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Music Studies Club: February Events!

Victoria Hughson - Monday, February 2
 Events 
Hi,

This month we have a few events, and they are outlined below! Be sure to go to the Hub rather than our regular meeting room the 6th and 27th. We will also have a regular meeting Feb 13 12:30pm in MTB 1004.

Feb 6: Earth's Greatest Hits

The Hub, Meeting Room 4 (top floor)
12:30pm-2:00pm (lunch provided!)
https://cglink.me/2d7/r2288493

Almost 50 years ago, on September 5, 1977, humanity launched an unusual experiment: an LP featuring 27 musical pieces, the "Voyager Golden Record," was sent into space by NASA, where it might be found—somehow, somewhere, someday—by intelligent extraterrestrial beings. In the ideal scenario envisioned by NASA, these aliens could listen to the record and learn about human culture on Earth through the impressions conveyed by the music.

None of us will ever find out whether this actually works: it will take at least 40,000 years for the the two spacecraft carrying the Golden Records to be closer another star than to the solar system, and nobody knows what fate awaits the records there. Nonetheless, we can speculate about what is possible and what will likely remain unattainable. This talk develops a media archaeology to explore what music and sound may even mean in a context in which we cannot rely on any of our common, earthbound terminologies.

Feb 20: Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

Music & Theater Building, 1004
12:30pm-2:00pm

This session is on Spaces and Bodies and has three papers:

Sound, Motion, and Meaning: Rethinking the Role of Space in Multipercussion Music
Madeleine Howey (Concordia College)

They Lost the Time: Disability and Empowerment in Gaelynn Lea’s “Lost in the Woods
Austin Wilson (Florida State University)

Keyboard Distance: An Analytical Tool for Bridging Transformational Theory and Embodied Performance in Piano Music
Zekai Liu (Eastman School of Music)

Feb 27: When Things Don't Get Better, No Things Don't Get Better, Just Different: Emo and Affect Under Neoliberalism

The Hub, Meeting Room 1 (top floor)
12:30pm-2:00pm (lunch provided!)
https://cglink.me/2d7/r2292430

While many previous analyses of emo argue the genre is best understood through a critical analysis of its politics of gender, this article instead contends that we are better served by highlighting emo’s implicit and explicit commentary on the material conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Through engaging with thinkers such as Lauren Berlant, David Grabear, and Asa Seresin, I show how various emo artists, through both their lyrical and performative particularities, take contradictory approaches to neoliberalism. At times emo artists seem utterly depressed by the neoliberal condition. At others, they seem to fully embrace its desires. I explore how these contradictions become emblematic of the genre’s often confused politics. Building upon the confused nature of emo, I offer close readings of Hot Mulligan's "How Do You Know It's Not Armadillo Shells" and Spanish Love Song's "Routine Pain" to show how emo song's seemingly contradict their own understandings of society and how these contradictions become emblematic of neoliberalism itself. I conclude by pondering how radical the genre can ever be if it is defined by such confusion towards the material and political realities of the present.