Penn Music Colloquium Series

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. 

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).

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

Join us for a talk with Nina Eidsheim, Professor of Musicology and Humanities at UC Los Angeles, as she considers artist, composer, and musician Camille Norment’s solo shows at Dia Chelsea (2022) and Bergen Kunsthall (2023).

Dr. Ioanida Costache is an ethnomusicologist and sound studies scholar specializing in Romani artist practices. Her work explores the legacies of Romani historical trauma, and the feminist and de-colonial critiques of the present, inscribed in Romani music, sound, and art.