Faculty Events - Research Colloquia Spring 2006

Faculty Research Colloquia have been over the years a congenial, relaxed way to learn what colleagues across campus have been doing. Here's a list of presentations for Spring 2006.

February 17
Paul Musser, School of Music.
Charles Mingus' Pithecanthropus Erectus: Extending Bebop's Formal and Textural Boundaries

When examining Charles Mingus' musical legacy, one can safely place him at the forefront of such varied jazz movements as West Coast, Cool, Third Stream, Hard Bop, Modal and Free Jazz. Of particular interest to performers and scholars alike has been Mingus' dramatic and innovative formal manipulation. Expanding conventional bebop forms through the use of formal sections containing contrasting rhythmic feels, harmonic changes, and melodic material, this process is most dramatically apparent on the bassist's "extended form" compositions.

Among Mingus' first works in this self-described genre, 1956's "Pithecanthropus Erectus" is a powerful example of this technique in which the composer subjects small formal units within the composition to open repetition, creating considerable formal expansion and an environment that fosters broad expressive freedom as well as the use of collective improvisation. "Pithecanthropus Erectus" is also an important work due to its larger compositional structure, which breaks away from the typical bebop solo-through-multiple-choruses format by incorporating "extended form" structural units. In this manner, one could argue that Mingus uses freedom as a formal device, a compositional choice evident on future "extended form" pieces like "Celia," "Sue's Changes," and several other works. As a result, it is possible to view "extended form" works like "Pithecanthropus Erectus" as important musical precursors to both the modal jazz and free jazz movements as practiced by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

February 24
Paul B. Watt, Asian Studies/Religious Studies.
Illusion as Reality and the Search for a ‘Mind at Ease': An Introduction to the Thought of the Modern Japanese Buddhist Philosopher Yasuda Rijin. 
 
In all times and places humans have struggled with the inherently precarious nature of existence, seeking the permanent and reliable in an unstable world.  While most religious traditions have held out the hope of some ultimately permanent basis for existence, Buddhism, at its conception and in what might arguably be called its mainstream philosophical tradition, has taken a different approach. It has urged people to embrace impermanence itself as the ultimate character of existence and to cultivate a frame of mind that will enable them to live constructively in a world of change. The enlightened live with this view of reality; the unenlightened misperceive the impermanent as permanent and habitually act in ways that run against the true character of reality and that result in suffering.

As Buddhism sought to clarify this position, the later tradition (Mahayana Buddhism) came to speak of the ‘emptiness' of things and of the world of ordinary experience as ‘mentally constructed.' At the same time, it held up as its ideal practitioner the bodhisattva who, realizing the empty and mentally constructed nature of reality, could function in it to liberate others. Yasuda stands at the far end of this line of thought. Living in a society consumed with modernization and, later, the war and that questioned the relevance of Buddhism, he sought to bring the tradition alive and assert its value in modern Japan . Moreover, Yasuda maintained that the mental state of the bodhisattva could be attained even by lay folk, without the traditional practices followed by monks and nuns.

April 7
Jen Adams, Communication Arts and Sciences.
The Rhetoric of Helen Gougar: A Midwestern Pioneer in the Women's Rights Movement, 1878-1907.

April 28
Michael MacKenzie, Art History.
Abstract Painting and Cave Painting in France and Germany after WWII.

May 5
 Henning Schneider, Biology.
On Genes and Behavior - What Zebrafish Can Do For Your Mental Health.