Conference Agenda

The Prospective Graduate Student Fair is a meet-and-greet event. The fair is an opportunity for prospective graduate students to meet with representatives of multiple departments of music to learn more about their graduate programs, resources, and the opportunities on offer.\nATTENTION - Department Leaders: You must reserve a table and designate a liaison for your institution to be represented. Click here to reserve space for your institution to participate in the Prospective Graduate Student Fair!

This first-ever film documentation of a 400-year-old current musical practice called Vingwengwe is accompanied by two discussions: one an external analysis, the other, an internal theoretical performance practice analysis. These discussions shed light on a twofold examination of an unexplored organological practice. The first discussion, titled African Organology as “Urtext” explores the historical, social, and cultural context of the Vingwengwe phenomenon in which each claypot is rhythmically frictionalized by a three-legged stool. “Organological Urtext” denotes the ancient musical instruments used polyrhythmically that remain unchanged to this day. Hiding in plain sight, we argue, domestic utensils (claypots and stools) were transmogrified unchanged into musical instruments, accounting for the paucity of musical scholarship on Western Tanzania’s Vingwengwe ritualistic practices.\nThe second exploration, Geometry and Tradition, uses Jay Rahn’s and Godfried Toussaint’s applications of the theory of maximal evenness to argue: “Does the ubiquity of these maximal evenness patterns suggest a historical tie between various African traditions, or should they be seen as a natural preference of the human ear?” Preliminary analysis reveals that Vingwengwe performance shares a mathematical grammar with better-known Sub-Saharan traditions. By comparing Vingwengwe rhythms to mathematical models of evenness, this presentation explores whether these structures are \"cultural fossils\" passed down through generations or \"auditory optima\" that emerge independently across different societies.\nThis unreleased new short documentary (36 minutes) reveals that overlooked water- and cooking-claypots when used as sophisticated polyrhythmic idiophones, are the original progenitors of the contemporary musical instruments of the Fipa people of Western Tanzania. These instruments serve as “organological urtexts.” The larger maximal evenness questions connect initial theoretical findings to broader concerns of musical disciplines, which require close interdisciplinary collaboration between musicology and music theory. Combining a macrocosmic with a microcosmic discussion, this unprecedented academic film presents a persuasive new approach to a living-in-plain-sight ethnographic musical practice.

The pipa has long occupied a distinctive place in Chinese musical culture as an instrument uniquely associated with femininity in repertory, performance practice, and reception history. Yet the sonic means through which femininity is articulated in pipa music have changed significantly across the twentieth century. This concert, performed by Dr. Yuxin Mei, examines four different musical strategies through which gendered meaning is produced in pipa repertoire: narrative lyricism, aesthetic contrast, symphonic heroism, and timbral abstraction. By juxtaposing traditional narrative repertoire with twentieth-century programmatic, socialist-era concerto writing, and late-century coloristic composition, the program demonstrates that femininity in pipa music functions not as a fixed cultural symbol but as a historically contingent performance aesthetic shaped through technique, texture, and sound production.