At the Margins of Enlightenment: Reflections on Antiracist Musicology from a Jewish Scholar Event
- Time:
- 18:00
- Date:
- 29 March 2022
- Venue:
- Online
Event details
The business of music historians is to excavate stories from the musical past. All humanities fields, including musicology, are now engaging in a much-needed revision of methodologies--heeding the calls of scholars working on the margins for years--to complexify and diversify the stories we tell. The study of figures such as Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780), apparently the first Black person to publish his original musical compositions, confirms that music has long carried antiracist messages, and engagement with Sancho's work allows us to revise our understandings of agency, authorship, and community in music studies. And yet, Sancho's published letters also raise uncomfortable questions about the marginalization of Jews among even the most enlightened writers from the past. As historians, we must not ignore the passages in Sancho's letters that reinscribe caricatures of Jews. This conversation between Thomas Irvine (University of Southampton) and Rebecca Cypess (Rutgers University, USA) will explore Cypess's current research on antiracism in Sancho's music while also reflecting on the experience of engaging with his published correspondence as a Jewish scholar.
Speaker information
Dr Rebecca Cypess,Masson Gross School of the Arts,, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Mason Gross and an Associate Professor in the Music Department. She is committed to fostering interdisciplinary research, teaching, and artistic practice; enhancing the school’s climate and its commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion; and promoting the work of Mason Gross’s faculty, students, and staff. From 2018 to 2020, Cypess served as Associate Director of the Music Department, where she worked to enrich the department’s academic and artistic life while advancing initiatives that increased operational clarity and amplified the voices of students. In her teaching and research, Cypess specializes in the history, interpretation, and performance practices of music in 17th- and 18th-century Europe and America, as well as music in Jewish culture, music in the history of science, and women in music. Prior to her appointment at Rutgers in 2012, Cypess served on the Music History faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Dr Thomas Irvine,, is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Programmes in Music, and an Alan Turing Fellow. He will chair this seminar.