Online: Corwin Chair Series Lecture: Leigh Landy

The Department of Music will present a virtual Corwin Chair Series Lecture featuring composer Leigh Landy on Friday, November 19, 2021, at 11 am PT via Zoom. Professor Landy will discuss his work, aesthetics, and philosophies in a lecture titled “Things that are on my mind about (and in my own) sound-based music.”

This event is free and open to the public.

Zoom link: tinyurl.com/corwinlecture

As someone in the field of Music Technology (capital M as I am focused on music that uses technology, only developing it when needed), I have been fascinated by the many branches of sonic creativity that have evolved over time and equally fascinated by how innovation seems to coexist with craft, most musicians focusing on one or the other. As someone equally interested in musicological and socio-cultural research, I look at such issues from inside (the musician) and outside (the scholar). In early publications, I wrote more generally about experimental music, including vocal/instrumental varieties, investigating issues such as how much of this music was – when I was a student – and remains today somewhat marginalized from society. But is that so? This talk will investigate some of the twists and turns of my career as a musician and a scholar and can be symbolized by:

Why I prefer ‘art for life’s sake’ to ‘art for art’s sake.

It will be proposed that aspects of our world of sonic creativity, such as sampling and hacking cultures, just might form part of 21st-century folk music.

Leigh Landy (llandy.dmu.ac.uk) holds a Research Chair at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) where he directs the Music, Technology, and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity (MTI 2 ). His scholarship is divided between creative and musicological work. His compositions, many of which are sample-based, include several for video, dance, and theatre and have been performed around the globe. He has worked extensively with the late playwright, Heiner Müller and the new media artist, Michel Jaffrennou and was composer in residence for the Dutch National Theatre during its first years of existence. His publications focus primarily on the studies of electroacoustic music. He is editor of “Organised Sound” (Cambridge University Press) and author of eight books including “What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music?”, “Understanding the Art of Sound Organization” (MIT Press) and “The Music of Sounds” (Routledge). He is currently completing two books, “On the Music of Sounds and the Music of Things” with John Richards and “Experiencing Organised Sounds” and is composing the seventh work (Mexico) in his Radio Series. He directs the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site projects (EARS, EARS 2) and is a founding director of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS).