This series features Schulich School of Music faculty presenting a selection of books and music that they are exploring – for edification, inspiration, or distraction – during these long months of social isolation. These short interviews seek to emulate the spontaneous interactions that our patrons enjoyed in the Music Library discussing their current reads or the recordings that they had recently discovered (or rediscovered!). Tune in to learn about new works and old favourites, and let us know what you are reading and listening to!
Image from: Mackesy, Charlie. 2019. The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. Ebury Press.
Q. What are you currently reading?
A. Charlie Mackesy’s illustrated book The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse (although I’m reading the French translation sent to me for Christmas by my eldest daughter in Paris). It’s about friendship and helping each other out. It has beautiful pen and water-colour illustrations and a hand-written font. A taste: “Sometimes I feel lost,” said the boy. “Me too,” said the mole, “but we love you, and love, it’s like a home” (with a drawing of the boy, the mole and the fox sitting on a tree branch looking out over a valley).
Q: What have you been listening to these days?
A. A lot of music for modern Chinese orchestra by Chinese composers. Notably “Tremors of a memory chord” by Lei Liang and “Dong Hai Yu Ge” originally written for the Guzheng by Zhang Yan and orchestrated for mixed orchestra of Western and Chinese instruments by Ma Sheng Long and Gu Guan Ren. Completely new to me. It’s part of a diversity effort in the ACTOR project led globally by Bob Hasegawa and locally for East Asian music by Interdisciplinary Music Studies PhD Lena Heng.
Q. Have you attended any concerts or events lately?
A. I followed the series of Beethoven symphonies done virtually through Deutsche Grammaphon Stage by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Orchestre Métropolitain. They were all recorded under pandemic conditions in the Salle Bourgie with the orchestra spread throughout the whole space. Some great video footage and surprisingly good sound recording over internet.
Q. What are you most looking forward to post-Covid?
A. Being with my lab members in person. I really miss hanging out with them all.
This series features Schulich School of Music faculty presenting a selection of books and music that they are exploring – for edification, inspiration, or distraction – during these long months of social isolation. These short interviews seek to emulate the spontaneous interactions that our patrons enjoyed in the Music Library discussing their current reads or the recordings that they had recently discovered (or rediscovered!). Tune in to learn about new works and old favourites, and let us know what you are reading and listening to!
Our seventh post in this series features Shawn Mativetsky, Course Lecturer in Music Education, Musicianship and Percussion, and Director of the McGill Tabla Ensemble.
Image credit: Caroline Tabah
Q. What are you currently reading?
A. During the semester, I have difficulty finding time to read books, and generally save them for the summer and winter breaks, when I can devote my attention over longer periods of time. For the moment, I tend to mainly read the local, Canadian, and international news, and try to keep up with current events in music, especially relating to percussion and North Indian classical music. I have also been reading a few cookbooks (and enjoying cooking new recipes)! Recent favourites are Michael Solomonov’s Zahav and Israeli Soul.
Q: Have you been able to attend any virtual concerts or conferences?
A. No conferences of late, but I was fortunate to virtually attend the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, which was held online this past November. The convention included numerous workshops, masterclasses, round table discussions, and performances, some pre-recorded and some streamed live. I definitely did enjoy the live-streamed sessions more, as there was an active chat discussion, which allowed for interaction with the presenters and participants and provided a feeling of communicating with the greater percussion community. When PASIC takes place in person, typically somewhere between 5000 and 8000 percussionists are in attendance. Adapting this type of event to an online format must certainly have been challenging, but the organizers pulled off a highly successful event in this new format.
Q. What are you most looking forward to post-Covid?
A. What I am looking forward to the most, as I suspect most musicians are, is the return to live concerts and touring. To go from an active concert and travel schedule to staying essentially at home for an entire year has been quite a change. Though this pandemic perhaps has forced many of us to take some much needed time to slow down, reflect, and adapt. In my case, this fortunately provided me the opportunity to write a book this past summer, RUDIMENTAAL – Pieces for Snare Drum Inspired by the Tabla Drumming of North India, that has been on my to-do list for many years! Nevertheless, I’m very much looking forward to getting outside my bubble and to reconnecting with friends, colleagues, and audiences, once the public health situation allows it. It’s an understatement to say that those first concerts are sure to be highly memorable!
This series features Schulich School of Music faculty presenting a selection of books and music that they are exploring – for edification, inspiration, or distraction – during these long months of social isolation. These short interviews seek to emulate the spontaneous interactions that our patrons enjoyed in the Music Library discussing their current reads or the recordings that they had recently discovered (or rediscovered!). Tune in to learn about new works and old favourites, and let us know what you are reading and listening to!
Our sixth post in this series features Isabelle Cossette, Associate Professor, Music Education.
Q. What are you currently reading?
A. I am currently reading a book from Luca di Fulvio. I really liked the first one I read from him, Les enfants de Venise. Now I’m reading Le gang des rêves. It is a bit darker but is still interesting, it is set in New York around 1920, and highlights class differences. I will soon start reading another book by di Fulvio, Le soleil des rebelles.
Another book I have been reading is Performing Music Research, which was recently launched by Aaron Williamon and other colleagues! Professor Williamon has held the position of Schulich Distinguished Visiting Professor and Dean’s Chair in Music for the past two years. Anyone interested in performance research should definitely check out this book!
Q. What have you been listening to these days?
A. I have listened quite a lot to the relatively new Jean Leloup Album: L’étrange pays. He is a fabulous poet. At the end of February, I listened to a great virtual concert produced by Les nuits d’Afrique, which focused on the diversity and kindred ancestral ties between Africa and the First Nations. The performance featured Djely Tapa, Anachnid et Mi’gmafrica.
Q. Have you attended any conferences or events lately?
A. This past week, I attended the opening movie of Le Festival International du Film sur l’Art: the film, Beijing Spring, reveals the role a small group of avant-garde Chinese artists, the Stars, had on Beijing Spring, a brief period of political liberalization and freedom of expression in China in the late 70s and early 80s.
This online Festival will also feature Les frontières de l’art, a film written and produced by my husband on the Quebec art world and in which I performed.
Q. What are you most looking forward to post-Covid?
A. What I am most looking forward to post-Covid is seeing my parents and family, going out on terrasses, eating in restaurants, and having dinners with friends!
This series features Schulich School of Music faculty presenting a selection of books and music that they are exploring – for edification, inspiration, or distraction – during these long months of social isolation. These short interviews seek to emulate the spontaneous interactions that our patrons enjoyed in the Music Library discussing their current reads or the recordings that they had recently discovered (or rediscovered!). Tune in to learn about new works and old favourites, and let us know what you are reading and listening to!
Our fifth post in this series features Dorian Bandy, Professor of Music History and Early Music.
Q. What are you currently reading?
A. For an academic, there’s never a simple answer to this question! This term, much of my reading has been in connection with the graduate seminar I’m teaching, Approaches to Musical Meaning. Currently, we’re reading two chapters from R.A. Sharpe’sMusic and Humanism, and we’ve also spent quite a bit of time this term on chapters from Roger Scruton’sThe Aesthetics of Music. Both are extraordinary books: rigorous in their philosophical arguments but also beautiful and intimate in the way they take account of the musical experience. Scruton’s book is, taken as a whole, particularly inspiring in this regard. But Sharpe, too, explores some wonderful ideas about the meaning and value of music. He makes a compelling case that musical works are best appreciated in exactly the same way that we appreciate people—and beyond the strength of his arguments, this idea has always rung true for me. Especially during a time of comparative isolation, I feel more aware than ever that the people I regularly spend time with include various favourite concertos, sonatas, and operas!
Aside from “official” reading for my seminar, my pleasure reading over the past few weeks has included David Friedman’sLaw’s Order(a nonfiction book about the relationship between economics and law), which has completely reshaped my understanding of the legal norms of Anglophone countries; Martin Amis’s novel The Information (a book whose plot does not matter at all; reading it, one forgets that there’s a story and instead just delights in the liveliness and brilliance of Amis’s prose); and various collections of John Hollander’s poetry, including In Time and Place and Blue Wine. In Time and Place is an interesting and beautiful collection in which every stanza is rhymed A/B/B/A. In one poem, he self-consciously reflects on this constraint:
Why have I locked myself inside This narrow cell of four-by-four, Pacing the shined, reflecting floor Instead of running free and wide?
He goes on for quite a few pages discussing the history of this rhyme-scheme (never once departing from it), and ultimately concludes that the scheme itself is a metaphor—for love, for distance, and even for the passing of time:
I, too, fill up this suite of rooms, A bit worn now, with crowds of word, Hoping that prosody’s absurd Law can reform the thoughts it dooms;
An emblem of love’s best and worst: Marriage (where hand to warm hand clings, Inner lines, linked by rhyming rings; Distance between the last and first),
This quatrain is born free, but then Handcuffed to a new inner sound, After what bliss it may have found Returns to the first again.
— Not our bilateral symmetry, But low reflecting high, as on His fragile double poised, the swan: What’s past mirrored in what will be.
Q. What are you listening to these days?
A. For the past two months, I’ve been on a pretty intense Beethoven kick. Beethoven is one of my favourite composers, so it’s not unusual for me to listen to his music—but my focus these past two months has been unusual for being uninterrupted. I traveled to the UK in December, and when I returned to Montreal and had to spend two weeks in isolation, I listened twice to the entire piano sonata cycle (the period-instrument recording featuring Malcolm Bilson and colleagues). I also listened through all of the string chamber music, the piano concertos, and the violin sonatas. I’m now on to the piano trios, and have been listening to a marvellous recording by Trio Goya. A few days ago I finally broke the Beethoven habit and listened to Trio Goya’s Haydn recording—and the music-making is just spectacular.
I’ll also report on two films I’ve discovered this winter: the first is What’s Up, Doc, which was recommended by my music history area colleagues Lisa, David, and Chip. (It came up in a faculty meeting a few weeks ago because much of it takes place at a musicology conference—though this is just the on-ramp to an unrelentingly hilarious farce in the spirit of Bringing Up Baby.) The other is Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, which didn’t impress me when I saw them in theatres in my teens and early twenties, but really captivated me now. All three movies in the trilogy are aesthetically beautiful, philosophically rich, and even psychologically deep. (This is not something I ever thought I’d say about a Batman movie!)
This series features Schulich School of Music faculty presenting a selection of books and music that they are exploring – for edification, inspiration, or distraction – during these long months of social isolation. These short interviews seek to emulate the spontaneous interactions that our patrons enjoyed in the Music Library discussing their current reads or the recordings that they had recently discovered (or rediscovered!). Tune in to learn about new works and old favourites, and let us know what you are reading and listening to!
Our fourth post in this series featuresIchiro Fujinaga, Associate Professor, Music Technology, Director Distributed Digital Music Archives & Libraries Lab (DDMAL).
The 2020 International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference.
Q: What have you been reading/listening to these days?
A: I have been reading a book about databases, which I discovered in the McGill Library catalogue. It is called RDF Database Systems by Olivier Curé and Guillaume Blin. As for music, I have been listening to some old favorites and newer groups: J-Pop (Namie Amuro, Hikaru Utada, M-Flo, Ko Shibasaki), Jazz (Michel Camilo, David Sanborn, David Weckl, Paco de Lucia) and Bach’s Mass in B minor. I’ve also recently discovered Corinne Bailey Rae and Love Harmony’s, Inc. which have been on my playlist this last while.
Q: Have you been able to attend any virtual concerts or conferences?
A: We had the pleasure of hosting the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference in October, 2020. It was challenging as we had never done anything like it before! I had great help from people around me, and it was quite successful with a record-breaking attendance of over 800 people (whereas it is usually in the 400–600 range).
This series features Schulich School of Music faculty presenting a selection of books and music that they are exploring – for edification, inspiration, or distraction – during these long months of social isolation. These short interviews seek to emulate the spontaneous interactions that our patrons enjoyed in the Music Library discussing their current reads or the recordings that they had recently discovered (or rediscovered!). Tune in to learn about new works and old favourites, and let us know what you are reading and listening to!
Our third post in this series features Lloyd Whitesell, Professor of Music History/Musicology, and Associate Dean, Research and Administration.
Q: What have you been reading these days?
A: I’ve been digging into my fiction library at home, rereading some favorites and things I forgot I had. During the pandemic I got intrigued by plague literature, and this led me to reread Margaret Atwood’s “Maddaddam” trilogy—a brilliant dystopia about a man-made plague. I also just finished something I read back in my teen years (when it was written), John Christopher’s “Tripods” trilogy, a classic alien invasion adventure/Bildungsroman. And I had forgotten how whimsical and enjoyable the young adult author Nancy Farmer is: e.g., The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, a mutant-detective story set in 22nd-century Zimbabwe. New discoveries: Patrick Gale, A Place Called Winter—sort of like Brokeback Mountain in the Canadian prairies. I just bought the acclaimed novel The Prophets(Robert Jones, Jr), about forbidden love between two enslaved young men on a Southern plantation, looking forward to reading it.
As for non-fiction, I’m reading The Swerveby Stephen Greenblatt, about scholars hunting for ancient books in the Italian Renaissance; White Fragilityby Robin DiAngelo; and Kate Manne, Down Girl(a philosophical analysis of misogyny). I just acquired two high-theory treatises at the intersection of disability and queer studies: Jasbir Puar, The Right To Maim, and Mel Y. Chen, Animacies—which look rather daunting!
Q: Have you been able to attend any virtual concerts or conferences? If so, can you tell us about one?
A: I’m preparing to present at a virtual conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of Joni Mitchell’s album Blue. Professor Nicole Biamonte will also be a featured presenter.
