Marking the 55th anniversary of Ukrainian composer Borys Liatoshynsky's death, join us for an exploration of the concept of influence in the field of music studies, including how influence contributes to national musical identity, canon formation, and musical exchange across borders. Joy Calico (Vanderbilt University), Peter Schmelz (Arizona State University) and Liza Sirenko (Graduate Center, CUNY) will explore these ideas with respect to Liatoshynsky, Ukraine, and beyond.
Peter J. Schmelz is Professor of Musicology at Arizona State University, Tempe. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, his writing has received awards from ASCAP and from the American Musicological Society. His most recent book is Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the late USSR (Oxford, 2021). Among other ongoing projects, Professor Schmelz is currently co-editing an introduction to Ukrainian music for Indiana University Press.
Joy H. Calico is University Distinguished Professor of Musicology and German Studies and Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Music at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She has written extensively about Bertolt Brecht, opera in the 20th and 21st centuries, and Arnold Schoenberg. Her award-winning monograph Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (California, 2014) was just published in Italian translation (Il Saggiatore, 2023).
Liza Sirenko is a music theorist, critic, and current Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She studies contemporary instrumental music and her current research focuses on North American approaches to post-tonal music analysis. She is a co-founder and editor of the Ukrainian classical music website The Claquers, where she discovers music from abroad for Ukrainian audience and explores Ukrainian classical music for English-speaking readers. She is the former PR Director for the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra and the independent Liatoshynsky Club initiative.
Leah Batstone (University of Vienna and Hunter College) is a musicologist working at the intersections of art music, politics, and philosophy in Central and Eastern Europe. She is currently working on her second monograph concerning Ukrainian musical modernism with the support of a REWIRE postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vienna. From 2018-2021, she spent three wonderful years as an instructor in the Department of Music at Hunter College and will be returning to teach a seminar on empires and their musics in summer of 2023. She is the creative director of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival.