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Lunchtime Concert: GLEAM Takeover feat. Marko Ciciliani
Lunchtime listening: Glasgow Electronic and Audiovisual Media Festival (GLEAM) 2025 guest programmes this slot in the Lunchtime Concert Series with a performance-lecture from Marko Ciciliani. This event is free of charge and open to all!
Music in the University
Date: Thursday 30 October 2025
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Venue: University Concert Hall
Category: Concerts and music, Public lectures
Speaker: Marko Ciciliani
Glasgow Electronic and Audiovisual Media Festival (GLEAM) is an event which showcases the work of graduate and postgraduate students at UofG alongside amazing visiting artists.
GLEAM returns on Thursday 30th October, presenting a dynamic and packed day of electronic music, sound art, audiovisual compositions and performances.
This year's event includes a takeover of Music in the University's lunchtime concert series, featuring a performance lecture by special guest intermedia artist and composer Marko Ciciliani, who presents a fictional history of the electric guitar.
Why Frets? by Marko Ciciliani is a series of three works – a multimedia performance, a performance lecture, and an installation – that illuminate different aspects of this fictional history of the electric guitar from varying angles. The story is based on speculative fabulation – a deliberate re-invention of the past.
Why Frets? – Requiem for the Electric Guitar – a performance-lecture (2020-21)
Music and visuals: Marko Ciciliani
Original Story: Marko Ciciliani
Writers: Marko Ciciliani & Nicolas Trépanier
In this performance-lecture, the fictional history of the electric-guitar, that is underlying the entire project, is presented in a linear narrative way. It is supplemented by an interactive video, which starts out as a rather conventional power-point-style presentation, but gradually gains more visual finesse and interactivity. From the perspective of the year 2083, a historian presents his recent research and striking new evidence that puts the history of the electric guitar in a radically new perspective. According to it, the pickup was invented in 1833 by a weaver and amateur-physicist named Sieglinde Stern who also designed the first electrically amplified string instrument, the Di-Cord. Through a series of coincidences and circumstances the design plan lands in the hands of George Beauchamp who in 1933 – a hundred years after the invention of the pickup – produces the first electric guitar, the Rickenbacher A-22. This instrument then becomes a symbol of youth rebellion and Rock ‘n’ Roll and gradually grows to a symbol of masculinity and sexual potency. However, various developments – described by theoreticians as transcendal technophallacy (Waksman) and the species-turn (Takacs) in media-theory – lead to a collapse of the popularity of the instrument, and the year 2033 marks the last public performance with this instrument.