Dialogo della musica

The Department of Musicology cordially invites you to lectures within the cycle

Dialogo della musica, Spring 2024

Ancient treatises often deal with music in the form of a dialogue. This has become the inspiration for this lecture series, which aims to open a dialogue between the speaker and the audience, as well as between different disciplines or spheres dealing with music. The spring series will present themes based on current musicological projects whose common feature is the exploration of music in relation to the extra-musical.

The lectures are held on Tuesdays at 5 pm in the Musicological Library of the Institute of Art History of the CAS, Puškinovo nám. 9, Prague 6.

16. 4.
Ondřej Daniel (Praha)
Hudba, vizualita a drogy: kulturní praxe psychedelického festivalu

Festivaly inspirované hnutím hippies a psychedelickou kulturou 60. let nabízejí jedinečné a transformační zážitky prostřednictvím hudby, vizuálních umění a užívání psychedelických látek. Jsou spjaty s elektronickou taneční hudbou, psychedelickým rockem, world music a dalšími žánry. Klíčovou roli při ponoření do zážitku hraje též vizualita. Přednáška se zaměřuje na kulturní praxi těchto festivalů, považovanou za kontrolovaný prostor pro prožívání změněného stavu vědomí, a analyzuje její historický a kulturní vývoj v českém (Kozí mejdan a Dub Sirens) i širším mezinárodním prostoru.

Ondřej Daniel je kulturní historik pracující v Semináři obecných a komparativních dějin Ústavu světových dějin Filozofické fakulty Univerzity Karlovy a spoluzakladatelem neziskové organizace Centrum pro studium populární kultury.

21. 5.
Samantha Heinle (Notre Dame, USA)
On the Musically Kafkaesque

Although the novelist insisted that he was unmusical, Theodor W. Adorno upheld Kafka as the first writer to treat language as music, and Stanley Corngold suggested that music was the originary “traumatic event” from which Kafka spent the rest of his life running. This talk develops the notion of Franz Kafka as an unmusical-musical writer to advance a larger claim: the musically Kafkaesque offers a yet unheard auditory diagnostic for pathologies of the modern condition, whose abiding symptoms range from the obscure to the obvious and from the acute to the chronic.

Samantha Kim Heinle is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame. She holds an A.B. Honors degree in Music and Literature from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

11. 6.
Nicola Usula (Fribourg)
Seventeenth-Century Libretti in the Bohemian Kingdom: Dynamics of Dissemination and Acquisition from Surviving Collections in Prague and Český Krumlov

A high number of librettos in Italian dating from the second half of the seventeenth century are now held in the Czech Republic. Some of these surviving items come from late collections, but many of them still show signs of coeval 17th-century collecting. In my paper I will share the results of a research carried on in Prague and Český Krumlov, with the aim of digging into the phenomenon of dissemination and sedimentation that – already during the century in which opera was born – brought to Bohemia traces of the spectacular life from the main contemporary operatic centres.

Nicola Usula is a Senior Postdoc SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) at the Université de Fribourg. His work focuses on musical dramaturgy, music and libretto philology, codicology and musical iconography.