Begun in 2002, MMaP’s Music & Culture Lecture Series presents cutting-edge research by leading scholars in ethnomusicology and allied disciplines. The talks, which are free and open to the public, take place in the MMaP Gallery on the second floor of the John C. Perlin Arts and Culture Centre. Since February 2017, all of the talks in the series have been livestreamed on the MMaP YouTube channel, and videos of past lectures from the series can be viewed there as well.

2024–2025 Lecture Series

Seeing the Moon Through my Window: Lullaby Project-NL

David Buley and Jan Buley (Memorial University)
September 24, 2024 at 7:30 pm

The Lullaby Project-NL is part of a world-wide initiative that had humble beginnings in 2011 in the Bronx, New York City. Its founder, composer Thomas Cabaniss, had an idea for writing and creating lullabies collaboratively, and since its inception, the program has bloomed all over the planet. Today, there are Lullaby Projects in youth shelters, hospitals, prisons, schools, clinics, and refugee camps. In these projects, participants are partnered with facilitators, who help in guiding the creative process—from writing down phrases and memories, to crafting texts and choosing the tunes and their instrumentation. Since 2017, Lullaby Project-NL facilitators Jan and David Buley have attended training in New York at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute and offered eight Lullaby Project partnerships in Newfoundland. This fall, they hope to return to the Clarenville Women’s Correctional Centre to offer a program there again. Although lullabies are often associated with lulling babies and toddlers to sleep, they can be much more. The lullaby-writing process can be surprising. A lullaby may be written about someone who has died. Lullabies have been written for pets, special neighbours, siblings, parents, or an important memory or crucial period in one’s life. They may be written for places that are loved and missed, and they are always deeply personal.  Sometimes, a project partnership concludes with a tender sharing of lullabies with invited family members or prison staff. Each partnership is unique. In this presentation, Jan and David Buley will discuss  some of their experiences with the project—and we’ll sing a bit too!​

Streaming Virtuosities: Media Structures, Accelerated Fandom, and Alienation by Volume

David VanderHamm (Johnson County Community College)
Tuesday, March 11, 2025, 7:30PM

This video will blow you away. Anyone who spends time online has encountered some version of this message, whether in a friend’s post, a corporation’s advertisement, or a video’s own description. When the promise is fulfilled, we experience virtuosity: skill made apparent and socially meaningful. Yet such widespread online encounters are also peculiarly individualized, driven by algorithmic recommendations based on each user’s data. This lecture discusses online performances by a cluster of guitarists (centered around Kaki King and Jon Gomm) to shed light on virtuosity in the era of digital streaming. It combines first-person phenomenology and critical voices from music and media studies to explore how streaming platforms in general (and YouTube in particular) structure mediated encounters with virtuosic bodies. I examine three different (if frequently overlapping) paths through streaming media: (1) “only what I came for,” the path platforms attempt to nudge us beyond, (2) accelerated fandom, and (3) surfing the algorithm. Reflecting on these paths reveals how digital architecture and the algorithms operating within it exercise a social power that we experience regularly, even if their technical workings remain opaque. The very intimacy of the encounter—platforms provide individual recommendations for content that we stream in our homes on devices that serve as constant companions—readily turns our interpretive concerns back on ourselves. Our values and judgments are already temporally “on all sides” of experience, and algorithmic recommendations increasingly replicate these subjective contributions to experience in the media objects themselves, leading to simultaneous intensifications and crises of value.