Harvard Club of Southern California

Musicalities: Scenes of Sonic Social Life - A Lecture by Vijay Iyer

To conclude his residency at USC, Vijay Iyer—a celebrated pianist, composer, collaborator, and tenured professor at Harvard University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies—will lecture on Musicalities: Scenes on Sonic Social Life.

Thursday, February 27, 2025 @ 6:00 PM
Doheny Memorial Library (DML), 3550 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089

“Vijay Iyer could be the poster boy for twenty-first-century jazz: omnivorous in his musical interests, socially and politically aware, his powers as a pianist, composer, and bandleader ever expanding.”—The New Yorker

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Cost: No charge
Contact: Madeleine Mejia, Madeleine_Mejia@post.harvard.edu

According to Iyer, “The category of music aligns with the category of the human; the two should be understood as mutually constitutive, unstable constructs. Like personhood, music’s status is not freely given. Rather, it is conferred through a contingent process in which ‘you,’ the subject, experience an affective (which is to say, embodied) relation with the sensory trace of an other.”

He continues, “Such a precarious sonic relation, which I am calling musicality, can assume many forms; we must imagine not one but many musicalities, many modes of sonic mattering, coming into existence across the anthropocene. With this argument I ask that we unthink the totalizing category of ‘music,’ and begin to theorize humankind's innumerable, diverse, emergent musicalities, via a series of scenes of mutable, embodied sonic social life.”

Iyer’s residency will also include a performance on Tuesday, February 25, and a masterclass on Wednesday, February 26.

Vijay Iyer, Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, is a musician and scholar who has been described by the New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker, and multicultural gateway.” The composer-pianist has earned a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. Iyer’s honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. His newest album, Compassion, features his acclaimed trio with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh. His lush, expansive collaboration with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile, received two GRAMMY nominations and was named among the best albums of the year in Pitchfork and the New York Times. Iyer’s scholarship dwells at the intersections of music studies, Black studies, and the sciences.

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