Colloquium Seminar
We are delighted that the 2025 Colloquium Seminar will be lead by Dr. Jesse Rodin (Music, Stanford University). In addition to his teaching and research as a faculty member, Dr. Rodin is also the director of the internationally renowned early music ensemble, Cut Circle.
​The Colloquium Seminar, which happens every other year, allows participants a workshop environment where they can learn new approaches or encounter new disciplinary methods. Participants will meet in a series of Zoom sessions with the seminar leader before the conference to experiment with connections between their own research interests and the seminar topic. Then, at the conference itself, the group will discuss their interdisciplinary collaborations during an in-person roundtable session.Prior experience with the seminar topic is in no way required, and we are looking for a wide array of approaches, objects of study, and voices. A full seminar description follows.
Temporality, Varietas, and Performance in the Late Middle Ages
This seminar invites participants to explore late-medieval events, texts, objects, and music that set up dynamic temporal trajectories by controlling how various energies—historical, poetic, visual, musical, and more—unfold. A workshop environment will enable attendees to present examples from their own research while learning about a musical revolution that took place during the second quarter of the fifteenth century, when composers found new ways of manipulating energy, flow, and time. As we shall see, music of this period is animated by intensifications, unexpected explosions, dramatic pauses, and sudden evaporations. These developments are hinted at in our seminar’s common text: Johannes Tinctoris’s famous De arte contrapuncti (The Art of Counterpoint) of 1477, a music-theory treatise that evokes the concept of varietas to advocate for what we might call an “aesthetics of opposition.” Although varietas can sometimes run the risk of dissolving into a meaningless generality (everything can be said to evince “variety”), when channeled through discipline-specific discourses and creative productions the term can illuminate important aspects of late-medieval aesthetics. These developing aesthetic sensibilities will be the focus of our study.
A musical background is by no means a prerequisite for participation in the seminar. Our conversations will introduce relevant terminology and repertory that can undergird wide-ranging discussions of energetic trajectories and flow; explore connections—and disconnections—between music and other art forms; probe the possibilities and limitations of varietas as an interpretative tool; and consider how modern historiography and performance traditions have impeded our understanding. We will think together about how narrative structures unfold over time and how dynamic trajectories in literature and the visual arts operate—even within recognizable, “fixed forms.”
Applicants should propose a text, object, event, or musical piece through which to explore these issues during several Zoom meetings leading up to the conference. Participants will work through their ideas collaboratively; at the conference they will have an opportunity to describe their findings and the process that produced them as part of a roundtable discussion. Proposals should include a description of the object, why applicants think it would be a useful site for investigation, and a series of questions they would like to bring to the table as part of their contribution. (~300 words)