Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Peter Schubert
The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.
Doctoral Colloquium: Prof. Peter Schubert, 㽶Ƶ, Music Theory
վٱ:The Arcane Counterpoint of Rore’s 1542 Madrigals and What It Can Teach Us About Analysis
ٰ:I will give this talk in October in Amsterdam and Leuven as the Music Theorist in Residence of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory (Vereniging voor Muziektheorie, ). I will summarize recent work that Sylvain Margot and I have done on Cipriano de Rore, and I will apply it to questions about the broader enterprise of musical analysis. Using software developed in the CRIM Project (Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass, Freedman), we found surprising deployment of motives in a collection of Rore’s madrigals, particularly motives that we might be tempted to dismiss as “contrapuntal fillers.” This work provoked the following questions: Can we only find what we are looking for in a piece of music, or can we be surprised? Does our experience inevitably determine our focus, or can an alien mind (the computer’s) bring a fresh perspective to the object of analysis?
Biography: Peter Schubert studied with Nadia Boulanger, received his degrees from Columbia, and has taught at McGill’s Schulich School of Music since 1990. He has published two textbooks on counterpoint (one with Christoph Neidhöfer), recorded CDs of choral music, and posted videos on Renaissance improvisation to YouTube. In 2015 the 4. Leipziger ImprovisationsFestival said “Peter Schubert gilt als großer Improvisations-Guru Nordamerikas.” In 2019 he received the Gail Boyd de Stwolinski Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Music Theory Teaching and Scholarship.