Penn Music Colloquium Series

The Department of Music's main Colloquium Series showcases new research by leading scholars in music and sound studies and composers both in the United States and internationally.  All Music Colloquia takes place in Room 101 of the Lerner Center on Tuesdays at 5:15 PM.

Fall 2023

October 3: Nina Eidsheim, Professor of Musicology and Humanities, UC Los Angeles

October 24: Brian Kane, Associate Professor of Music and Film and Media Studies, Yale University

November 28: Alessandra Ciucci, Associate Professor of Music, Ethnomusicology, Columbia University

December 12: George Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Composition & Historical Musicology, Columbia University

Spring 2024

January 30: Steven Takasugi, Composer, associate of Harvard University Department of Music

February 13: Gavin Steingo, Associate Professor of Music, Princeton University

March 12: M. Myrta Leslie Santana, Assistant Professor of Integrative Studies, UC San Diego

April 9: Mark Burford, R.P. Wollenberg Professor of Music, Reed College

Upcoming Events



Performing Preservation: White Women’s Voices and Old South Black Song

Colloquium Lecture by Mark Buford
Apr 9, 2024 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 101, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

This talk considers inscrutable contradictions in the reception of three early twentieth-century white southern women expressly committed to preserving antebellum Black vernacular song by performing the voices of their childhood “mammies.”

Past Events



Transforming las Américas: Trans/Queer Performance in Cuba and its Diaspora

Colloquium Lecture by M. Myrta Leslie Santana
Mar 12, 2024 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 101, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

The talk delves into the influence of trans and queer performances in the Cuban diaspora, highlighting events like Wigwood drag festival in Miami, a 1980s album by a Cuban drag queen in New York, and ongoing work by a Black lesbian drag king in Havana. From her upcoming book, she contributes to discussions bridging performance and music studies, exploring the intricacies of trans and queer lives in the Spanish-speaking Americas.



Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity

Colloquium Lecture by Gavin Steingo
Feb 13, 2024 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 101, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

This talk offers a précis of Steingo's new book, Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (University of Chicago Press)In the book, he examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human—cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged.



Just-noticeably Human (JNH): Musical Humanness in the Age of Digital Automation

Colloquium Lecture by Steven Takasugi
Jan 30, 2024 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 101, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

Composer Steven Takasugi believes it is a composer’s inquiry into perception from an intuitive, metaphorical vantage point. This lecture applies this concept to experiential material and form in the troubled age of automation, in hopes of computer-assisted, technologically critical artworks.



New Music and the Heterogenous Sound Ideal

Colloquium Lecture by George Lewis
Dec 12, 2023 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 101, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

Join us for a presentation by George Lewis, American composer, musicologist, computer-installation artist, and trombonist. Lewis’s central areas of scholarship are exemplified by his widely read book, "A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music" (University of Chicago Press, 2008) which received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award.



Sentinel Musicians of the Ethiopian American Diaspora

Colloquium Lecture by Kay Kaufman Shelemay
Dec 5, 2023 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 101, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

Kay Kaufman Shelemay comes to the Lerner Center to discuss the experiences of Ethiopian musicians during the 1974 Ethiopian revolution, their forced migration abroad, and their roles in helping found new communities in the Ethiopian American diaspora. 



The “Tea Tray:” Nass el Ghiwane, Popular Music, and the Sound of Protest in Morocco (1970s-1990s)

Colloquium Lecture by Alessandra Ciucci
Nov 28, 2023 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 101, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

Alessandra Ciucci presents her current project where she posits that in order to understand the effectiveness of the songs of Nass el Ghiwane it is critical to examine their musicopoetic assemblage with its rich web of citations and intertextual references, and to acknowledge the force of the band’s sound that Moroccans heard as “revolutionary” (thəuri) and with a “protest tone” (nəbra ḥtjajiya).



Birmingham and the Voice of Al Hibbler

Colloquium Lecture by Brian Kane
Oct 24, 2023 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 102, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

Hibbler’s idiosyncratic use of the voice presents a challenge to the orthodoxies of “voice studies.”