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MUSICOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

30/10/2015

Vitry in the Rhineland? A provisional report, and some methodological considerations

Colloquium Muziekwetenschap
prof. dr. Karl Kügle

19 November, 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, zaal 3.01

The ontological status of Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361) escapes easy classification even more than that of his contemporary, ‘secretary-poet-musician’ (Leach 2011) Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377). Vitry personally might have seen himself first and foremost as a cleric, pursuing a career that led him from studies at Paris University into service to two noble houses within the extended French royal family (Bourbon and Valois), culminating in his appointment as bishop of Meaux (1351-61). Having fulfilled relatively straightforward functions for his aristocratic patrons at first, including legal counsel and notary, he acquired important posts within the Valois administration following Philip of Valois’s accession to the French throne (1328), at the same time serving as royal propagandist, diplomat, and tutor to Philip’s children. Hailing (probably) from Artois, his own family included several brothers also active in French politics. He befriended the likes of Petrarch and of Pierre Roger, archbishop of Rouen, later Pope Clement VI (1342-52), possibly one of Philippe’s student friends. He was a scholar of music, theology, and astronomy, an early humanist, a poet working in Latin and Old French, a singer, and – last but not least - a composer. His reputation extended far beyond France into England, Italy, Central Europe and Cyprus, and endured well into the fifteenth century. His fame was revived by musicologists who see him as one of the key instigators of the so-called ‘ars nova’.

Against such a background (‘data-poor’ but exceptionally rich in hermeneutic possibilities), any additional material coming to light acquires unusual importance. In my paper, I shall review the state of Vitry research today, then introduce a new source I discovered recently in the Middle Rhine region of Germany. I conclude with some methodological considerations: How to grasp the complexities of a past where even the word for music (musica) means something different from what it means to us?

21/10/2015

MA Graduation Conference Friday 23 October

On Friday 23 October, the recent graduates from the MA Musicology UvA will present their research for their fellow students, family, friends, and anyone interested. After the presentations, students will receive the certificate for the MA Musicology. The location is room 1.01A at the University Theater, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, Amsterdam.

Full program:

9:45-10:15 Meagan Hughes  -  Music and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland
10:15-10:45 Fabian Westzaan  -  Volharding in de Progressieve Muziekpraktijk. Over het activisme van Orkest de Volharding van 1972 tot 1983

10:45-11:00 break

11:00-11:30 Belle Edelman - Musical Recall: A Study on Transmission
11:30-12:00 Tim Ruijgrok - Dissonant Views on Consonance (presentation in Dutch)

12:00-13:30 break

13:30-14:00 Geraldine van Gelder  -  Lamentaties van Palestrina en Lasso
14:00-14:30 Rebecca Erickson - A Filmic Sound Atlas

14:30-14:45 break

14:45-15:15 Aart Appelhof  - Eduard Hanslick en programmatische muziek
15:15-15:45 Laura Jonker  -  Bang on a Can-ism. Postminimalism, totalism and the music by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe (presentation in Dutch)

15:45-16:00 break

16:00-16:30 Marloes Schuurman - Gender, muziek en islam. Vier case studies over Marokkaanse zangeressen in Nederland
16:30-17:00 Jurre Thuijs - Pitch Anticipation: a study of glide tone perception

02/10/2015

Music notation as technology and material culture in the performances of the ICP Orchestra

Colloquium Muziekwetenschap
Floris Schuiling

15 October, 15:30-17:00
Universiteitstheater, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, zaal 3.01

This talk presents some of the results of an ethnographic study of Amsterdam-based improvising collective the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra, taking their notated repertoire as inspiration for formulating a new approach to music notation after the performative turn in music scholarship. The ICP, founded in 1967 by Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink and Willem Breuker and still performing, is one of the longest consistently performing groups in improvised music. Influenced by free jazz, experimental music and performance art, founding member Mengelberg composed a diverse repertoire of pieces that construct different possibilities for improvisation and creative interaction in performance.

In such an improvised context, it seems pointless to approach these pieces as ‘representations’ of the music they play. Rather than such a binary relation between text and performance, I draw on the work of anthropologist Alfred Gell (1992, 1998) to describe them as technologies, mediating social and creative agency of performers in a wider network of mediating relations between musicians and their instruments. While a critical attitude to the centrality of the work in musicology has been vital for the performative turn, this formulation of the role of notation in a model of distributed creativity is intended to develop a positive understanding of notation and its role in the construction of musical cultures and socialities.