Obsolete Musical Objects in Material Culture—

Survival, Collection, and Imbued Objects

Prof. Margaret Murata

University of California, Irvine

“Biographies” of musical objects can trace the changing social contexts in which they survived, beyond the brief period of their use. This colloquium explores the utility of looking at seventeenth-century manuscript scores and twentieth-century audio cassette tapes for music as mute and obsolete objects.

In the west, through to the eighteenth century, repertories of non-sacred music continually changed over time; consequently there was little reason to hang onto, much less save, musical scores. What then, to non-musicians, was the cultural value of keeping seventeenth-century scores and musical instruments after they were no longer functional? Indiscriminate hoarding? Collectionism? Or does survival of these scores symptomize some other social phenomenon?

Collecting vinyl LPs is a recognized contemporary phenomenon; audio cassettes, however, have a much less exalted status. But although as a sounding medium they died in the 1990s, cassettes have revived as a cultural symbol on T-shirts, USB drives, and in works of art. Looking at compact cassettes as objects and the increasing phenomenon of music merchandising exemplifies Kopytoff’s “dynamics of informal singularization” and illuminates where music itself might fit on his continuum between commodities and personalized objects.

Margaret Murata is a Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of California, Irvine.  A distinguished musicologist, Professor Murata is a specialist in Italian Baroque opera and cantata, the revival of arie antiche in modern times, and performance practice, particularly for the voice and continuo instruments.  Previously Professor Murata was the President of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (2000-03) and the Vice-President of the American Musicology Society (1994-96). Her most recent publications include “Opera as Spectacle, Opera as Drama” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Opera (2012), “Gems, Glories, and Capolavori of Early Italian Opera,” in D’une scene à l’autre. L’opéra italien en l’Europe (2008), and Passaggio in Italia: Music on the Grand Tour in the Seventeenth Century, edited with Dinko Fabris (2011).

Thursday, February 23, 2011

4:00 PM

Room 1440, Schoenberg Music Building

This event is sponsored in part by the UCLA Graduate Student Association