Please join the Theater & Performance Studies Workshop for Marcelle Pierson’s presentation “Voice and Techné in Music for 18 Musicians.” In this paper, Pierson argues that composer Steve Reich uses mechanistic vocal writing to explore the fraught relationship between voice and techné. She then contextualizes that experimentation within post-war discourses on music, philosophy, and the voice.

Marcelle Pierson is a PhD Candidate in Music History and Theory at the University of Chicago, with a minor field in composition. In the 2014-15 academic year, she is in residence as a doctoral fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities. Her dissertation, entitled “The Voice under Erasure: Singing, Melody and Expression in Late Modernist Music,” investigates how and why certain composers felt that they couldn’t write melodies after World War II.

There is no pre-circulated reading for this workshop. Light refreshments will be served