Seminar Series

2025 John F. Larchet Memorial Lecture

Music and Conviviality: Empathy, Repair, and Homage

ABSTRACT

I will share parts of my introduction to an edited book in progress titled Connection, Empathy, and the Performing Arts. The book will feature chapters by eight music scholars and a full circle return to a musical and political idealism. I explore two sets of questions. First, how is the framework of ‘conviviality’ useful at this historical moment? When we focus on music and empathetic connection across difference, what does this bring to an area of music scholarship now dominated by attention to conflict, trauma, and violence? What’s gained and what’s lost by focusing on the reparative? Second, how can I honor the intention of a colleague whose research was dedicated to those questions? Ethnomusicologist Yoshitaka Terada instigated this book, brought me on as a co-organizer, and unexpectedly died midway through the project. As I work to weave the strands of his thought and mine – and the music scholars he brought together – into a book, I address issues now at the center of North American music research: what are the decolonial ethics of speaking for others? How can we share or cede scholarly authority? Now that our book is an act of homage, how can I recast ‘editing’ as an act of conviviality?

Deborah Wong is an ethnomusicologist and Professor Emerita of Music at the University of California, Riverside. She has written three books: Louder and Faster: Pain, Joy, and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko (2019), Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music (2004), and Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Ritual (2001). She served as editor for Nobuko Miyamoto’s extraordinary memoir, Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution (2021). Committed to public sector work at the national, state, and local levels, she serves on the board of Great Leap, a non-profit community arts organization with an Asian American focus. She hosts a weekly radio show titled Gold Mountain for KUCR 88.3 FM in Riverside. She was a member of the Taiko Center of Los Angeles for many years and still dances bon-odori every summer in Southern California Obon gatherings. She is a core member of the collaborative team that recently published the oral history book Riverside Women Creating Change: Stories and Inspiration from Activists and Organizers (Inlandia Institute, 2024).

Wednesday 7th May, 5:00pm

Mason Curran and Hayes Theatre, UCD Sutherland School of Law, Belfield Campus, Dublin 4 ((opens in a new window)view map)

(opens in a new window)Register to attend here.

Implicit Trust: Collaboration in New Music

Presented by Dr Seán Clancy (University College Dublin)

ABSTRACT

Music making across the world can be thought of as an essentially collaborative activity - it is something people do together. Think hard enough, and you can conceive of a way of describing even solo performances as a collaboration.
In a continuum that traditionally centres and celebrates the sole author, what unique and exciting possibilities could emerge if we make the collaborative nature of music the fundamental principle steering a body of work?
Drawing on the practices of visual artist Sol LeWitt, Fluxus, and the AACM, I will discuss how unique and exciting compositional strategies have been formed in my own work by finding the Other, trusting them implicitly, and aiming for utopia.

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?

The Dancer′s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India.

Presented by Professor Rumya S. Putcha (University of Georgia)

In The Dancer’s Voice Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood. Putcha argues that the public persona of the Indian dancer has come to represent India in the global imagination—a representation that supports caste hierarchies and Hindu ethnonationalism, as well as white supremacist model minority narratives. Generations of Indian women have been encouraged to embody the archetype of the dancer, popularized through film cultures from the 1930s to the present. Through analyses of films, immigration and marriage laws, histories of caste and race, advertising campaigns, and her own family’s heirlooms, photographs, and memories, Putcha reveals how women’s citizenship is based on separating their voices from their bodies. In listening closely to and for the dancer’s voice, she offers a new way to understand the intersections of body, voice, performance, caste, race, gender, and nation.

The Tyndall Effect

Presented by Professor Grainne Mulvey (TU Dublin)

ABSTRACT

Light and colour have long been a fascination of mine. The titles of many of my works—Shifting Colours, Diffractions, Parallel Light, Tunnelling To Light—bear witness to this. Discovering that John Tyndall—a highly-respected and influential Victorian  scientist, born in my home village—was one of the pre-eminent pioneers in this field, it was natural that I would try to find out more about him, and inevitably, this research impacted my own work, and over the last few years I have been drawing inspiration from his work in a number of pieces.
The Tyndall Effect is a CD bringing together five of these works, coupled with an extended essay on Tyndall’s life and work by Dr Norman “Mac” McMillan, for whom restoring Tyndall to his rightful place in the scientific pantheon has been a life’s work. From Mac, I learned much more about the historical, political and social context of Tyndall’s work, in particular the deliberately provocative Belfast Address of 1874, a polemical rallying call for the separation of religion and science.
I was naturally particularly drawn to Tyndall’s work on light and sound. There are obvious parallels that can be drawn between light and sound: both are wave (or wave-like) phenomena; both allow us to map our surroundings; both are mediums of communication; both can be used to create art…
However, analogy is not equivalence; for the creative artist, it’s a way to spark imagination. We are creating art, not lab demonstrations. While the scientist is seeking—and governed by—a universal set of laws, with each new work the artist is creating an entirely new universe, subject only to the limits of the imagination. Every work brings us back to Genesis chapter 1—and we get to play God!
Extra-musical inspiration is just that—something outside of music that stimulates the imagination. In my case it’s often something visual: the constantly changing shapes of a murmuration of starlings or shoal of fish; a meteor shower; an auroral display; the colours of the sunrise and sunset; the blue of the sky—and it was Tyndall who explained why the sky is blue!
Colour is important in my music, both literally, in the sense of timbre, but also metaphorically, as a way of working with musical material. Every time we see a rainbow, we are seeing how white light can be split into constituent parts. Those colours can be recombined in an infinite variety of ways to produce new colours.
So it is with sound: individual musical parameters can be separated and recombined to produce new “hybrid” material, which can then undergo the same process to produce yet more new material—and so on.
The five works in this collection display this process in very different contexts: mapping the colour spectrum to the piano keyboard in Calorescence, the dangers and delights of Alpine exploration in the Cello Concerto “Excursions and Ascents”, the emergence of order from primordial chaos in LUCA and Diffractions, and the electronic expansion of the piano sound world in Sun of Orient Crimson with Excess of Light.
Having been invited to contribute to a book Mac is writing on the history of Irish optics, the parallels with light and  sound continue to inspire me—in the recent Light Scattering, for violin and piano, as well as two works in progress: the Solstice Prelude for flute and electronics and Rosette for orchestra—named after the Rosette nebula, which we see today as it was at the time Newgrange was being built.

Breaking the Symphonic Glass Ceiling: Emilie Mayer's Orchestral Concert in Berlin in the 1850s

Presented by Dr Nicole Grimes (Trinity College Dublin)

ABSTRACT