O Projecto ORFEUS assentou na pesquisa histórica e musicológica sobre o espólio musical do mosteiro eborense de S. Bento de Cástris, mosteiro cisterciense feminino, afiliado na abadia-mãe de Alcobaça desde finais do século XIII. Trata-se do mais antigo mosteiro cisterciense a sul do Tejo, e a inventariação dos seus bens, aquando da morte da últim…[Read more]

An introduction to the analysis and interpretation of European classical music from 1827 to the present. The focus is on music of Europe, in particular of France, Germany, and Italy, but thanks to the vagaries of colonialism and imperialism we will also direct our attention towards countries where the musical traditions of Western Europe spread,…[Read more]

This seminar investigates musical performances of the past in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ranging from Anton Webern’s famous transcription of a Bach fugue to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, we will seek to explore how compositional practices in the twentieth century drew inspiration from a range of historical sources, and…[Read more]

Leonard Bernstein’s 1949 second symphony, subtitled “The Age of Anxiety,” is an exploration of post-war apathy and exhaustion at the dawn of McCarthyism. Examining the work both in its political context and also within the context of Bernstein’s beloved American symphonic tradition, I show how Bernstein flipped the triumphal musical rhetoric of…[Read more]

Elliott Carter once extolled the visceral, primitive effect of Penderecki’s Threnody on untrained listeners. In this article, I examine how a formalized analytical approach to the central section of the piece contributes positively to a phenomenological experience of the whole piece. Part 1 presents an ear-training progression aimed at bringing t…[Read more]

In this article I demonstrate how listeners understand musical processes with their bodies, and how their gestures can be used to build analytical models. Specifically, I draw on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that situated, active listeners project their motor intentional gestures inside music, where they reconstitute the…[Read more]