Björn Heile | The Dodecaphonic Diaspora: Serialism and Migratory Aesthetics from a Global Perspective

**Please note: this event has been cancelled due to industrial action by the UCU**

Event details

Speaker: Prof Björn Heile

Date: 9 February 2023

Time: 5.15 - 6.45pm.  

Venue: Alison House, Atrium (G10)

Abstract

Florian Scheding (2019) has associated serialism with a ‘migratory aesthetic’, suggesting that its historical association with migration and exile has been transformed into an aesthetic signifier. In my talk, I will outline that serial composers further formed a transnational network that has many characteristics of a diaspora as theorised in Migration Studies (e.g. Van Hear, 2014). Serialism’s extraordinary international dispersion followed the migratory pathways of many of its early proponents during its ‘expulsion’ from its principal homeland, Vienna. Subsequently, the transnational bonds between serial composers in different countries were often stronger than their embeddedness in their adopted host countries.

Significantly, while, particularly among later generations, not all serial composers were migrants, in the post-war period, serialism’s association with migration and internationalism contributed to its cachet including among sedentary composers. The dodecaphonic diaspora, then, is constituted equally by composers with and without migratory experience. I will discuss various serial networks, across Western and Central and Eastern Europe, North America, Latin America, East Asia, Africa and Australia.

Biography

Björn Heile  studied at the Technische  Universität Berlin (MA in Musicology and English and American Literature) and the University of Southampton (PhD, 2001). After spending another year at Southampton as a Leverhulme Special Research Fellow, he moved to the University of Sussex, where he spent eight years, before joining the University of Glasgow in 2010. He was Visiting Professor at the Université de Côte d'Azur (Nice) during June 2017.

He is the author of The Music of Mauricio Kagel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and the editor of The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009),  the co-editor (with Martin Iddon) of Mauricio Kagel bei den Darmstädter Ferienkursen für Neue Musik: Eine Dokumentation (Hofheim: Wolke, 2009), (with Jenny Doctor and Peter Elsdon) of Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen (New York: Oxford, 2016) and (with Charles Wilson) of The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music (London: Routledge, 2018). He is mostly interested in music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a number of fairly diverse, but variously inter-related areas, such as Experimental Music Theatre and theories of embodied cognition and the global history of musical modernism, seen from a comparative and cosmopolitan perspective.