[367] Music colloquium draws 2 top scholars to MTSU for free public lectures

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — The MTSU School of Music is sponsoring a Music Colloquium that will bring two top scholars to campus for free public presentations on Tuesday, March 28, and Thursday, April 20.

Joy H. Calico, the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University, will speak at 1 p.m. March 28 in Room 207 of MTSU’s Saunders Fine Arts Building. Helena Simonett, senior research associate at Switzerland’s Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, will speak at 2:40 p.m. April 20 in Room 101 of the Saunders Building.

A searchable campus parking map is available at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParkingMap. Off-campus visitors attending the lectures should obtain a special one-day permit for each at http://www.mtsu.edu/parking/visit.php.

Calico will discuss her research on “Noise and Arnold Schoenberg’s 1913 Scandal Concert.” March 28. The Austrian-American composer, known for creating new musical composition methods involving atonality, conducted a concert in the Great Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein that was broken up by a melee and led to legal proceedings.

The professor said her research “analyzes the ways in which both the scandal and Schoenberg’s response to it sit at the nexus of fin-de-siecle anxieties about Central European concert life, the anti-noise movement and emerging copyright law.”

Calico is the author of two monographs, “Brecht at the Opera” and “Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe,” and she is writing a book about opera since Salome. She’s also the co-founder of the Music and Sound Studies Network of the German Studies Association and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. 

Simonett’s April 20 presentation, “Yoreme Cocoon Leg Rattles: An Eco-organological Study of a Unique ‘Sound Maker,’” stems from her research among the indigenous peoples of northwestern Mexico.

She received her doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has conducted extensive research on Mexican popular music and its transnational diffusion, as well as exploring the role of indigenous ceremonial music and dance in northwestern Mexico.

Simonett’s publications include “Banda: Mexican Musical Life Across Borders” and “En Sinaloa Nací: Historia de la Música de Banda,” and she edited “The Accordion in the Americas: Klezmer, Polka, Tango, Zydeco, and More!” and co-edited “A Latin American Music Reader: Views from the South.” She also produced the children’s book “Ca’anáriam — Hombre Que No Hizo Fuego” with Bernardo Esquer López in both Yoreme and Spanish with an English translation.

The MTSU Music Colloquium is a public series that presents scholarship on music and music-related issues concerning the world’s many music traditions. More details on both events are available at http://www.mtsu.edu/music/colloquium2017.php.

For information on MTSU School of Music events and musical performances, please visit http://www.mtsumusic.com or call 615-898-2493.