Computers have altered so many aspects of musician’s lives, from digital performance, to electronic composition, to how we acquire and share new music, but only recently have they had the potential to transform how we study and analyze music. Michael Scott Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard) introduce the new world of Digital Musicology by showing the techniques and tools that allow scholars to “listen faster”: to examine and analyze large repertories of pieces in the time that a human musicologist could only look at and hear a single work. Through computational analysis, clustering techniques, visualization tools, and data-mining of musical works, the landscape of our understanding of music is being shaken and new ground created for the wired music scholar.

Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen (Robert Schumann)

Click here to hear the music that goes with the image

“Guitar and Friends”

in collaboration with the

New England Conservatory of Music

presents

Why Labels and Large Venues Don’t Matter: Building a Successful Career as a Young Performer

A Workshop with Matthias Röder

Organized by Zaira Meneses

New England Conservatory of Music
Jordan Hall Building
ROOM 124
May 21, 2011from 6-8pm
Free Admission

This workshop addresses the fundamental challenges that every young performer faces at the beginning of their career. In this two-hour long seminar participants will learn how to build a successful career in the classical music industry using simple marketing tools and web technologies. The course focuses on management issues and marketing strategies that help independent musicians achieve their goals step by step. The workshop content includes the following topics:

1. Music as a business: Thinking strategically about your career.
2. Being different: How to find a market niche that you can own.
3. Create meaningful content, or why connecting with your audience is the most important.
4. Music is communication! How to effectively use the web, facebook and twitter to achieve your goals.

Prerequisites: No background in music management is needed.

What to bring: pen and a notebook. No computer is needed.

Matthias Röder is a music consultant, artist manager and artistic advisor who has worked with musicians, orchestras and non-profit organizations in the US, Germany, Austria and Turkey. Having produced several CD recordings, concerts, video, and educational events, Matthias currently teaches at Harvard University where he earned his PhD in 2010. He is also the founder and editor of zeitschichten.com, a web magazine for music, history and the music business. For his pedagogical achievements Matthias received multiple “Certificates of Teaching Excellence” from Harvard University as well as the Oscar S. Schafer Fellowship awarded for excellence in undergraduate, non-major teaching. Before coming to Harvard, Matthias studied Classical Guitar with Eliot Fisk at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg.

Trevor Bača
Wednesday, April 6, 5-7pm
Davison Room
Music Department
Harvard University

ABSTRACT: Abjad is open-source software designed to help composers build up complex pieces of music notation in an iterative and incremental way. You can use Abjad to create a symbolic representation of all the notes, rests, staves, nested rhythms, beams, slurs and other notational elements in any score. Abjad is a command-line utility implemented in the Python programming language. In this talk composer and Abjad systems architect Trevor Bača will introduce the system and show Abjad at work in score preparation.

BIO: Trevor Bača was born outside Los Angeles in 1975. His concerns as a composer include lost and secret texts; broken and dismembered systems; sorcery, divination and magic; and the effects, action and beauty of light. Bača’s music has been played in the US, Europe and Japan, with recent performances in New York, Berlin, Tokyo and elsewhere. Bača’s music has been anthologized as part of Notations 21, edited by Theresa Sauer, and Bača’s scores have been exhibited as art at the Chelsea Gallery in New York City and at the Hutchins Gallery on Long Island. Recent lecture engagements at the University of California at San Diego; University College Cork in Ireland; the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique (IRCAM) in Paris; and the Stuttgart Musikhochschule. See www.trevorbaca.com for more information.

My paper discusses how the role of music as a political tool changed in Prussian politics from the times of Frederick the Great to the era of the Prussian reform movement at the end of the long eighteenth century. I argue that the changing conception of the public sphere in combination with the popularization of Berlin music culture promoted a slow transformation of music’s role within the system of state. At first, music was an integral component of the representational system of the state, glorifying the ruler’s power and status in opera performances, concerts at court and political festivities such as weddings of high members of the court, anniversaries of important battles as well as birthday celebrations for the members of the ruling family. Gradually this initial function was extended and transformed so that music’s foremost function within the state was now that of a tool for cultural policy. This shifted emphasis figured prominently in the newly emerging importance of public music education programs, state supported music societies as well as a general decline in representational culture at court. In examining these hitherto understudied trends, my paper provides new insight into the establishment of a modern conception of music’s political role and the cultural self-image of Prussian society at the beginning of the nineteenth century. My paper draws on rich documentary evidence from sources such as daily newspapers, government papers as well as polemic pamphlets discussing the state of music and the perception of music’s importance for politics and public life in the years around 1800.

Dear colleagues:

I am pleased to invite you to the next talk in the Digital Musicology Study Group at Harvard. Please forward this announcement to anyone who might be interested. Thank you!

SASHA: Saxophone Audio Search and Heuristic Analysis
Wednesday, March 9, 5-7pm
Davison Room, Music Department
Harvard University
open to everyone

SASHA represents an attempt to collect and make easily searchable not only the recorded audio results of various instrumental techniques, extended or otherwise, but also the symbolic or “idiomatic” information necessary to encode the performance instructions which produce those sounds. We hope to provide both a set of compositional tools and materials to composers, with which they can draw harmonic and timbal connections between sonic objects, as well as reference and pedagogical tools for students and performers to aid in the assimilation of multiphonic and microtonal techniques, among others. The project will eventually be extended beyond the saxophone, perhaps necessitating an acronym adjustment.

Eliot Gattegno is the only saxophonist and one of the few Americans to ever win the “Kranichsteiner Musikpreis”, widely considered the most prestigious prize for the interpretation of new music. Mr. Gattegno
holds a Doctorate from the University of California, San Diego, a Master and Bachelor of Music degree from New England Conservatory, and a diploma from Interlochen Arts Academy. His principal teachers include Kenneth Radnofsky, Steven Schick, Marcus Weiss, William Sears, Jean-Michel Goury, Arno Bornkamp, and Jean-Marie Londeix. Mr. Gattegno is currently a Fellow at Harvard University and resides in New York City. (http://www.eliotgattegno.com)

Josiah Wolf Oberholtzer (*1984) is a composer of acoustic and electronic music, video artist and programmer. He holds a Bachelor of Music from Oberlin Conservatory (2006), attended the Summer Academy at Schloss Solitude in 2007 and, since 2008, is pursuing his doctorate in composition at Harvard University. (http://www.josiahwolfoberholtzer.com)

With best wishes,
Matthias Röder

Back in October I helped out American rockband Incubus to put together a Youth Orchestra for a benefit concert in Santiago de Chile. Here is some video footage from the evening as well as an exclusive look behind the scences of that memorable event. The part about the fabulous Youth Orchestra starts at around 8:35 min. Enjoy!

Mike Einziger from Incubus and I are going to teach a course on inspiration and creativity for amateur musicians at Harvard’s January Term (J-Term). We look at a lot of contemporary music and have students apply the inspiration that comes from studying those works to their songs and arrangements. Here is our course description:

During this 4 day seminar (Jan 18 – 21), students will be examining a variety of compositional methodologies, discussing their historical contexts (with respect to related movements in the history of Classical Music) and utilizing them to create their own recordings using the GarageBand software on their own computers. Materials for this course will be based on a series of interviews, conducted by Grammy-nominated songwriter/Incubus guitarist Michael Einziger, with members of: The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, and Film Composers Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman. Lessons will include musical examples from the artists who were interviewed, and will also feature a special guest lecture by the Senior Program Manager of Presentations at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Johanna Reese.

Enrollment to this course is limited to ten students. All interested students should apply by submitting a short statement of their motivation as well as a short bio/resume. These materials should be sent via email to Matthias Röder (roeder@fas.harvard.edu) before January 5, 2011

Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to invite you to the third talk in the Digital Musicology Study Group at Harvard. Please feel free to send this invitation to our colleagues in the Boston area who might be interested. Thank you!

Inventoriana: Annotation and Sharing of Marked-Up Manuscripts and Digital Images (Drew Massey)
Wednesday, December 8, 5-7pm
Davison Room, Music Department
Harvard University

Inventoriana is a cloud-based digital image annotation package. In this talk, Drew Massey provides an overview of its functionality, and considers the opportunities and obstacles present in projects of this nature.

Drew Massey was educated at Harvard University and Indiana University-Bloomington. A recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, he is currently writing a book about the practice of music editing in the twentieth century. His research has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and the Indiana Theory Review, and he currently serves as a contributing editor for the New Grove Dictionary of American Music. His other research interests include historiography and the use of technology in the humanities. He is also co-founder and editor of the musicology blog amusicology.com. He is on the faculty at Tufts University.

The Digital Musicology Study Group at Harvard University aims to provide a forum for the rich community of music scholars who are working on aspects of the digital humanities in the Boston area and beyond. In monthly sessions, scholars present their work and discuss implications, applications and future developments of their research. The series is supported by the Dean for Arts and Humanities and is hosted by the Music Department, Barker Center and the FAS-IT group. All talks are free and open to the public.

With best wishes,
Matthias Röder

Houghton Library Studies

“Milanese Chant in the Monastery? Notes on a Reunited Ambrosian Manuscript,” (Co-authored) in: Ambrosiana at Harvard. New Sources of Milanese Chant (=Houghton Library Studies, vol. 3), ed. by Thomas F. Kelly and Matthew Mugmon, Cambridge, 2010

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