Music Faculty Lecture Series Keynote: Jennifer Iverson – Fraught Adjacencies: The Politics of German Electronic Music

The keynote lecture for UNC Asheville’s 2018-19 Music Faculty Lecture Series will be presented by Jennifer Iverson, assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. Her talk, Fraught Adjacencies: The Politics of German Electronic Music, will take place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 26, 2019, in Karpen Hall, Laurel Forum, and is free and open to everyone.

Iverson is a scholar of twentieth-century music, with a special emphasis on electronic music, avant-gardism, sound studies, and disability studies. Jennifer’s research explores the interaction between bodies, technologies, and sound, drawing together music analysis, archival research, and cultural history.

Her book, Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde, under contract with Oxford University Press, analyzes the cultural impact of mid-century electronic music produced in and around the WDR studio in Cologne, Germany. In particular, the electronic music studio provided a crucial space to reclaim wartime technology and ideas and put them to artistic use. The electronic studio also engendered a paradigm of invisible collaboration, where composers, technicians, scientists, and performers worked in a laboratory-like environment to develop a shared framework of ideas that applied to both electronic and acoustic musical compositions. Related articles appear in the journals Tempo, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Music Analysis, twentieth-century music, and Music Theory Spectrum.

Iverson’s second research area is disability studies, which analyzes historical and cultural ideas about disabled bodies. Along this line, she has written about Bjork’s oeuvre, the film Dancer in the Dark, and the disabled body in electronic music in venues such as the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Oxford, 2015), Sounding Off (Routledge, 2006), and the Journal of the American Musicological Society.

For more upcoming UNC Asheville music events, visit the Music Department website or scroll down to “Tags” and click on “music.”

Sponsored in part by