Times are shown in your local time zone GMT
Ad-blocker Detected - Your browser has an ad-blocker enabled, please disable it to ensure your attendance is not impacted, such as CPD tracking (if relevant). For technical help, contact Support.
Roundtable 7: Music and Breath [FREE IN-PERSON EVENT - BOOKINGS REQUIRED]
Roundtable
Roundtable
4:00 pm
01 December 2023
Melba Hall, Conservatorium of Music
Session Programme
FREE IN-PERSON EVENT
Non-delegates, book via Eventbrite.
If, according to Genesis, the human form was invented from dust, then it was the inspiration of breath which made Adam a living being. Breath has long been taken to define the span of human life. Yet far from defining the uniquely human, breath connects humans with the non-human worlds of the elements, divinities, and with other aerobic life. Perhaps breath even undermines the human’s boundaries and essence, threatening to suffuse the body with its environment and diffuse its powers into thin air. And while music might seem an innocent fashioning of the air, the first woodwind instrument was invented – according to a myth rehearsed in many enlightenment texts – when the nymph Syrinx, transformed into a reed to escape Pan, was cut into pieces by the god and bound into a set of pipes.
Enlightenment and Romantic Europeans endlessly rehearsed earlier myths of breath, yet equally transformed them. From Robert Boyle’s experiments on air in the early years of the Royal Society, to Joseph Wright Derby’s Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump; from the revolutionary ‘breath of Autumn’s being’ that roars through Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, to long nineteenth-century projects to measure lung capacity across the globe, Enlightenment and Romantic cultures profoundly reshaped understandings and practices of breath. Aiming to breathe new life into this longer history, this recital-roundtable offers music and conversation to reflect on breath across just some of its many current domains: musical, historical, philosophical, medical, literary, political, environmental.
Convenors:
Non-delegates, book via Eventbrite.
If, according to Genesis, the human form was invented from dust, then it was the inspiration of breath which made Adam a living being. Breath has long been taken to define the span of human life. Yet far from defining the uniquely human, breath connects humans with the non-human worlds of the elements, divinities, and with other aerobic life. Perhaps breath even undermines the human’s boundaries and essence, threatening to suffuse the body with its environment and diffuse its powers into thin air. And while music might seem an innocent fashioning of the air, the first woodwind instrument was invented – according to a myth rehearsed in many enlightenment texts – when the nymph Syrinx, transformed into a reed to escape Pan, was cut into pieces by the god and bound into a set of pipes.
Enlightenment and Romantic Europeans endlessly rehearsed earlier myths of breath, yet equally transformed them. From Robert Boyle’s experiments on air in the early years of the Royal Society, to Joseph Wright Derby’s Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump; from the revolutionary ‘breath of Autumn’s being’ that roars through Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, to long nineteenth-century projects to measure lung capacity across the globe, Enlightenment and Romantic cultures profoundly reshaped understandings and practices of breath. Aiming to breathe new life into this longer history, this recital-roundtable offers music and conversation to reflect on breath across just some of its many current domains: musical, historical, philosophical, medical, literary, political, environmental.
Convenors:
Dr Miranda Stanyon (Senior Research Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne)
Dr Fred Kiernan (Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellow at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and National Secretary of the Musicological Society of Australia)
Participants:
James Q. Davies is Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley; his most recent book is Creatures of the Air: Music, Atlantic Spirits, Breath, 1817–1913 (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
Maxine Beneba Clarke is Peter Steele Poet in Residence at the University of Melbourne, and an award-winning author of poetry, short fiction, memoir and children's books, including How Decent Folk Behave (2021), When We Say Black Lives Matter (2020), and The Hate Race (2016).
James Q. Davies is Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley; his most recent book is Creatures of the Air: Music, Atlantic Spirits, Breath, 1817–1913 (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
Maxine Beneba Clarke is Peter Steele Poet in Residence at the University of Melbourne, and an award-winning author of poetry, short fiction, memoir and children's books, including How Decent Folk Behave (2021), When We Say Black Lives Matter (2020), and The Hate Race (2016).
Tom Ford is Senior Lecturer in English at LaTrobe University; his books include Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a Time of Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and, with Justin Clemens, Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius (MUP, 2023).
Genevieve Lacey is an Australian recorder virtuoso, composer and arts advocate; her recent projects include Breathing Space (2021), commissioned for the National Museum of Australia’s Garden of Dreams.