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.

2025–2026 Lecture Series

Time Vistas of Awe: The Dynamic Intertwinement of Affectivity and Time Consciousness in Sikh Musical Worship

Inderjit N. Kaur (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
October 7, 2025, 7:30PM

In Sikh epistemology and practice, musical worship is a special site for enhancing affective temporalities aimed at bringing to the fore a sensation of an embodied presence of the Divine. During the course of my ethnographic research on Sikh Kīrtan (sung scriptural verse), I could sense, time and again, that a significant affect that is intensified and circulated among devotees is that of awe for a Divine that is understood to be of profound virtue. In Kīrtan sessions, sacred texts, ritual gestures, music making, and worshipping bodies come together for a heightened experience of awe and expansive time. Both Sikh philosophy and practice speak to the affordances in sensations of awe and time for sensing the awe-inspiring and eternal Divine. In this talk, I elaborate on this Sikh way of feeling and knowing by engaging phenomenological ideas about awe and time to explore the embodied processes at play in the worshippers’ experience. I argue that over the course of musical worship, as the body’s affectivity is shaped, so is its time consciousness, the two working with mutual involvement. Thus, my ethnography of Sikh musical worship leads me to advance a dynamic account of embodied experience in which time consciousness is not independent of affect; rather, over the course of musicking, the body’s affectivity and time consciousness are mutually shaped toward a sensation of expansiveness that feels like a presence of something larger.

 

Blacksplaining Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century

Philip Ewell (Hunter College, City University of New York)
March 12, 2026, 7:30PM

“Blacksplaining Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century” gives an unvarnished black perspective on European classical music as it’s practiced in the United States and Canada. I’m black, I’ve played the cello for over 50 years, and I’m a citizen of both countries, so I’m well equipped to give this perspective. Much has been made recently of the unrelenting whiteness of this music and, for even longer, its unrelenting maleness. Less prominent are classical music’s anti-Asianness, Christian roots, Germanism, pianism, and elitism. To top this all off, it’s worth pointing out that classical music is absolutely [insert expletive here] awesome!

In this talk I’ll blacksplain—yes, that means to explain from a black perspective—these seemingly contradictory aspects of classical music. Ultimately, I argue that in order for us to move beyond the baked-in negative aspects of this music we must let go of some of its most intractable beliefs, like the belief that Johannes Brahms’s music is better than Nathaniel Dett’s, that Igor Stravinsky’s music is better than Julia Perry’s, or that classical music writ large is better than, say, bluegrass music. I call this “letting go” my musical re-education, and, notably, when I come back to classical music after having spent time away from it, I enjoy it even more than I did beforehand. This is not because it’s superior to other musics of the world, but precisely because it is not, which has been one of the most unexpected and exhilarating aspects of my work in reframing classical music. Won’t you join me?