The Graduate Center Music Program, CUNY

This Friday at 3pm GC student Magdalena Filipczak will be performing on the Chamber Music Live series curated by Marcy Rosen at Queens College. The program includes Beethoven’s Violin Sonata nr 6 in A major (Op. 30, nr1) and Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata Nr 2 (Op. 94a). The streaming will be on YouTube at this link:

Olivier Fluchaire, (D.M.A. graduate, class of 2011), was recently appointed as Chair of the Fine and Performing Arts Division at Manhattanville College (Purchase, New York). The Division counts Dance, Music, Theatre and Studio Arts disciplines with 20 undergraduate and graduate degrees and 70 full-time and part-time professors.

D.M.A. student Audrey Chen was selected as a semifinalist in this year's Young Concert Artists International Auditions. Here's a link to more info on their website: https://buff.ly/2SUyaHq. Congratulation to Audrey!

GC student Stephanie Lou George recently presented a paper entitled ‘It used to be all Hindi’: The Global Resonance of Indo-Guyanese ‘Madrasi’ Sonic Practices for Invoking a Local Tamil Diaspora at Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference! In this presentation, Stephanie drew from Juan Flores’s idea of diasporic music making and exchange as forms of cultural remittances in The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning (2009) to discuss how a grow...ing number of Indo-Guyanese practitioners of Madrasi Religion in the United States newly harness an ancient Tamil origins narrative to reinvent and revitalize ecstatic goddess worship in Guyana through cultural remittances of music and spirit mediumship in seeking to belong to South Asian American diaspora culture. She argued that the appeal of this diasporic narrative and recent attempts to sound Tamil are attributed to the emergence of Indo-Guyanese racial subjectivities in the U.S. context and the ongoing stigmatization of the sounds of Madrasi Religion resulting in the perception that knowledge is lacking in Guyana. See more

GC Professor Eliot Bates recently presented talks at two conferences: When Manley Pride Threatens Manly Pride: Examining Gear Online for the panel Unlocking the Control Room: Equity Achievements in Audio at the Audio Engineering Society conference, and Resource ecologies, political economies, and the ethics of audio technologies in the anthropocene at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference. Congratulations, Prof. Bates! #AESShow #SEM_2020 @oudplayer93 @AESorg

D.M.A. student Graeme Steele Johnson was selected as a semifinalist in this year's Young Concert Artists International Auditions. Here's a link to more info on their website: https://buff.ly/2SUyaHq. Congratulation, Graeme!

GC student Kathryn Straker to present a paper entitled At Home with the Exotic: The Celtic and the Oriental as Mutual Otherworlds in British Psychedelia at the upcoming AMS/SMT 2020 on November 14th. Congrats, Kathryn! About: Appropriations from Near Eastern music are a well-known psychedelic signifier in 1960s folk and rock, and in this paper I use Derrida’s concept of slippage to look at how orientalism coincides with native British elements in psychedelia. Both the Celtic and Oriental are saddled with spiritual tropes, and as objects cherry-picked out of their parent cultures, they become empty vessels for receiving the artists’ meaning, leading to further slippage in which shared musical traits that facilitate a sense of endlessness become the primary psychedelic signifiers.

GC student Greg Hartmann to present a paper entitled "Expanding Parsimony to Microtonal Music" in the upcoming 2020 Society for Music Theory conference. This presentation explores how expanding the definition of parsimony enables us to find parsimonious relationships such as P, L, and R in microtonal music of many different cardinalities.

Music theory Ph.D. candidate Stephen Gomez-Peck to present a paper entitled "(Hyper)metrical Games in Schubert's Early Piano Sonatas, at the upcoming 2020 Joint Meeting of the SMT and the AMS. About: While scholars have long recognized and engaged with rhythmic and metric virtuosity and playfulness in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, there is little such engagement to be found with the music of one of their Viennese heirs: Franz Schubert. Building off recent theoretical and analytical work in rhythm and meter scholarship, this paper explores metrical gameslike obscuring of the barlinein three of Schubert's piano sonatas from the years 181718.

GC professor Ben Lapidus will be presenting a paper entitled "El Patio de Adela: Music, Medicine, and Cultural Preservation in Guantánamo, Cuba" at the upcoming The Society for Ethnomusicology 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting, on Oct. 30 from 2-4pm. Congratulations! Founded in February 2014 and operating out of Dr. Adela Gómez Blanco’s backyard, El patio de Adela/Caverchelo.comb is a unique award-winning community-based project that combines medical care, health education, musical performance, and meaningful inter-generational exchanges while nurturing local cultural practices in the Loma del Chivo neighborhood of Guantánamo, Cuba.

Congratulation to Martha Schulenburg, who will be presenting a paper entitled "'Those Theda Bara Eyes': The Remediation of the Vamp from Cinema to Tin Pan Alley" at the American Musicological Society annual conference. This paper explores the creation and refashioning of the vampire women or "vamp" in American cinema and Tin Pan Alley during the 1910s and '20s. Looking at a selection of songs about actress Theda Bara, Hollywood's first sex symbol, Martha details how the commodification of the vamp in popular novelty song inadvertently normalized both the transgressive femme fatale and the music most closely associated with her: jazz.

GC student Lina Sofia Tabak presents Pulse Dissonance in Colombian Currulao" at the 2020 Society for Music Theory conference. The paper studies certain complex rhythmic patterns in the Pacific-coastal genre which are arguably polymetric. She argues that these patterns can be conceptualized using an altered version of Harald Krebs's metrical dissonance theory, adding a "pulse dissonance" model to the more normative "grouping" and "displacement" dissonances from his book, "Fantasy Pieces."

Peter Manuel, emeritus professor of ethnomusicology, will be presenting a paper entitled South Asian Musics and Cultural Remittances in Global Perspective: Making Sense out of Diasporic Flows at the upcoming The Society for Ethnomusicology 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting. Congratulations, Professor Manuel!

Congratulation to CUNY Ethnomusicology PhD Student Lynne Stillings, who will be presenting a paper entitled The Right to Participation: Childhood, NGOs, and Cultural Production in Dakar, Senegal, at the upcoming The Society for Ethnomusicology 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting! Summary: In Senegal, programs that utilize music as a means of promoting children’s rights have become a unique site of cultural production, and while these programs do not systematically measure or prove... the efficacy of music’s impact on children’s rights and protection, they have come to create opportunities for young people to participate in Senegal’s cultural sector. In this paper, I specifically discuss the activities of Studio Timbuktu, a children’s and youth hip hop studio funded by an international children’s rights NGO, and its relationship to Africulturban, a youth hip hop association dedicated to developing Dakar’s urban cultural sector. See more