Claim OwnershipTransforming Sounds, Altered Selves
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Transforming Sounds, Altered Selves: How music changes in time, changes us and changes our worlds.
All cultures have stories of miraculous transformations—of individuals, groups, even landscapes—produced by instrumental music and song. In recent decades, our understanding of the transformative effects of music has itself been doubly transformed by new kinds of historical and cognitive research. These podcasts were created by Resident Members at Green College, at the University of British Columbia, and based on a series of public lectures and discussions at the College in 2017-18 that explored the modalities of mind/body-altering and world-changing musical experience in the persons of players and listeners across time, and also in the wider history of societies and cultures, using performances of “classical” (and other) music in all periods and settings, and their audiences, to generate data.
All cultures have stories of miraculous transformations—of individuals, groups, even landscapes—produced by instrumental music and song. In recent decades, our understanding of the transformative effects of music has itself been doubly transformed by new kinds of historical and cognitive research. These podcasts were created by Resident Members at Green College, at the University of British Columbia, and based on a series of public lectures and discussions at the College in 2017-18 that explored the modalities of mind/body-altering and world-changing musical experience in the persons of players and listeners across time, and also in the wider history of societies and cultures, using performances of “classical” (and other) music in all periods and settings, and their audiences, to generate data.
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How is the ‘language’ of music learned? Can it be translated? Ethnomusicology student Anna Wright explains how music serves as a communicative device even in the absence of lyric content, and how it can help create our senses of individual and cultural identity. She and guests Corey Cerovsek (violin) and psychology professor Bill Thompson probe the limits of our musical understanding, with special reference to non-western traditions. Hear fiddle music by Liz Carroll, playing the first of a two-piece set called Castle Kelly.
How do musical masterpieces travel through time? Philosophy student Ian Heckman speaks to Iain Fenlon, Emeritus Professor of historical musicology at the University of Cambridge; Tanya Tomkins (cello) and Eric Zivian (forte piano). Learn how performers make music from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries come to life for audiences today. How is possible for operas like Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo and L’Arianna, now more than 400 years old, still to move us? Hear, too, why some musicians choose to perform such pieces on period instruments. Musical interludes include excerpts from the operas and Tomkins’ and Zivian’s performance of Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1, with violinist Monica Huggett.
Can ancient and modern traditions of chant tell us something fundamental about the musical self? Clinical Psychology student Serene Qiu traces the transformative and unifying power of musical chant, inside and outside religious communities. Professor Thomas Forrest Kelly, musicologist at Harvard University, explains how the musical structure of Gregorian chant creates a sense of community across time, and the theological underpinnings of that effect. Dr. Paula Pryce, anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, reflects on her personal experiences with chant, over many years spent living and working with monks and other contemplatives. The episode features performances of chant by Schola Magdalena and Diabolus In Musica.
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