Penn Music Colloquium Series

Chilean singer-songwriter Víctor Jara (1932-1973) is renowned for his role in protest music and his support for leftist causes through the New Song movement. After being brutally murdered following the 1973 coup, Jara became a martyr for the movement. This presentation explores Jara’s queerness, examining its impact on his role in the Communist Party and suggesting new interpretations of his music through a queer perspective.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.