Subjects A-Z: Music

Research Colloquia in Music

Music hosts a series of colloquia on behalf of the Royal Musical Association featuring national and international guest speakers, along with staff and postgraduate students.

All talks take place in-person, in various venues on the Gilmorehill campus (see the University campus map for detailed directions).  All sessions are free and open to the public and a warm welcome is extended to all.

2026–27 Semester 1 — Wednesdays at 4.15pm (unless stated otherwise)

Wed 14^th October, 4:15pm — Rm 141AB, Adam Smith Building (2 Discovery Place, Glasgow, G11 6EY)
Dr Noel Torres Rivera (Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico)
PolyArt, Third World Internationalism, and the Politics of Remembrance in Francis Schwartz's Auschwitz (1968)

In 1968, Francis Schwartz premiered in Puerto Rico his polemic poly-artwork, Auschwitz. Over an electroacoustic track and with bright stage-lights directed towards the audience, a dancer improvised while human hair and rancid meat burned near the stage. Schwartz abandoned his initial idea of encircling the audience with barbed wire for this first performance. However at least in various subsequent performances the doors to the hall were locked with chains, so those in the audience attempting to escape the gas chamber-like atmosphere would find themselves trapped. Musicologist Amy Wlodarski suggests that, as secondary witness, Holocaust-themed music and art implies “a perceived distance from the historical event itself, a remove that allows the artist to focus on interpreting the Holocaust according to an understanding of its meaning within a present-day context, be that social, cultural, or aesthetical.” Therefore, in this paper I read Schwartz’s Auschwitz through three interconnected lenses: rupture—in the context of Puerto Rico’s contemporary music scene; pain—in the context of holocaust representation culture; and remembrance—in relation to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and Puerto Rico’s own anti-colonial fights. By carefully shifting between the local and the global, this study also makes a case for both the further revision of narratives on musical experimentalisms in the Americas, and the proposal of a post-nationalist approach to the study of Puerto Rico’s musical history.
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Noel Torres Rivera is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Affiliated Researcher in Music Studies at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico. His work addresses avant-garde/experimental practices in Puerto Rican, Spanish, and Latin American art music. His articles appear published at the Journal of the American Musicological Society and American Music, and his first monograph—in production with Oxford University Press—traces transnational exchanges between Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Spain through the early work of Puerto Rican composer Rafael Aponte Ledée. Committed to public scholarship, he has presented concert talks in Germany and Puerto Rico, published content in various online platforms, and since 2013 serves as the program annotator for the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra and the Festival Casals de Puerto Rico.

Tue 10^th November, 4.30pm — Room 118, Hetherington Building (Bute Gardens, G12 8QQ)
Dr Katharina Clausius (Université de Montréal)
Musical Incultur(n)ation and Nation Branding: “Mozart Austria” in the 1920s-30s

How does a nation (re)brand itself through its cultural capital and heritage? What vestiges of previous regimes, doctrines, and iconographies get imprinted on the new face of a nation? Why do music and musicians act as such ready representatives for political mandates, diplomatic missions, and propaganda campaigns? My paper explores these questions through the example of one of history’s most successful music nation branding campaigns: Mozart Austria. Forged in the 1920s and 30s in the ruins of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian empire, “Mozart Austria” found ardent supporters across competing political camps and dissimilar regions thanks to music’s capacious value set. By retracing the political pressures motivating the creation of “Mozart Austria,” I show how the performative “soft power” of music provides a stubbornly uniform and stable iconography at the service of competing ideologies.
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Katharina Clausius is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Cultural Diplomacy Lab at the Université de Montréal in Canada. Her research on the politics of aesthetics includes a monograph, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy (University of Rochester Press, winner of the Margorie Weston Emerson award); edited volumes (Recentring the Weimar Republic, The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature, The Routledge Companion to Early Modern Music and Literature); and articles in Theory & Event, Philosophy Today, The Journal of Musicology, and The Opera Quarterly, among others. In 2022, she was awarded the inaugural Medal of Excellence in Research from the Université de Montréal and in 2024 was a Scientist in Residence Fellow for the City of Salzburg.

Wed 18^th November, 4:15pm — Rm 141AB, Adam Smith Building (2 Discovery Place, Glasgow, G11 6EY)
Dr Paul Newton-Jackson (KU Leuven)
Sacred Music in Scotland in the Final Years of the Old Religion

The University of Edinburgh library (GB–Eu) holds a manuscript known today as the “Dunkeld Music Book” which contains music for the Latin rite: motets and masses for six and eight voices by composers from France, Scotland, the Low Countries and England. Scottish sources of pre-Reformation polyphony are vanishingly rare, only one other near-complete manuscript survives from this period. Even so, many of the most basic facts surrounding the Dunkeld Music Book are unknown: important questions remain regarding the manuscript’s dating, provenance, the possible composers of its anonymous works, and its relationship to the wider landscape of sacred musical culture in sixteenth-century Scotland. In this talk, I share the results of a three-year research project focusing on this precious document of music-making in pre-Reformation Scotland. My recent dating of the manuscript to c1556—just four years before the Latin rite was completely outlawed by the Scottish Reformation Parliament in 1560—raises new questions about who was singing this music during such a turbulent period in Scotland’s political and religious history. We have tended to align sacred music from sixteenth-century Scotland with one of two extremes: the old elaborate Latin polyphony of a decadent late-medieval Catholic church on the one hand, and the new austere vernacular psalmody of the Calvinist reformers on the other. The Dunkeld Music Book shows, however, a third option. Its contents do not represent a stubborn adherence to “business as usual” in the face of increasing challenges. Rather, the manuscript reveals a Scottish Catholic church that was actively trying to balance its existing liturgical identity with those musical and theological shots across the bow—both from at home and from abroad—that suffused the religious life of mid-century Scotland.
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Paul Newton-Jackson is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leuven in Belgium. In 2022 he completed his PhD on the music of Georg Philipp Telemann at the University of Cambridge, and since then he has held fellowships at the University of Edinburgh (2023) and Leuven, where he was a Junior Fellow from 2023 to 2026. He has published on music from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in periodicals including Journal of Musicology, Early Music, Music & Letters, and Eighteenth-Century Music. His monograph and facsimile edition of the Dunkeld Music Book (GB-Eu MS 64) will soon be published by Alamire Academic Press. Paul is also active as a singer and director: a recording of modern premieres from the Dunkeld Music Book (performed by his Edinburgh-based vocal ensemble Mater Matris) is scheduled for release on the Toccata label in early 2027.

Wed 25^th November, 4:15pm — Rm 141AB, Adam Smith Building (2 Discovery Place, Glasgow, G11 6EY)
Dr Marten Noorduin (Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung)
American Pianists and Anti-Americanism in Germany and Austria around 1900

The Golden Age of the Piano was a time during which thousands of Americans made grand tours to German-speaking Europe to study piano. According to their descriptions, anti-Americanism played a significant role in this transatlantic cultural exchange. This talk will show that anti-American sentiments were not a uniquely European phenomenon, but actually played a significant role in the cultural life of America at the time, and were accordingly a factor that shaped every aspect of this transatlantic migration.
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Marten Noorduin obtained his PhD in 2016 in Manchester with a thesis on Beethoven’s tempo indications, and held a postdoctoral position at the University of Oxford before moving to Germany. There, he has been involved several large projects, including a DFG-project on anti-Americanism and American pianists at the Musikhochschule Lübeck. He is currently the PI on a 3-year project hosted by the State Institute for Music Research in Berlin focussing on the history of orchestral rehearsals.