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Conference Schedule

Full conference program:

Final Schedule (23 March 2024)

All papers, roundtable and film screening will take place in the Music Department, Room 9; coffee breaks and social events will occur in the Department’s Taft Lounge.

Friday, 12 April

ca 11am-12:45pm: Welcome table (Taft Lounge)

12:45pm: Opening remarks (Room 9)

1-2:30pm: Panel 1: “Politics, Empowerment & (Music) Criticism”

  1. Nayive Ananías, “Filomena Salas, Chilean music critic of the first half of the 20th century: dissident, opinionated, and with familial ties that hid her writing”
  2. Max Jefferson, “Def Culture: Black Nationalist Music Criticism at The Cricket, 1968-9”
  3. Briana M. Nave, “Writing from a Body: Ellen Willis and Pro-Sex Rock Criticism”

2:30-2:45pm: Coffee Break

2:45-4:15pm: Panel 2: “Body Politics & Performance amidst Criticism”

  1. Hiro Cho, “Deep Critic or Surface Critique?: Yuja Wang’s ‘Superficial’ Performance and the Interruption of Music History”
  2. Avery Noe, “Legacy, Canon, and Gender: How Chopin’s Legacy has Been Affected by Non-Normative Gender Expression”
  3. Simon Cohen, “Bernstein, Tár, Mahler: Symphonic Music Onscreen and Music Criticism at the Limits”

4:15-4:30pm: Coffee Break

4:30-6pm: Panel 3: “Criticism Meets Musicology”

  1. Joseph E. Morgan, “Musicology in Music City: A re-evaluation of criticism”
  2. Rubina Mazurka, “The Longevity of Anonymous Criticism: Barbara Strozzi’s Reception”
  3. Kwame Ocran, “Do it Like They Did: A Pedagogy for the Black Music Scholar-Critic & Public Musicology”

6-7:30pm: Social Hour in the Taft Lounge (light dinner will be provided)

7:30pm: Film screening of Negrura (2022) and talkback with musician Fabiola Méndez (producer of Negrura), with Luis Pabón Rico and Maria Privado (co-hosted with Harvard’s Southern-Pian Society)

Saturday, 13 April

9-10am: Coffee & light breakfast (Taft Lounge)

10:00am-12:15pm: Panel 4: “Media/Mediation: Hearing and Seeing Music Criticism”

  1. Julian Day, “In the Ruins of Radio”
  2. Mia Yun, “Sonic Storytelling: The Essential Role of Korean Film Music Critique”

(15 minute break)

  1. Chae-Lin Kim, “Reconsidering Music Criticism in Sign Language: Deaf Performer from the Observed to the Observer”
  2. Fiona Boyd, “‘He Sounds Human’: Discourses of Liveness, Authenticity, and Genre in NPR Tiny Desk Concerts”

12:15-1:45pm: Lunch break (Lunch will be provided)

1:45-2:45pm: Roundtable with invited speakers: Lucy Caplan, A.Z. Madonna and Amelia Mason

2:45-3pm: Coffee Break

3-4:30pm: Panel 5: “Criticism in the Transnational Sphere: Ethics & Regimes of control”

  1. Glen Gray, “The Two Metastasios in Mid-Eighteenth-Century German Music Criticism”
  2. Zac Stewart, “Pierre Lalo, Résistant?”
  3. Jasper Schoff, “Hearing the ‘Clarion of the Gospel’: Jesuit Music Criticism in New France, c. 1650”

4:30-4:45pm: Coffee Break

4.45pm-6pm: Keynote, Prof. Lucy Caplan

News:

We are pleased to announce that our keynote speaker for the conference will be: Lucy Caplan, Assistant Professor of Music, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

We are also excited to announce that, in conjunction with the Southern-Pian Society, we will host a screening of Negrura, a 2022 film by Boston-based musician, composer, and educator Fabiola Méndez.

Lucy Caplan headshot

Lucy Caplan holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University, where she also earned a master’s concentration in Public Humanities. Caplan’s first book, High Culture on the Lower Frequencies: African Americans and Opera in the Early Twentieth Century (forthcoming with Harvard University Press), argues that early-twentieth-century African Americans redefined the genre of opera as a wellspring of antiracist activism, collective sociality, and aesthetic innovation. Exploring the work of performers, composers, critics, pedagogues, and students, Caplan show how Black artists transformed opera into a rich vein of lived experience under Jim Crow, an aesthetic endeavor that powerfully expanded the parameters of Black cultural production by facilitating new modes of self-making and world-making.

The recipient of the Rubin Prize for Music Criticism, Caplan also writes frequently for public audiences. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker online and Opera News, among others, and her program notes have been commissioned by Boston Lyric Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Seattle Opera, and Lincoln Center.

Fabiola Mendéz headshot

Fabiola M. Méndez is a Puerto Rican cuatrista, singer, composer, and educator that has taken part in a musical movement, crossing over the lines of genres such as folkloric, jazz & Latin and taking the listener on a journey through identities, cultures, and roots.

Fabiola Méndez’s project Negrura (released in 2022) is an audiovisual storytelling experience that showcases the stories of Afro-Latinx folks from Boston’s Latin Quarter Cultural District. The film aims to create spaces for conversations about colorism, anti-blackness, discrimination, and racism within our own Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latinx community.  Music, at the core of the project, connects our voices to provide a space for self-reflection, support, and healing.

Produced by: Fabiola Méndez | Directed by: Monica Cohen | Edited by: Paloma Valenzuela | Color by: Jorge Roman  | Audio mixing: Alex Maury López