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Don Shirley, the subject of the 2018 film Green Book, performed in nightclubs after being denied classical concert management on account of race. He navigated audile discrimination through musical means that mirrored the spirit of the Negro Motorist Green Book and the ethos of the Civil Rights Movement. His performing style blended popular and classical techniques while aiming to stimulate engaged, “serious” listening of an otherwise inaudible Black performer within a racially restrictive musical culture. Simultaneously, Shirley’s pianistic strategies intersected with gendered performance negotiations. For a Black pianist like Shirley, being thrust into entertainment paradigms prompted resisting prejudice tied to the afterlives of blackface minstrelsy. Shirley pushed against legacies of stock character stereotypes of the hypermasculine, sex-crazed maniac and the effete dandy.

Berkeley Nu Jazz Collective & Goldberg-Melford-Davis-Glenn Quartet with Special Guests–An evening of creative jazz by students in the Berkeley Nu Jazz Collective, featuring Ben Goldberg, Myra Melford, Ben Davis, and Jordan Glenn, as well as special guests Mark Dresser, Liberty Ellman, Mat Muntz and Matt Wilson.

Lovemusic collective is specialized in new music and based in Strasbourg, France. Working with composers on new and exciting works that will enrich the musical world is at the heart of their mission. This involves collaborating with artists who wish to create new music together, with both the composer and musicians actively involved in the creative process. They aim to dismantle the patriarchal and hierarchical systems ingrained in the new music world, creating a safe and inclusive environment in which musicians can make individual decisions regarding how they contribute to each project, the music they want to perform, and the composers they wish to work with.

¡Resistir! Students of the vocal studies program perform songs inspired by resistance and protest movements from around the world.

These lectures explore an anthropogenic history of sound during the first half of the twentieth century (up to the 1960s), a period of intense imperial expansion of the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the first three lectures I approach the centrality of media and the development of new sound technologies in such a history. I particularly focus on the transformation of the relation between histories of life, extractivism and sound produced by sound technologies. In the last two lectures I approach an intertwined counterarchive: that of the rise of indigenous film and works by indigenous intellectuals in Colombia and Brazil during the early twenty first century and the conceptualizations of music, voice and sound in specific works produced by them. All lectures are based on different archival and ethnographic materials from Latin America, the Caribbean and The United States.

When Mozart came across a treatise written in 1776 by Abbé Vogler that used Roman numerals to describe harmonies within a key, he despaired. Mozart wrote a letter to his father complaining that Vogler’s theory was “more use for learning to count than to compose.” In the early nineteenth century, Vogler’s pupil Gottfried Weber fine-tuned the analytical system—and complaints raged yet again, notably by A. B. Marx, who rejected the Roman numeral system in his harmony treatise. It was not until the teachings of Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker that the use of Roman numerals became entrenched, and still today there are grumblings about the system despite its widespread use.