Jeri Lynne Johnson presents a roundtable discussion on and offers advice to students wishing to enter a career in music, based on her professional experiences. Johnson is conductor and founder of Philadelphia’s Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra, the first orchestra in the nation led by an African-American woman, and founder of the Orchestrating Leadership program. In 2005, Ms. Johnson made history as the first African-American woman to win an international conducting prize when she was awarded the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship. She…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series presents UCLA professor Nina Eidsheim on the topic, "Acousmatic Blackness: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music." Lunch to be served after the lecture. Free; no tickets required. Guest parking passes can be purchased at the Tufts University Police Department, 419 Boston Avenue, Medford. This colloquium is made possible by the Granoff Music Fund.

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series presents Universitéde la Sorbonne Nouvelle Professor Michel Chion speaking on "Instrumental Imagination and Causal Indeterminacy in Early Sound Cinema." Free; no tickets required. Guest parking passes can be purchased at the Tufts University Police Department, 419 Boston Avenue, Medford. This colloquium is made possible by the Granoff Music Fund.

Tufts University professor Melinda Latour presents a lecture, “Performing Repair: Moral Song after the French Wars of Religion,” as part of the Rumsey Family Junior Professorship in the Humanities and the Arts at Tufts. Latour is the Rumsey Family Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Arts and Assistant Professor of Musicology at Tufts. Her current book project centers on vernacular moral song in late sixteenth-century France. She also works on tone and timbre in popular music, early modern music jurisprudence, and Mexican…

Multimedia composer and musical artist Kathryn Bostic will speak at her alma mater Tufts University about a wide range of topics regarding film and theater scoring, including the art of collaboration, storytelling tools, and building a business as an artist. Bostic is known for her work on film, TV and theater. She is a recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including the prestigious Time Warner-Sundance Fellowship, Sundance Fellowship for Feature Film Scoring, BMI Conducting Fellowship, and Sundance Fellowship for Documentary Film…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series at Tufts University presents University of Missuri professor Stephanie Shonekan speaking on “‘We Insist!: An Exploration of Love and Revolution in the Album by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln.” “We Insist!” is a jazz album released on Candid Records in 1960. The cover references the sit-in movement of the Civil Rights Movement. It contains a suite which composer and drummer Max Roach and lyricist Oscar Brown had begun to develop in 1959 with a view to…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series at Tufts University presents Toni Shapiro-Phim of the Philadelphia Folklore Project on the topic “Expressive Culture and Social Justice.” Shapiro-Phim oversees the Folklore Project's public programs including exhibitions, performances, humanities forums and other collaborative endeavors with community partners. She received a Ph.D from Cornell University in cultural anthropology, exploring the relationship between war, migration and the arts, and worked in refugee camps in Indonesia and Thailand with people who had come from Vietnam, Laos and…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series at Tufts University presents Smith College professor Andrea Moore on the topic "Canons and Capital in American New Music.” Moore is a musicologist specializing in new classical music and concert culture since 1989. She is at work on two projects. The first examines the politics of identity and representation in new classical music of the post-Cold War period, and argues that musical multiculturalism was crucial to the concept of musical progress in the 1990s.…

Beethoven was obsessively interested in questions of identity and the potential for conflict. This talk explores a variety of those expressive antidotes in performance, in execution and most of all, in perception and understanding. George Mathew, conductor, humanitarian, and founder of Music for Life International, presents an exploration of certain elements of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and how they relate to the current Rohingya crisis in and now outside Myanmar. This talk is presented by the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership and Tufts…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series at Tufts University presents Tufts Associate Professor of Music Stephan Pennington on the topic "Boys Don’t Cry: Historical Empathy, Silence, and the Trans Masculine Soundscape." Pennington is a critical musicologist focusing on popular music and cultural studies. He is also affiliated with the Africana Studies Program, the American Studies Program, the Films Studies Program, and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. He teaches courses such as History of African-American Music, Queer Pop, The History…

Tufts University alumnus and Washington Post national arts reporter Geoff Edgers returns to campus to talk about his new book “Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith and the Song that Changed American Music Forever.” He'll discuss the revolutionary song that brought rap into mainstream American culture in the 1980s, how to develop your dream writing gig in the post-print age, and turning your passion for music and culture into a reporting beat. Free; no tickets required Guest parking passes can be purchased at…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series at Tufts University presents Oberlin College Assistant Professor of Music Theory Megan Kaes Long on the topic “What do Signatures Signify? The Curious Case of 17th-Century English Key.” Free; no tickets required. Guest parking passes can be purchased at the Tufts University Police Department, 419 Boston Avenue, Medford. This colloquium is made possible by the Granoff Music Fund.

Tufts University presents an interactive panel discussion about the similarities and differences of African diasporic music and its respective cultures. The discussion will feature Tufts Department of Music faculty Emmanuel Attah Poku (Ghana), Joel LaRue Smith (United States), and special guest Kimani Bishop (Trinidad and Tobago). This event is co-sponsored by the Tufts Bridging Differences Grant, and will be moderated by Isaiah Marshall-Thomas, Tufts Class of 2019. Free; no tickets required.  

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series at Tufts University presents Harvard University Professor of Music Suzannah Clark on the topic  “Heine, Liszt, and Commerce and Religion on the Rhine.” Clark is a Canadian-British musicologist and music theorist specializing in the music of Franz Schubert, the history of music theory, and medieval music. Free; no tickets required. Guest parking passes can be purchased at the Tufts University Police Department, 419 Boston Avenue, Medford. This colloquium is made possible by the Granoff Music Fund.

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series at Tufts University presents Vassar College Assistant Professor of Music Tahirih Motazedian speaking on “Music Theory at the Movies: Interpreting Sound Track Tonality.” Lunch to be served after the lecture. Free; no tickets required. Guest parking passes can be purchased at the Tufts University Police Department, 419 Boston Avenue, Medford. This colloquium is made possible by the Granoff Music Fund.

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series at Tufts University presents Tufts professor of music John McDonald for the talk, "What Do I Always Do?" McDonald will explore how composers often get stuck reproducing the same parts of themselves as a result of musical habits/impulses. He'll examine how these get compounded with external expectations, and will attempt to delve into differences inside the music of several piano pieces–two pairs of which could be considered alternate sides of the same two coins.…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series at Tufts University presents UC Santa Barbara Professor of Music Timothy Cooley speaking on his recently published book, “Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy.” The work focuses on the connection between environmental sustainability and human cultural sustainability, and examines the potential for reversal of negative human impact on the environment from a cultural perspective, particularly at the local level. Cooley curated a collection of 23 essays by musicologists and ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, ethnographers, documentary…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium Series at Tufts University presents Evergreen State College professor of music Sean Williams speaking on the topic, "Irishness, Celtic Culture and Magical Whiteness in the 21st Century." Williams teaches ethnomusicology, Irish Studies, and Asian Studies at Evergreen State, located in Olympia, Washington. She is teaching “Ireland in History and Memory” in the current academic year. Free; no tickets required. Guest parking passes can be purchased at the Tufts University Police Department, 419 Boston Avenue, Medford.…

This month's Granoff Music Center Colloquium at Tufts University will feature Maeve Sterbenz, assistant professor of Music at Smith College, presenting the program "Listening to Ballet." Sterbenz will speak about a contemporary ballet called Seven Sonatas, choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky to keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti. In connection with this piece, the talk will consider how ballet can serve as a lens for music analysis—particularly, as a source of physical and affective attributes that listeners can project onto sounds and…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium at Tufts University presents Tufts music professor Richard Jankowsky discussing his latest book, "Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form," which examines ritual journeys shaped by music that reveal the contributions of women and underrepresented minorities to the North African musico-spiritual landscape. Free; no tickets required. Due to COVID regulations, live audience attendees at Tufts Music events must present a Tufts ID or a COVID vaccination card showing that they have…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium at Tufts University presents Tufts faculty member and composer Kareem Roustom discussing, "Of Vertical and Linear Heritages: One Composer's Journey in (Some) Words and (Mostly) Music." Free; no tickets required. Due to university COVID regulations, live audience attendees at Tufts Music events must be prepared to present a Tufts ID or a COVID vaccination card showing that they have been vaccinated and boosted.  

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium at Tufts University presents University of Sheffield Professor of Musicology Tim Shephard discussing "Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books.” Free; no tickets required. Due to university COVID regulations, live audience attendees at Tufts Music events must be prepared to present a Tufts ID or a COVID vaccination card showing that they have been vaccinated and boosted.  

The new semester's first Granoff Music Center Colloquium at Tufts University features SUNY-Albany assistant professor and ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt on the topic, "Uttered Silence: A Black Feminist Ethnomusicology as Care and Repair." Gaunt will speak on anti-Blackness and the particular f*ckery Black girls face online and in real life around twerking and voice. She is a digital ethnomusicologist known for her work on kinetic orality and the gendered twist of music-making from girls to men in Black popular music since…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium series at Tufts University features Joel LaRue Smith, senior lecturer in the Tufts Department of Music. He will speak on how the intersection of culture, theory and composition open our possibilities for freedom in performance. Through compositions and performance, Smith reveals how social and musical theories give inspiration to change, definition and innovation within the Black Aesthetic. Smith has been the director of the Tufts Jazz Orchestra and Jazz Activities at Tufts since 1996. He…

The Granoff Music Center Colloquium series at Tufts University features Samantha Jones of Harvard University on her research on musicality in percussive dance. Focusing on the non-competitive and social styles of Old-Style Irish Step and sean-nós dancing, she examines how musical and choreographic knowledge circulates through embodied modes of transmission. Oral mnemonics, hand gestures, notation – these transmission methods offer rich sites for examining the interaction of embodied cognition, performance aesthetics, and community. In framing these techniques as musical pedagogies,…

The Tufts University Department of Music presents a roundtable discussion with Ghanaian percussionist Okyerema Asante featuring guests Michael Veal (Yale University), Ingrid Monson (Harvard University), Maya Cunningham (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Stephan Pennington (Tufts). This event is part of "Jazz Transnationalism and Intercultural Intersections Between Africans and African Americans," a two-week residency at Tufts for Asante. In the early 1970s, Asante toured the U.S. with the legendary South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, as a founding member of the Ghanaian…

The Tufts University Department of Music is hosting an interdisciplinary conference bringing together an international group of musicologists, literary scholars and historians to consider how poetry and music in early modern Europe creatively explored questions of living and dying well. The conference is co-organized by Julien Goeury (Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne) and Isabelle His (Université de Poitiers). The conference will culminate with a performance by Ensemble Faenza entitled “Sons et soupirs: Music of Life and Death in Early Modern France”…

The first Granoff Music Center Colloquium at Tufts University for the 2023-24 season features Michael Bierylo, an electronic musician, guitarist, composer and sound designer, on the topic "The Modular Synthesizer, An Improbable Instrument." Bierylo is a former faculty member at Berklee College of Music,  where he is chair emeritus of the Electronic Production and Design Department. He is also active with Berklee Online, Berklee’s online school, where he co-authors and teaches music technology courses.  

Composer/theorist and Tufts University lecturer Sid Richardson presents the second Granoff Music Center Colloquium of the fall semester, titled "Ground Gone Under: Intersections of Music and the Poetry of Nathaniel Mackey.  

The Tufts University Department of Music's first Granoff Music Center Colloquium of the spring semester will feature Yale University research scholar  Janie Cole on the topic, "Sacred Sound, Space, and Afro-Eurasian Encounters in the Christian Kingdom of 17th-century Ethiopia." The Jesuit mission to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia (1557-1632) was one of its earliest and arguably most challenging projects in the early modern period. New ambitious architectural projects were undertaken as symbols of religious renewal and state supremacy, and music…

The Tufts Department of Music's Granoff Music Center Colloquium presents Northeastern University music faculty member Susan Asai on the topic, "Sounding Our Way Home: Japanese American Musicking and the Politics of Identity." Asai, an associate professor at NU for 33 years, teaches courses on the music of a variety of cultures from around the world and global pop music that explore issues of music and identity, music and social movements, and the intersection of music and politics.

The Tufts Department of Music's Granoff Music Center Colloquium presents Chris Newell (Passamaquoddy), co-founder and director of education of the Akomawt Educational Initiative, on "A Gift and Responsibility: The Soundtrack of My Life." The Akomawt Educational Initiative is dedicated to furthering knowledge of Native America through innovative learning approaches designed to impact how we teach history and contemporary social issues.  

The first Granoff Music Center Colloquium at Tufts University for the 2024-25 term is "Max Roach: Black Power Ideologies and Aesthetics," with speaker Maya Cunningham, an ethnomusicologist, Africanist/African Americanist scholar, cultural activist, and a Black music practitioner (jazz vocals). The program is part of the Max Roach 100 Project, a nationwide centennial celebration of the iconic drummer, composer and activist.