Eugene Thacker (Media Studies, New School for Social Research) “Music and Negation”

Frances Dyson (Technocultural Studies, UC Davis)“From Hard to Soft Sound: Michel Serres’s Movement From Individual to Collective via Tone, Sensation and the Anechoic”

Thomas Y. Levin (German, Princeton) “‘Interro-Tunes’: Music, Torture and
the Aesthetic Politics of the Playlist”

All events are free and open to the public

Silver Center for Arts and Science / 100 Washington Square East / Department of Music, Rm 220

Sponsored by the departments of Music and Comparative Literature; with support from the NYU Humanities Initiative

The new (winter 2011)  issue of Grey Room features a conversation between Branden W. Joseph (Columbia) and Suzanne G. Cusick (NYU), “Across an Invisible Line: A Conversation About Music and Torture.”

Branden W. Joseph presented a paper titled “Biomusic” at MLT I, in February 2009.

4pm – 6pm

Martin Harries (English, NYU): “Still: Sarah Kane After Beckett and Joy Division”

Tamara Levitz (Music, UCLA): “The Composer as Allegorical Critic: Interpreting Musical Modernism through the Lens of Walter Benjamin”

All events are free and open to the public

Silver Center for Arts and Science / 100 Washington Square East / Department of Music, Rm 220

Note:

Prof. Levitz has recommended the following readings:

-  Benjamin-Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Benjamin, Walter. “Zur Kritik der Gewalt Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 47, no. 3 (August, 1921): 809-32; rpt. in Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), vol. 2.1, 179-204)

- English translation: Benjamin – Critique of Violence (Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 1 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 236-53.)

- Jacques Derrida, Force de loi: Le ‘fondement mystique de l’autorité’, (Paris: Galilée, 1994), reproduced in French and English in Cordozo Law Review (1989-1990): 920-1045.

Tamara Levitz (Music, UCLA): “The Composer as Allegorical Critic: Interpreting Musical Modernism through the Lens of Walter Benjamin”

Martin Harries (English, NYU): “Still: Sarah Kane After Beckett and Joy Division”

–and–

MLT VII, April 20, 2011 (4:30pm)

Eugene Thacker (Media Studies, New School for Social Research)

Thomas Y. Levin (German, Princeton)

Frances Dyson (Technocultural Studies, UC Davis)

Jason Stanyek (Music, NYU)

All events are free and open to the public

Silver Center for Arts and Science / 100 Washington Square East / Department of Music, Rm 220

Sponsored by the departments of Music and Comparative Literature; with support from the NYU Humanities Initiative

Friday, December 10th

3:00  -  7:00pm

Kevin Bell (English, SUNY Albany): “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City:
Sound as Break in Christopher Harris’s “Still/Here.”

Myles Jackson (History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, NYU): “The Role of Physicists in Measuring and Defining Nineteenth-Century Musical Aesthetics.”

Ana María Ochoa (Music, Columbia University): “Orality and Orthography in Nineteenth-Century Colombia”"

Gary Tomlinson (Music, University of Pennsylvania): “Paleolithic Formalism.”

Silver Center for Arts and Science

100 Washington Square East

Department of Music, Rm 220, 2nd floor

Sponsored by the departments of Music and Comparative Literature; with support from the NYU Humanities Initiative

Please save the date for:

MLT VI, March 4, 2011 (4pm)

Speakers: Tamara Levitz (Music, UCLA) and Martin Harries (English, NYU)

MLT VII, April 20, 2011 (4:30pm)

Speakers: Eugene Thacker (Media Studies, New School for Social Research), Thomas Y. Levin (German, Princeton), Frances Dyson (Technocultural Studies, UC Davis), Jason Stanyek (Music, NYU)

Friday, December 4

Fred Moten (Duke) “Jurisgenerative Grammar (_For Alto_)”

5:30 pm

Maureen McLane (NYU) “Border Trouble: or, Ballad Mediality and ‘World Literature’”

Abstract: In this paper, Maureen N. McLane will explore how ballads, as both texts and tunes, have long crossed, troubled, yet also sustained multiple borders–historical, national, medial. A reckoning with balladry’s transmedial status, and with the long history of ballad scholarship in English, suggests many openings for further theoretical reflection: not least about the underexplored relations between recent discussion of “World Literature” and of “World Music.” Some specific topics: the ambiguous status of Scotland and of Scottish balladry since the 18th century; the place of Herder in recent theorizations of World Literature; “The Twa Sisters” as case study for investigations into locality and globality.

David Samuels (NYU) “Who Invented Music and Language?”

Abstract: In some recent work on language evolution, music has re-emerged as a practice notable for its explanatory power. Yet this work also recycles dichotomous models that link language to the rational and music to the emotional. In this paper I attempt to come to an understanding of a possible music-language link that moves away from syntax and cognition and toward socialization and playfulness.