Lincoln College Music Society - Lecture Series: Dr. Thomas Metcalf

Free entry - Registration Required

Lincoln College Music Society is delighted to announce the first event in our lecture series. We welcome Dr Thomas Metcalf, Christopher Cox Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford, in Week 4. In this lecture, Dr Metcalf argues that musical manuscript paper is ‘alive’: suffused with an emergent iconological energy that has contributed to the ‘image’ of music since the 17th century. By considering case studies from the 20th century by Dick Higgins and Christian Marclay which destroy (or sacrifice) manuscript paper as part of their creative process, a framework drawn from ethical philosophy and visual studies will be constructed to re-consider concepts such as musical ‘brutality’ and ‘violence’, as well as the idea of audiences as witnesses to, or participants in, destructive creative processes. As music’s methods of consumption, creation, and distribution become increasingly digitized and subsumed into algorithms and AI (an ethical minefield itself), considering manuscript paper as alive can be used to contextualize the historic and contemporary status of musical text, notation, and materiality.
The lecture will take place in the Lower Lecture Room, Berrow Foundation Building, Lincoln College.

We look forward to seeing you there!