MacKay Lecture Series

 2008-09

Music, Culture, and Society

Music is widely recognized as one of the most powerful and meaningful human activities, but how does music work and why do people care so deeply about it? Our speakers probe these questions, addressing music in a variety of contexts and offering insights into the ways in which music represents value systems, informs social relationships, and structures human consciousness. Themes of spirituality, technology, aesthetics, sexuality, and ethnic identity are examined through lectures on topics ranging from traditional music cultures to the latest music software, illuminating the functions, forms and meanings of musical practice.

Lecture One - September 25, 2008

Ondaatje Auditorium
Marion McCain Arts and Social Sciences Building
7:30pm - Reception at 8:30pm

“Sex, Death, and Mary Magdalene at the Foot of the Cross”

Susan McClary, Professor of Musicology, UCLA

Susan McClary specializes in the cultural criticism of music, both the European canon and contemporary popular genres.  She is best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), which examines cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body in various musical repertories, ranging from early seventeenth-century opera to the songs of Madonna.  McClary is also author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000), Georges Bizet: Carmen (1992), and coeditor with Richard Leppert of Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (1987). In her more recent publications, she explores the many ways in which subjectivities have been construed in music from the sixteenth-century onward. Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (2004) won the Otto Kinkeldey Prize from the American Musicological Society in 2005, and she is now working on Power and Desire in Seventeenth-Century Music.  Her work has been translated into at least twelve languages, and she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1995.

Professor McClary's presentation will include a vocal-harpsichord performance of the 17th-century sacred song  A piè della gran Croce by Italian composer Girolamo Frescobaldi, as McClary examines the cultural assumptions that were necessary for this unusual work to make sense to listeners of the day.

Robert Walser, Professor of Musicology, UCLA

Robert Walser specializes in jazz and other American popular music, including scholarly publications on music ranging from the polka to hip-hop.  He is the author of Running with the Devil:  Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (1993) and edited Keeping Time:  Readings in Jazz History (1999), and he contributed 28 entries to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, including the main entry on North American popular music.  His most recent work investigates the ways in which recent technological developments have redefined music, musicianship, and musicality. Chair of the UCLA Musicology Department from 1998 to 2006, he has also served as President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U. S. Branch (2002-04) and as Editor of the journal American Music (1997-2001).  A recipient of NEH and ACLS Fellowships, he has twice won the Irving Lowens Award for Distinguished Scholarship in American Music.

Beverley Diamond, Canada Research Chair in Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology, Memorial University

Beverley Diamond is a Canadian ethnomusicologist who assumed the Canada Research Chair in Traditional Music at Memorial University in 2002.  Since the early 1970s, she has worked extensively in Inuit and First Nations communities in the Northwest Territories, Labrador, Quebec, and Ontario, and she has also done research in Sami communities in Norway and Finland. The relationship of music to issues of cultural identity (relating to such diverse subjects as women’s expressive cultures, musical instruments as cultural metaphor, and indigenous popular music) has been central to her work. Her publications include Visions of Sound: Musical Instruments of First Nations Communities in Northeastern America (co-authored with M. Sam Cronk and F. von Rosen, 1994), Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity (co-edited with Robert Witmer, 1994), and Music and Gender (co-edited with Pirkko Moisala, 2000).  She currently holds a SSHRC Research Grant to study the ways in which indigenous musics (both Native American and Sami) are being selected, produced, and circulated for transnational audiences.