This paper explores the role of mobile telecommunication and technology firms (MTTs) in the distribution of recorded music in Ghana and Kenya. These countries both have vibrant music markets with weak formal distribution networks. Limited enforcement of copyright regimes and weak market regulation created new entrepreneurial business models. While…[Read more]

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

At the intersection of comics and medicine is the rise of the Graphic Medicine scholarship field. This course examines the ways in which the sequentialized hybrid of word and image is bringing new insights to patient, healthcare, and clinical experiences.

In any manner of ways, the comics medium (whether known as comic books, graphic novels,…[Read more]

An essay written for the catalog for the exhibition, “Benga: Kenyan Kaleidoscope” (Bureau Sepän). Originally written in English; French translation by Gabriella Seemann.

Abstract from the catalog:
Se référant à une performance musicale à laquelle il a assisté et impliquant l’un des musiciens les plus en vue du Kenya, Dan Aceda, dans cet ess…[Read more]

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1314) portrays Hell as an alienated realm, in which the doomed spirits must spend eternity in isolation and regret. Franz Liszt’s two-movement Dante Symphony (1857), based on the Inferno and Purgatorio, gives musical form to Dante’s textual expressions of agony. These evocations of suffering are enhanced by Lisz…[Read more]

Contemporary developments in the medium of the moving picture, particularly in relation to the general digitisation of media, are bringing about substantial changes to long-held conceptions of both its theory and its practice. This thesis asserts that a significant factor in these, both historically and in terms of potential development, is the…[Read more]

What were the sounds of war in the early modern period? What were the sounds of peace? The period between 1570 and 1750—roughly coincident with the cultural era known in Western contexts as “the Baroque”—was characterized by almost continual conflict in Europe. Whether caught up in the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, the Thirty…[Read more]

For some years I have been meaning to upload some of the material I have gathered over the years, including interviews I conducted with experimental composers and performers. One of the most useful, clearest interviews was my interview with Michael Nyman, 23 March 1983, just a few days after I had seen him in Hammersmith with the eponymous Michael…[Read more]

In 1972–3, the American composer Barney Childs began work on a book of interviews with modern composers. Unfortunately, Childs could not find a publisher for the book and abandoned the project. The interviews have remained, unpublished and almost unseen, for over forty years. This paper will introduce Childs’ interview with Wolff in June 1972. H…[Read more]

This collection of essays represents the first international survey of minimalism and postminimalist music from a wide variety of analytical and historical perspectives; its authors include the central scholars in this area. This chapter is the first comprehensive study of the wide variety of minimalist styles in Britain, from the sparse,…[Read more]