Graduate Colloquium and Workshop Series
Our Graduate Colloquium and Workshop series includes lectures and practical workshops by distinguished guests, our own faculty and staff, and senior graduate students on all fields of research and creative activity in music.
Admission is free and open to all. Most of these in-person events are held in Talbot College room 101. All events will be on Fridays at 3:30.
Please contact ayardley@uwo.ca for more information.
2024-25 Series
Winter 2025
Friday, January 10| 3:30pm
TC 101
Colloquium
J. Alex. Young (Brandon University)
“Indigenous Perspectives of Musicianship: Creativity, Presence, Education and Understanding”
Bio
J. Alex. Young is a Cree-Métis Composer from Northern Ontario. He holds a Bachelor of Music (Honours) from Carleton University, a Masters in Composition from the University of Ottawa, and a Ph.D in Composition from the University of Calgary. He has operated as an Indigenous student advisor for the University of Calgary Equity Diversity Inclusion and Decolonization Committee and is currently a dedicated member of the Canadian Music Centre’s Accountability for Change and Indigenous Advisory Councils.
In 2019 he was awarded the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for his research on Indigenous culture which encompasses aspects of Cree storytelling, ceremony and song as inspiration for new creative works. His most recent work titled šâkohtâw (shâ-kôhê-tâ-hwah) was premiered February 27, 2022, by the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra as an Indigenous composer commissioned to create a new work for Tom Jackson’s digital series The Bear and the Wild Rose. Currently he is undertaking two commissions for the Calgary Wind Symphony and Tim Brady’s Instruments of Happiness ensemble.
Starting in September 2022 he has joined the School of Music at Brandon University as Assistant Professor of Composition and Indigenous Music Perspectives. J. Alex Young feels to reflect a musical concord between his Indigenous Cree and Western heritage that a unity of self, community, land and spirit must be maintained. His compositions are combinatory sonic and narrative explorations of his personal connection to home, family, story and spirituality.
Abstract
Indigenous storytelling is a means of connecting our spirituality to our culture and our past to our present. I view story and song as equally significant within my Cree culture, and as an Indigenous person, storytelling is tied to my expression of self within my music. I take great care in sharing my cultural background through music as Indigenous musicians operate in a time where the simple act of presence holds high standards. The cultural erasure of residential schools has resulted in pale transcriptions of Indigenous culture and music. These misrepresentations of our culture and people have resulted in convoluted and disrespectful views of Indigenous people. Therefore, present-day Indigenous people walk a line between these representations and reality. With slow and careful steps, we aim to cease false representations of our people.
Every act an Indigenous person undertakes reflects our people and our culture. Our spirituality permeates every aspect of our lives and the objects we create, but non-Indigenous observers of our culture often disregard or are unaware of this concept. Thus, Indigenous musicians have taken on the responsibility to use every opportunity to share as one to teach. Musical creativity and expression are hence inseparable from education and practice. Indigenous ancestors teach and guide our practices. Furthermore, our present-day practices teach and guide those yet to come. Indigenous musicians hope to promote understanding through these expressions of culturally-defined respect for our ancestors, generations and spirituality. Creativity, presence, education and understanding thus are the cornerstones of the Indigenous perspective of musicianship.
Past Colloquia and Workshops Fall 2024
Friday, September 13| 3:30pm
TC 340
Workshop
Chantal Lemire (Western University)
“How to Write an Effective Scholarship Application”
Led by Dr. Chantal Lemire (PhD 2021), Don Wright Faculty of Music Research Officer, the workshop explores SSHRC graduate scholarship applications, writing styles, and specific advice for proposals involving music research.
Graduate Scholarship Workshop - slides
Friday, September 27| 3:30pm
TC 101
Colloquium
Jonathan De Souza (Western University)
“‘You Can Hear Their Interaction’: Musical Texture, Ensemble Coordination, and Social Network Analysis”
Bio
Jonathan De Souza is an Associate Professor of Music Theory. He is also the Director of Western’s Graduate Collaborative Specialization in Music Cognition.
Dr. De Souza’s research combines music theory, psychology, and philosophy, and it examines both classical and popular repertoire. He is particularly interested in music, performance, and embodiment. For example, his book, Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, asks how instruments affect music’s sounding organization and players’ experience. In 2020, Music at Hand won the Emerging Scholar Book Award from the Society for Music Theory, and he received a Faculty Scholar Award recognizing significant achievements in research.
Dr. De Souza often collaborates across disciplines. He is an Associate Member of Western’s Centre for Brain and Mind and a Core Member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism.
At Western, Dr. De Souza teaches a range of undergraduate theory courses. Recent graduate courses have explored music cognition, the history of music theory and science, and music theory pedagogy.
Dr. De Souza holds a PhD in music theory and history from the University of Chicago, an MMus from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a BMus from Western University. He joined the faculty at Western in 2013.
Abstract
Research on musical texture often takes a listener’s perspective: it shows how simultaneous parts are grouped according to principles of auditory perceptual organization. Performers in a musical ensemble have a different viewpoint. A violist in an orchestra, a soprano in a choir, or a rhythm guitarist in a funk band will experience texture from the inside. For ensemble performers, texture combines sonic and interpersonal relations. They coordinate with other musicians, synchronizing or interlocking, leading or following. Texture, then, reveals music as a medium for social interaction, as a kind of “social media”. In this talk, I’ll approach ensemble textures via social network analysis. I’ll present networks where nodes correspond to parts in the ensemble, and links reflect the proportion of shared note onsets. This method facilitates multi-layered analyses that consider relational properties of the whole ensemble, clusters within it, or individual parts—and changes in all of these parameters over time. It can be applied to individual pieces or larger corpora, and my illustrations will include repertoire for symphony orchestra, chamber groups, choir, and jazz big band. Ultimately, I argue that social networks are a powerful tool for analyzing texture in ensemble music, which can engage both listening and performance
Friday, October 25| 3:30pm
TC 101
Colloquium
Kristin M. Franseen (Western University)
“Flattered, fêted, extolled, nay, almost deified”: Canonical Anxieties and (Mis)reporting Salieri’s Decline in the Media Landscape of 19th-Century Europe
Bio
Kristin M. Franseen is a postdoctoral associate in musicology at Western University. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow in history at Concordia University, where her research was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC). She received her PhD in musicology from McGill University with a dissertation on early 20th-century queer musicological approaches to 18th- and 19th-century opera, symphonic music, and composer biography. Her first book, Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson, was published by Clemson University Press in 2023. Articles stemming from this research also appear in 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters, and Theoria.
Her current book project, tentatively entitled The Intriguing Afterlives of Antonio Salieri: Gossip, Fiction, and the Post-Truth in Music Biography, considers the place of unreliable sources in composer biography and reception history. Preliminary research from this project has appeared in an article on 20th-century crime fiction about Mozart’s death for the Journal of Historical Fictions and in an expanded and updated entry on Constanze Mozart for Grove Music Online’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality project. She is currently working on an article for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Public Musicology on musicological references and depictions of misinformation in post-2016 productions of Amadeus. Kristin has also made appearances on various public history podcasts (mostly to talk about historical gossip), including Professor Buzzkill, New Books on Music, History Rage, and Vulgar History. Her secondary research interests include women in the history of music theory, representations of female philosophers in 18th-century comic opera, and celebrity endorsements in early metronome advertising.
Abstract
In a footnote to an article on the present state of Viennese musical life published in the January 1824 issue of the British music magazine The Harmonicon, editor William Ayrton remarked upon the then-recent hospitalization of Antonio Salieri, lamenting that “so celebrated a musician…should now be compelled to seek refuge under a roof supported by charity” as “such an impeachment of the generosity, of the justice, of those classes that enjoyed the fruits of his genius, that we cannot find terms sufficiently strong to express the indignation which such a fact rouses.” Salieri was a regular topic of the magazine’s international coverage throughout its decade of existence (1823-1833), including a detailed obituary, frequent reports on his hospitalization and mental state reprinted from similar news items in Leipzig and Paris, and speculation about his musical legacy. Under the heading “Curious Documents,” The Harmonicon even printed a much-abridged translation of Giuseppe Carpani’s famous 1824 defense of Salieri, reflecting the international circulation of (and public interest in) both legitimate composer biography and more dubious biographical anecdote and gossip. Yet while both the magazine’s tone in the 1824 editorial note and the preface to Carpani’s letter were sympathetic to Salieri, other mentions of him and his work frequently take on a more critical tone. One negative review of a new English translation of his opera Tarare, for example, accuses audiences and the musical press of poor taste in having preferred Salieri’s operas to Mozart’s.
This presentation positions The Harmonicon alongside other early 19th-century international media wrestling with Salieri’s reputation, including journalism, reminiscences, and fiction. Building on work by Christopher Wiley (2008), Marie Bennett (2018), and Abigail Fine (2023) on the power of the anecdote in musical mythmaking, I argue that published discussions of Salieri’s mental health and (eventually) posthumous legacy reflected an uneasiness around shifting notions of musical canonicity and biography taking shape in the European musical press throughout the 1820s and 1830s. This anxiety—largely revolving around the idea that both the public and the media are ill-equipped to distinguish popularity from greatness—shaped not only public perceptions of Salieri and his contemporaries, but also a musical discourse prone to hyperbole, conspiratorial thought, and a fixation on being on the artistic “right side of history” for decades (and centuries) to come.
Friday, November 29| 3:30pm
TC 101
Workshop
Emily Ansari (Western University)
“Recipes for a Happy Academic Writing Life”
Want to develop a calm, consistent, and enjoyable academic writing practice? Plagued by inner demons and bad habits that make it hard to meet your goals? Come talk about the psychology of writing with Prof. Ansari. Drawing from the latest scholarship on productive academic writing, we'll examine practices that will make your writing life more manageable.
