During this time of COVID-19, nothing is normal anymore. So, instead of our usual morsel of Musicological Brainfood, we are providing you with something appropriate for this time when many of us are isolated by an invisible plague. So don’t expect something short and pithy to whet your appetite. In fact, don’t even expect a text. Here is a video: home-made, phone-made, and (due to social distancing) lone-made by our president in his Hong Kong apartment. These are personal musings, improvised thoughts, something to be shared at this time of self-isolation. So, if you, too, are home alone with thirty minutes to spare, why not watch our president’s “Impromptu in the Key of COVID-19.” The video now has subtitles in English and Chinese (courtesy of The University of Hong Kong’s Cultural Management Office). Just click on the “settings” icon and choose a language under “captions.”
Daniel K. L. Chua, “Music in Words: Impromptu in the Key of COVID-19.”
More Synaptic Connections to Musicological Brainfood 4, No. 1
Daniel K. L. Chua’s sequel, “Celebrating Beethoven’s 250th Birthday in the Time of COVID-19,” is now online as well (incl. subtitles). Also, as part of our invitation for more videos on the subject “Music in a Time of COVID-19” here are Nigel Nettheim’s “Schubert’s Lullaby in the Presence of Death,” Michael Beckerman’s “Czech Music and Infectious Disease,” Nora Beck’s “Music in Tuscany during the Plague,” and Gavin Lee’s “Listening in the Post-COVID-19 World.”
Daniel K. L. Chua, “Music in Words: Beethoven’s 250 in the Time of COVID-19.”Nigel Nettheim, “Schubert’s Lullaby in the Presence of Death.”Michael Beckerman, “Czech Music and Infectious Disease.”Nora Beck, “Music in Tuscany during the Plague.”
Gavin S. K. Lee, “Listening in the Post-COVID-19 World.”
Tango CO(m)VID(a)
For our Directorium member, Manuel Pedro Ferreira, the lockdown was heavy and called for some artistic exorcism. Confined at home in Portugal, he composed a “COVID Blues” and a “Tango CO(m)VID(a)” last May and persuaded his wife, Joana Gomes Ferreira, to accompany him. This is truly home-made, not a performance to dazzle you with artifice but one that welcomes you into his life. Sung in Portuguese with English subtitles.
Manuel Pedro Ferreira and Joana Gomes Ferreira, “Tango CO(m)VID(a).”
Nora Beck is the James W. Rogers Professor of Music at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has published widely on the subject of Italian medieval and Renaissance music and art, including her new book Boccaccio and the Invention of Musical Narrative. Also a writer of fiction, Beck published Fiammetta, an LGBTQ take on the Decameron. In 2007, the American Musicological Society named Beck Master Teacher of the AMS, only the third professor to receive this recognition.
Michael Beckerman is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Music and Collegiate Professor at New York University. He has written on Czech topics, film music, Mozart, orientalism, music of the Roma, and composition in the camps and the question of the relationship between form and musical meaning. He is the author of six books including New Worlds of Dvořák, Martinů’s Mysterious Accident, and Janáček as Theorist. He was recently made an honorary member of the Czech Musicological Society. He has taught at Washington University, the University of Chicago, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Central European University, Charles University in Prague, and New York University where, from 2004 to 2013 he served as department chair. From 2011 to 2015 he served as distinguished professor of history at Lancaster University in England and he was the Leonard Bernstein Scholar in Residence of the New York Philharmonic from 2016 to 2018.
Daniel K. L. Chua is the chair professor of music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining the University as head the School of Humanities, he was a Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge, and later Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London. He is the recipient of the Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal, a fellow of the American Musicological Society, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. As the president of the International Musicological Society (2017–22), he championed global musicology and continues to contribute to its development. He is the author of five books: The “Galitzin” Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, 1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), Beethoven and Freedom (Oxford, 2017), Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music From Earth (Zone Books, 2021), and Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life (Yale, 2024).
Manuel P. Ferreira studied music and philosophy in Lisbon and earned his PhD from Princeton University, where he wrote a dissertation on Gregorian chant at Cluny. He teaches at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where he also chairs, since 2005, the Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical (CESEM); he held a guest professorship at EPHE, Paris-Sorbonne (2004–5) and was visiting research fellow at IIAS, Jerusalem (2016). In 1995 he founded the early music ensemble Vozes Alfonsinas, with which he produces himself in concerts and recordings. He published a large number of papers, both on medieval music and on other topics, namely twentieth-century Portuguese music. His prize-winning book O som de Martin Codax (1986) was followed by many others, either as author or editor, e.g., Cantus coronatus (2005), Aspectos da Música Medieval, 2 vols. (2009–10), or Musical Exchanges, 1100–1650: Iberian Connections (2016). He is additionally active as a music critic, composer, and poet.
Gavin S. K. Lee is a senior lecturer at Sydney Conservatorium and Elizabeth Wood fellow at University of Adelaide, who specializes in Sinophone, global, and LGBTQ+ music history, and has given guest lectures across US, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. He is the author of the forthcoming Estrangement from Ethnicity: Music and Sinophone Alienation, and the editor of multiple collections: Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory, Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music, and the special journal issues “Global Musical Modernisms” and “Global Music History Course Design.” Lee has collaborated with around 200 researchers in editing publications and convening conference panels.
Nigel Nettheim’s early work was in mathematical statistics, with a PhD from Stanford University in 1966. He changed careers by studying music full-time at the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto, Canada for the whole of the 1970s. He then joined the Music Research Centre at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, 1980 to 1986. Further studies in musicology resulted in a PhD from the University of New South Wales in 2001. He then took a position as adjunct research fellow at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, which he still holds today. He has published widely in musicology, mostly with an analytical leaning and including an annotated translation of a book by the early musicologist Gustav Becking.
