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM, Stort møterom (rom 2531), Georg Sverdrups hus (UiO Library), Moltke Moes vei 39
Through sharing examples of music and sounds created and recorded in prisons, by and with incarcerated people, the event will reflect on some of the many forms of sounding and listening that shape the experience of imprisonment.
The event will feature a roundtable conversation between musician/artist Belizio, and criminologist Thomas Ugelvik, hosted by the Prisons of Note team, Áine Mangaoang and Lucy Cathcart Frödén.
Refreshments will be served, and there will be plenty of time for questions and conversation. We hope to build some bridges between musicology, sound studies and criminology; between research, creative practice and community development; and between inside and outside prison. All welcome, no registration required.
We look forward to seeing you!
The event will be primarily held in English, but some Norwegian, Spanish or Swedish might also emerge.