It’s starting to look a lot like work party (Julebord) season, and we are excited to brag about ours shamelessly, but also ask: what makes a good celebration between colleagues? 

In the last show of the 2024 season, Julie, Kristina, Aleksander and Ieva sit down to chat about how musicologists celebrate Christmas. By sharing the perspectives of our party committee and our in-house band, we reflect on the importance of collective music-making, listen to some tunes, and have some laughs. 

References:

Wham! - Last Christmas

Vazelina Bilopphøggers - Hem'att tel jul

Oslo fagottkor - Running To The Sea

Carola and Viktor Norén - Stjärnorna lyser för oss

As we are closing up on Halloween, Kristina Klugnes and Eirik Jacobsen take us though some historical moments of horror film music! What is the sound of horror music and how has it developed from the 1930s until today?

In this episode, we take a stroll with IMV postdoctoral fellow Sadie Menicanin through Oslo’s Botaniske hage. As we walk along gravel paths and under shady boughs, we discuss Sadie’s recent and current research related to music and gardens. The conversation touches on garden scenes in French grand opera, Vienna’s municipal planning of green space in the later 19th century, erotically charged greenhouses, imperial botanical gardens, outdoor concerts, songs for hiking, class-coded noise complaints in public green spaces, and more. 

Together with her colleague Cana McGhee, Sadie is hosting a symposium on 28-29 October at IMV called “grounded,” which will delve into themes of soil, waste, and decomposition, and will explore music’s many connections to such material and political environmental matters. 

Join Daniel Fong (Doctoral Research Fellow, IMV) and Queer opera singer and activist, Angelle Khachik, as they ruminate on what Queer Opera might be today and discuss some famous and not-so-well-known Queer operas.

In this episode of The Music Talkshow, it's all about playing music with machines! How can we best interact and play music with machines? What does it mean for a machine to be a good bandmate? 

This, and so much more, is the topic of PhD candidate Vincenzo Madaghiele's research project at the UiO. On today's show, Vinzenco shares details of his recent artistic projects, his PhD research and insights into complex music tech topics such as mapping, machine-learning, algorithmic instrument design, software and more.

In this Easter special, doctoral research fellow Kristina Sočanski Čelik shares her insights and reminiscences of Eastern Easter - and the religious musical traditions of the Orthodox Christian church. Based on her research on how contemporary composition relates sonic experiences to the spiritual, this show takes listeners across the Greek, Ukrainian, Serbian, and North Macedonian Easter soundscapes, while offering folkloric and sacral readings of the works of Ljubica Marić and Arvo Pärt.

Listening List:

1.     The Sorrowful Mother - Vydubychi Church Chorus

2.     Anastaseos Imera - Divna Ljubojevic & "The Melodists" Choir

3.     Arvo Pärt – Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten – Norwegian Chamber Orchestra – Terje Tønnesen, conductor

4.     Arvo Pärt – Für Alina – Kristina Socanski, piano

5.     Ljubica Marić – The Byzantine Concerto - Olga Jovanović, piano - Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra -  Oskar Danon, conductor

6.     Serbian Octoechoe – Gospodi Vozzvah – Voice 1 – Marija Jovićević, Nikola Radunović, chanters

7.     Stevan Mokranjac – Passion Week – Radio Television Belgrade Choir – Vladimir Kranjčević, conductor

8.     Trad: Easter Ring Dance (Veligdensko oro) – Bajsa Arifovska 

References:

"The Revised Julian Calendar". Time and Date. Retrieved 25 December 2017.

Ribic, Romana. (2014). “Audio Recordings of Hymns from the Octoechos as 

Written Down by Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac”. New Sound 43, I/2014. 

Cizmic, Maria and Helbig, Adriana. "10. The Piano and the Performing Body in the Music of Arvo Pärt: Phenomenological Perspectives". Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred, edited by Peter C. Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt and Robert Saler, New York, USA: Fordham University Press, 2020, pp. 177-194. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823289783-010

In this episode of The Music Talkshow, produced by Tejaswinee Kelkar in collaboration with Oslo's Historical Museum, Tejaswinee speaks with Dr. Boro Baski about the musical heritage of the Santhal ethnic community; the instrument banam and the long process of creating, becoming, and in other ways inheriting musical heritage, such as singing folk songs, dancing practices and festivals, through the instrument; and how this inheritance is contextualised in a changing society and other kinds of musical learning.

This English language interview (with excerpts of Norwegian)  follows a thematic exhibition at the museum and comes with a list of English language references, which, together with the full version, can be found here: https://www.historiskmuseum.no/utstillinger/arv/podkast/

The Music Talkshow is back after the winter break with the first episode of a podcast series “What is musical inheritance?”, produced by Tejaswinee Kelkar in collaboration with the Oslo's Historical Museum.

Here, Tejaswinee speaks about the music of the Viking ages with Einar Selvik, also known for his band Wardruna. They discuss musical - and other - visions of the Viking era, their recreation today, and a broader shift towards the interest in neofolk and pre-Christian traditions, especially in such genres as black metal. 

This Norwegian language podcast comes together with a thematic exhibition at the museum and a list of English language references, which, together with the full version, can be found here: https://www.historiskmuseum.no/utstillinger/arv/podkast/

In this episode, Ieva Gudaitytė talks to James Tomlinson about Christmas music in late medieval England. The conversation involves aspects of medieval book production and the transmission of polyphony within England and abroad. It introduces music written for the Christmas period and contexts in which these elusive musical survivors might have been performed. They chat about the ephemerality of medieval polyphony, how popular musical settings were worked and reworked over time, and the challenges of working with the paucity of surviving sources.

References:

• Bowers, Roger. "Obligation, Agency, and Laissez-Faire: The Promotion of Polyphonic Composition for the Church in Fifteenth-Century England." In Iain Fenlon, ed. Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Patronage, Sources and Texts. Cambridge University Press, 1981: 1-19.
• Harris, Max. Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools. Cornell University Press, 2011.

This episode of the Music Talkshow is on the complex theme of music-making in prisons. IMV researchers Áine Mangaoang and Lucy Cathcart Frödén share tracks written or recorded in prisons in Norway, Iceland and Ireland, and discuss connections between music-making, identity and mental health, and the role music and shared creative processes could play in alternatives to incarceration. Along the way they’ll share recorded excerpts of a public conversation earlier in 2023 with special guest, Norwegian Hip Hop artist Belizio.

References and links

Prisons of Note project (University of Oslo)

Musikk i Fengsel og Frihet (Music in Prison and Freedom, Norway)

Mary Cohen (researcher/practitioner on music in prisons in the US)

Kate Herrity (criminologist interested in sound and the sensory in prisons)

Ben Crewe (criminologist who has written about ‘the pains of imprisonment’)

Facilitators’ perspectives on music in Norwegian prisons (article by Áine)

Distant Voices (songwriting-as-research in prisons in Scotland)

The Art of Bridging (podcast on the Distant Voices project, made by Lucy)

Learning Resources from The Art of Bridging