Colloquium with Katherine Larson

March 14, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Mānoa Campus, KUY 410 Add to Calendar

Katherine Larson is Associate Pro-fessor of English at the University of Toronto and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Toronto Scar-borough. Professor Larson's presentation will focus on opening up the notion of song from a performance-based perspective in order to examine the gendered mechanisms of the musical breath and its rhetorical effects when it emanated from the mouth of a singing woman. Her talk will explore early moderns' conceptualized the acoustic medium of the breath.She will chart its movement through the vocal mechanism of the body and explore the traces of that process preserved in physiological treatises, singing handbooks, and surviving manuscript and print scores. While such sources provide rich insight into singing as embodied practice and acoustic phenomenon in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, they testify equally powerfully to song’s elusiveness and capriciousness, particularly at moments where language and notation strain to represent the physical experience of singing. The “wild” or “drastic” dimensions of song manifested in the musical breath unleashed from the page needs to be taken up in literary discussions of textual reception and circulation and hold particular significance for considering the culturally fraught phenomenon of women’s song performance.


Ticket Information
Free & open to the public

Event Sponsor
English, Mānoa Campus

More Information
S. Shankar, (808) 956-3085, engchair@hawaii.edu

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