Begun in 2002, MMaP’s Music & Culture Lecture Series presents cutting-edge research by leading scholars in ethnomusicology and allied disciplines. The talks, which are free and open to the public, take place in the MMaP Gallery on the second floor of the John C. Perlin Arts and Culture Centre. Since February 2017, all of the talks in the series have been livestreamed on the MMaP YouTube channel, and videos of past lectures from the series can be viewed there as well.

2025–2026 Lecture Series

Sensational Journeys: Embodiment in the Time of Aura in Sikh Musical Worship

Inderjit N. Kaur (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
October 7, 2025, 7:30PM

Musical experiences often occur in an auratic context. This is especially true of musical worship. In these situations, aura plays a constitutive role in the bodily feelings and sensations of the engaged subject. Yet, the embodied aspects of auratic affect have not been extensively explored in musical ethnographies. In this talk, I follow the lead of Sikh devotees to focus on what they describe as transportive sensations during musical worship in heightened auratic milieus. Generated through a sense of historicity relating to the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib (1604|1704), and its musical features, the auratic affect circulates in Punjab, India, (the homeland of Sikhs), as well as globally in the diaspora. In this paper, I explore the thick event of musical worship at the famous Golden Temple (Harmandir Sahib) to investigate the constituent elements that create the conditions for the auratic and spatio-temporal experiences of congregants. Bringing Sikh epistemology into dialogue with an interdisciplinary set of scholarship, I draw attention to the corporeal processes at play for heightened sensations, what I call embodiment in the time of aura.

Blacksplaining Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century

Philip Ewell (Hunter College, City University of New York)
March 12, 2026, 7:30PM

“Blacksplaining Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century” gives an unvarnished black perspective on European classical music as it’s practiced in the United States and Canada. I’m black, I’ve played the cello for over 50 years, and I’m a citizen of both countries, so I’m well equipped to give this perspective. Much has been made recently of the unrelenting whiteness of this music and, for even longer, its unrelenting maleness. Less prominent are classical music’s anti-Asianness, Christian roots, Germanism, pianism, and elitism. To top this all off, it’s worth pointing out that classical music is absolutely [insert expletive here] awesome!

In this talk I’ll blacksplain—yes, that means to explain from a black perspective—these seemingly contradictory aspects of classical music. Ultimately, I argue that in order for us to move beyond the baked-in negative aspects of this music we must let go of some of its most intractable beliefs, like the belief that Johannes Brahms’s music is better than Nathaniel Dett’s, that Igor Stravinsky’s music is better than Julia Perry’s, or that classical music writ large is better than, say, bluegrass music. I call this “letting go” my musical re-education, and, notably, when I come back to classical music after having spent time away from it, I enjoy it even more than I did beforehand. This is not because it’s superior to other musics of the world, but precisely because it is not, which has been one of the most unexpected and exhilarating aspects of my work in reframing classical music. Won’t you join me?