[Thursday @ 5:30pm – 6:30pm, Yenching Auditorium]
Emily Dolan
“On the Edges of Technology”
Abstract
Musicology’s recent material and mediatic obsessions have turned scholars’ attentions towards the many things that make musical culture possible. Objects proliferate in music studies today: the field embraces everything from Wagnerian steam engines, unruly synthesizers, and magnetic tape, to automata, music boxes, and shellac. Part of the appeal of studying a particular musical technology has been the conceptual solidity it promises: it seemingly serves as a kind of archive of a particular soundworld. It is an access point to a past listening culture, bound to a particular time and place, and one that reveals and unmasks hidden sonic values and laboring bodies. But the influx of all of these objects raises fresh questions: how is it that for so long we have been able to listen past our material reality? Is the study of instruments and technology necessarily a corrective to a more idealized understanding of music? As much as music scholars might try to use instruments to counteract music’s abstract and incorporeal tendencies, instruments themselves are often idealized, functioning as objects of the imagination. This talk turns to the history of what is arguably one of the first digital instruments to think about the boundaries between the material and the immaterial.
Biography
Emily I. Dolan is Associate Professor of Music at Brown University. Dolan works on the music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on issues of orchestration, timbre, aesthetics, and instrumentality. She is the author of The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She has published articles and essays in Current Musicology, Eighteenth-Century Music, Studia Musicologica, Keyboard Perspectives, Representations, and 19th-Century Music. In 2018, she guest edited a double issue of Opera Quarterly entitled “Vocal Organologies and Philologies.” With Alexander Rehding, Dolan co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Timbre (2021) and is completing her second book, Instruments and Order.