The internationally recognized music scholar, teacher, and author Dr. Philip V. Bohlman of the University of Chicago will present a lecture on “Music’s Nationalist Moment.” Dr. Bohlman’s lecture will also serve as the keynote address for a regional music scholars conference taking place on campus that weekend.

From Dr. Bohlman:
The historical focus of “Music’s Nationalist Moment” will be the emergence of new concepts of music, politics, and the state during the eighteenth century enlightenments, particularly the convergence of religious nationalism and the encounter with world music beyond the West. Speaking to scholars from across the disciplines of music in Fort Collins, I examine larger philosophical and theological ideas in the extensive writings on music and nationalism by Johann Gottfried Herder, and examining analytical problems in the contact zones between Western and Asian musical thought, especially in Indian compositional procedures and Chinese modal studies. The “nationalist moment” itself marks a change in the way music is understood globally and ontologically, at once determined by and liberated from the changing formations of the nation-state in nineteenth century.

The lecture is one of a two part series called “The Rise and Fall of Nationalism in Music.”  The second lecture, “Music After Nationalism,” will take place at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s College of Music, March 30, 2 p.m.

Philip Bohlman is currently the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago where he serves as Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society. He also is Honorarprofessor at the Hannover Hochschule für Musik und Theater. An internationally known expert on Jewish music, Dr. Bohlman has won numerous awards, including the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg Award and Oxford University’s Donald Tovey Prize, both for exemplary historical performance. Among other honors, he was a 2013 recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Dr. Bohlman is the author and/or editor of more than two dozen books, including the recently published The Cambridge History of World Music. He is a former President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, serves on the Editorial Board of Grove Music Online, and is co-editor of the musicological journal Acta musicologica.

The Regional Scholars Conference is a joint venture of the Rocky Mountain/Southwest Chapters of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Society for Music Theory to be held March 27-28, 2015 at Colorado State University’s University Center for the Arts.

The lecture will be in Room 101A