Institute of Musicology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University cordially invites to a lecture from the cycle New Approaches in Music and Sound Studies.
Prof. Sarah Collins (University of Western Australia)
“Performing Automation: Agency, Animacy, and Mimesis in Opera”
8th January, 2024, 5:30–7 PM [Cancelled for reasons of remembrance]
Faculty of Arts, main building (nám. J. Palacha 2), room no. 104
Abstract:
This talk explores the interrelation between musical autonomy and automation by tracing a stream of thought and practice from the late-nineteenth century onwards that presents self-governing things—art, humans, voices, automata, animated objects, or organic processes—as achieving agency through partial automation. This trope will be mapped through ideas about the role of sound and music in opera and its remediations, by pairing three paradigmatic operatic figures (Papageno, Don Giovanni, and Faust) with three paradigmatic objects of variable animacy (shadows, stones, and puppets).
Sarah Collins is a cultural historian who has published widely on the relationship between music and literary aesthetics and broader intellectual and political currents in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, she is the author of Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain (Cambridge UP, 2019), and The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (Boydell, 2013); editor of Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (Cambridge UP, 2019); and co-editor with Paul Watt and Michael Allis of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford UP, 2020). She is currently Chair of Research and Deputy Head of School at the Conservatorium of Music, University of Western Australia. She is President of the Musicological Society of Australia, co-editor of Music & Letters (OUP), and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Sarah has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and Durham University, and has received competitive research funding from a range of sources including the British Academy, the Australian Research Council, and the European Commission.
