Sounding the Spectral:
A Symposium

May 12-13, 2023
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Performance Penthouse 901: 915 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry: 926 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
Franke Institute for the Humanities: 1100 E. 57th Street, JRL S-102, Chicago, IL 60637

Co-Organizers

Seth Brodsky, Martha Feldman

“Spectral”: a borderline concept, fusing absence and presence, lost and found, but also delay and reckoning, the simultaneous demand and reluctance to contend with past gaps that trouble the present. As such, the spectral is also always a contemporary concept, a struggle to deal with the contemporary and its lags. How might music and sound meet the spectral now? How might they help engage spectrality’s peculiar presence today, making us more hospitable to rethinking dilemmas that still haunt, while also conjuring new futures?

The spectral invokes a vital pre-millennial theoretical moment when Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993) unleashed an avalanche of spectrality studies conceiving the remains of history as a constant cause of mourning, a compulsion to repeat what had been wrongly presumed overcome. But that moment—which turned around language and vision, not hearing and sound—is no longer our own. How does spectrality operate now, in an age of hypercirculation, crisis ordinary, and ecological devastation? Contemporary experience requires us to rethink the spectral in colonial, global, and planetary terms while taking stock of new spatial and temporal displacements and new forms of repression, secrecy, surveillance, and disavowal. Sound and music emerge as singularly amenable to the task, their own centrifugal nature sympathizing with the spectral at its most manifold and elusive.

The conference events are held in three different locations. Please note below the day, time, and location of each event.

Sounding the Spectral: A Symposium
Program
Friday, May 12, 2023
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
Performance Penthouse 901: 915 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637

1:00 pm: WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS

Seth Brodsky, Associate Professor, Music; Director, Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, University of Chicago

Martha Feldman, Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Professor of Music and Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago

1:15 pm: SESSION ONE: Chair, Andrei Pohorelsky, PhD Candidate, Music, University of Chicago

Carolyn Abbate, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor and Chair of Music, Harvard University

Music’s Phantom Efficacy

Martin Daughtry, Associate Professor of Music, New York University, & Jairo Moreno, Associate Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania

(De)crescendo

3:15 pm: Coffee break

3:30 pm: KEYNOTE

Fumi Okiji, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley

Subjunctive, Semblant, Spectral; Haiti’s Infrasonic Blur

Chair, Seth Brodsky, Associate Professor, Music; Director, Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, University of Chicago

Respondent, Michael Gallope, Associate Professor, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota

Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
926 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637

5:15 pm: WINE AND CHEESE RECEPTION

Saturday, May 13, 2023
Franke Institute for the Humanities
1100 E. 57th Street, Regenstein Library, S-102, Chicago, IL 60637

9:30 am: Breakfast

10:00 am: SESSION TWO: Chair, Danielle Roper, Assistant Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures and Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago

Jessica Swanston Baker, Assistant Professor, Music and Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago

Sounding in the Wake: Thinking with Jumbies in the Caribbean Archipelago

Martha Feldman, Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor of Music and Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago

The Castrato as Subject, Dead or Alive

12:00 pm: Lunch

1:15 pm: SESSION THREE: Chair, Audrey Slote, PhD Candidate, Music, University of Chicago

Seth Brodsky, Associate Professor, Music; Director, Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry

Handwringing/On Hidden Labors

Amy Cimini, Associate Professor of Music, Integrative Studies, University of California, San Diego

Spectra against Surveillance

Bonnie Gordon, Associate Professor of Critical & Comparative Studies, Music, University of Virginia

The Lost: Castrates in Ghostly Contact Zones

4:00 pm: Coffee break

4:15-5:30 pm: FINAL ROUNDTABLE:

Co-chairs, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University, Performance Studies and Asian American Studies, and Varshini Narayanan, PhD Candidate, Music and Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago

Image by Elissa Osterland

Official Website

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Tags: Amy Cimini, Andrei Pohorelsky, Audrey Slote, Bonnie Gordon, Carolyn Abbate, Chicago, Danielle Roper, Fumi Okiji, Hyde Park, Jessica Swanston Baker, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Logan Center for the Arts, Martha Feldman, Martin Daughtry, Michael Gallope, Seth Brodsky, Sounding the Spectral: A Symposium, The University of Chicago