David Schroeder Music & Culture Lecture Series
The Fountain School of Performing Arts proudly hosts the David Schroeder Music & Culture lectures. This exciting PUBLIC series features distinguished scholars presenting research on music and culture, drawing on a range of disciplinary approaches and exploring diverse repertories. Join our community鈥檚 conversation.听
 Building Sound Communities in Unama鈥檏i: Fostering EDIA, Reconciliation and Decolonization through Community-Engaged Research-Creation
Building Sound Communities in Unama鈥檏i: Fostering EDIA, Reconciliation and Decolonization through Community-Engaged Research-Creation
 -with Marcia Ostashewski, Graham Marshall and Leim Joe
Oct. 23 | 12:00PM-1:00PM听
Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
free and open to the public
In this presentation, Marcia Ostashewski, Graham Marshall and Leim Joe share examples of award-winning community-engaged public-facing research, demonstrating ways in which music and arts can be at the core of innovation. Marcia leads and supports interdisciplinary research collaborations, based at the Centre for Sound Communities (Cape Breton U), that bring together partners from across community, university, and industry for lasting, transformational impact. These teams involve people from all over the world, from diverse walks of life. In their work, they bring together experiences and understandings from multiple knowledge systems, and a broad scope of disciplines, professional practices, and communities. Graham, a community-based researcher, and Leim, a university-based research assistant, discuss ways in which Indigenous scholars and practitioners are involved as both leaders and researchers in this work, and speak to the impact of this work for Indigenous communities.
The Centre for Sound Communities team was recognized with a 2024 SSHRC Impact Award in the Connection category, for a project titled for their groundbreaking research, that reflects the focus of this presentation and the broader aim of the team鈥檚 research, 鈥淏uilding Sound Communities in Unama鈥檏i: Fostering EDIA, Reconciliation and Decolonization through Community-Engaged Research-Creation.鈥澨
Dr. Marcia Ostashewski听is a scholar, musician, teacher, administrator, and leader with a decades long career pioneering research through a commitment to relationship building, social justice, anti-racism, reconciliation, and decolonization. Her work is based on an ethics of mutual care and support. She is the Founding Director of the Centre for Sound Communities, where she works with diverse artists, scholars, and traditional knowledge holders to create new knowledge and foster positive change on both an institutional and local level. Dr. Ostashewski鈥檚 collaborations connect her with an array of experts and laypeople on several continents and across various sectors with whom she conducts critical scholarly inquiry into music, dance, sound, movement, and their connection to community well-being. This work has been lauded as a model collaborative approach that opens new space to further decolonize institutions and to reimagine the roles of scholars within communities and practices.
Leim Joe听graduated from Cape Breton University with a concentration in ethnomusicology in 2024. He is now a student at St. FX University for the Mi鈥檏maw Kina鈥檓atnewey Cohort Bachelor of Education program, a part-time program with a focus on Mi鈥檏maq educational perspectives and learning. Leim also serves in the Canadian Forces as a reservist with the Cape Breton Highlanders Infantry Unit where he has taught multiple courses, including the Black Bear program, a Basic Military program for Indigenous youth in Atlantic Canada. At home, Leim is a proud father of two children with his wife in Membertou, NS. When not busy with university or work he enjoys spending time with his family, playing one of his musical instruments or walking his dogs.
Graham Marshall听comes from Membertou Mi'kmaw Nation, a founding member of the Mi'kmaw drum group Sons of Membertou in 1993. More recently Graham has been performing all over the world sharing songs and telling stories of his culture. Graham has been with Parks Canada as a Heritage Interpreter telling visitors the stories of the Mi'kmaq throughout this land of Mi'kma'ki He is also an Indigenous Liaison for Nova Scotia Indigenous Tourism Enterprise Network creating relationships and partnerships with Mi'kmaw and non-Mi'kmaw organizations.
 From Sociability to Solidarity: Maria Theresia Paradis as Piano Teacher and Advocate for Blind Musicians, 1809-1824
From Sociability to Solidarity: Maria Theresia Paradis as Piano Teacher and Advocate for Blind Musicians, 1809-1824
 -with听Adeline Mueller
Nov. 27 | 12:00PM-1:00PM
Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
free and open to the public
Maria Theresia Paradis (1759-1824) was a renowned blind piano virtuoso who, at the age of 49, opened a small music school for girls out of her home in Vienna. At their public concerts, her students performed challenging music in collaboration with elite musicians, both blind and non-blind, in Paradis鈥檚 network. Glowing accounts in the press marveled at both the skill of the players and their affection for one another and their teacher. Paradis鈥檚 school thus not only legitimized a blind musician teaching non-blind students; it also staged ensemble music-making as a form of resistance to familiar misconceptions of the blind as isolated and idle. Listening to the music of Paradis and her students鈥攁nd accounts of their 鈥渟isterly love鈥 and 鈥済ood communal tone鈥濃攚e can trace a political undercurrent to the sociability that has long been understood to characterize the chamber music of the late Classical and early Romantic periods. Paradis鈥檚 school concerts subtly but unmistakably asserted the right of blind musicians to full participation in Viennese society as convivial subjects, rather than sequestered objects of pity and charity.
Adeline Mueller is Associate Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College. She specializes in opera and art song by Mozart and his contemporaries, particularly in German-speaking Europe, with additional research interests in music and childhood, music and disability, and marginalized composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her book听听was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. She has written articles for听Eighteenth-Century Music,听Opera Quarterly, and听Frontiers in Communication, and contributed chapters to听听(2023),听听(Cambridge, 2018),听听(Indiana, 2010),听Mozart and his World听(forthcoming), and听The Cambridge History of German Opera to the Early Nineteenth Century(forthcoming).听In November 2024, she co-organized and hosted an international symposium at Mount Holyoke College entitled 鈥.鈥
 鈥楪o, Boy, Go!鈥: Child Pianist Frank "Sugar听Chile" Robinson and the Commodification of Black Boyhood
鈥楪o, Boy, Go!鈥: Child Pianist Frank "Sugar听Chile" Robinson and the Commodification of Black Boyhood
-with Dr. Jacqueline Warwick
Sept. 25 | 12:00PM-1:00PM听
Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
free and open to the public
With a focus on Frank Robinson (b. Detroit, 1938), this lecture explores the ways in which child musicians appeal to adult audiences. A Black child prodigy of boogie woogie piano, Robinson was a star in the 1940s, before the activism of Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King, and he performed at the White House for President Harry Truman. Robinson was self-taught, and his parents were discouraged from giving him piano lessons; this presentation explores the function of听 formal music training for child stars. Through study of key performances and compositions, Jacqueline considers what 鈥淪ugar Chile鈥 offered to audiences of the time, and how his music is heard today.
Jacqueline Warwick is a musicologist and Dean, Academic, at NSCAD University. She is the author of听Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s听(2007) and听Music, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: A Teacher鈥檚 Guide听(2023). She was Senior Editor for the听Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd听ed.听(2013), and co-editor of听Musicological Identities: Essays for Susan McClary听(2008) and听Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music听(2016). She has also written on topics ranging from the Beatles, backup singers, the musical听Annie, and Michael Jackson. Her current project is听Child鈥檚 Play: Musical Prodigies and the Performance of Childhood,听a book under contract with Oxford University Press.
