Seminar Series

All seminars will take place in room J305, UCD School of Music, Newman Building, UCD Belfield Campus on Wednesday afternoons, 3pm.

11 February

Nicholas Reyland (Royal Northern College of Music)
“Audiovisual Climate Change and Characterisation in Peak TV: The Wire and The Bear”

25 February

Kayla Rush (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick)
“Cassette Entanglements: Meaning, Connection, and Intimacy in Twenty-First-Century Cassette Tape Practices”

25 March

Emma Kavanagh (University College Dublin)
“Between Social Movement and Self-Promotion: Re-Assessing Gustave Charpentier’s Conservatoire Populaire de Mimi Pinson, 1902-1914”

1 April

David Bremner (Technological University Dublin)

“Pivot as Drone: Some Recent and Current Compositions”

15 April

Katherine Butler (Northumbria University)

“‘Hellish Harmony’or ‘Honest Mirth’: Ubiquitous Practices of Round and Catch-Singing in Britain, c.1550-1650”

“Sonic Junk and Techno Trash: Participatory Soundscapes and the Technocultural Afterlives of Recycled Objects”

[Taking place at 4pm]

This seminar is jointly organised by the UCD School of Music and the UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy.

Presented by Dr Abigail Lindo (UCD)

ABSTRACT

At Tremor, a five-day alternative music festival in the Portuguese autonomous region of the Azores, two ensembles incorporated recycled objects as instruments for generative musical compositions and audience engagement in natural and human-made venues. Experimental and electronic performances like these allow for tactile improvisational play that repurposes used materials for group engagement and dehierarchises the dispensation of bodies within the performance space - blurring the line between audience and performer. In this seminar, I explore these musical performances as ethnographic case studies demonstrating how the use of salvaged objects signals the complex relationships individuals have with technology over time and the potential for objects to be reimagined with a diversity of functions. 

The Turncoat Composer. Enquiries into the Lifewriting of Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842)

Presented by Dr Michael Fend (King's College London)

ABSTRACT

When Cherubini moved from Florence via London to Paris in 1786, he was soon presented to the notorious Queen Marie-Antoinette. After the French Revolution had started in 1789, he continued to be employed by a monarchical opera company and he composed a hymn in praise of the King, which is the equivalent of the British anthem "God save the King". But in 1795 he conducted an official music corps to celebrate the beheading of King Louis XVI and in 1797 he busied himself to steal an Italian Music Library for the new Library of the Paris Conservatoire. His political loyalties were also totally up in the air at the end of the Napoleonic Regime in 1815.
Did he not have other choices? What did his musical colleagues do at the time? What is the freedom of a composer in politically violent and economically rocky conditions? Can a black mark on his character - if that is the conclusion - be remedied by his musical creativity?

“Bob Dylan and Ecomusicology: Rewilding Interpretation”

“The Impact of Insider Research on the Researcher: Perspectives from an Ethnographer, Musician, and Activist”

“Excursions and Ascents – from Concept to Composition”