Join the Brown University Library and the Department of Music for an exciting lecture in Music’s Fall Colloquium Series. On November 19 at 6 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) at the Rockefeller Library, Will Cheng will give a talk entitled, “Groovy Choreographies: Gimmicks, Glitches, and Aesthetic Alibis,” in which he will deliver a playful inquiry into the aesthetic conceits of mechanical failure, ludic difficulty, and visual glitch in the virtuosic choreographies of digital gameplay (with case study Rayman Legends).

Free and open to the public, this event is part of the Department of Music’s Fall Colloquium series.

William Cheng is interested in sound, media, technology, identity, and politics. He is Assistant Professor of Music at Dartmouth College and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (on leave 2014-15). His first book is titled Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2014), published with the support of the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment; his articles have appeared in the journals 19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Ethnomusicology, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and in the volumes The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media and The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. He is the recipient of the AMS Philip Brett Award, AMS Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, and SAM Mark Tucker Award. His current projects include a monograph, Misrule in Meritopia: Music, Power, Privilege (supported by Harvard’s William F. Milton Fund); an edited collection of essays, Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (with Gregory Barz); an article on sound’s paranoid and reparative affects; and a book of short stories, The Things We Say: Seven Tragicomedies. He serves on the Advisory Board of Ethnomusicology Review and the Review Board of Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice. In recent years, he has enjoyed giving classical piano recitals featuring improvisations on themes from the audience.

Date: November 19, 2014
Time: 6 p.m.
Location: The Patrick Man Digital Scholarship Lab, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library, 10 Prospect Street, Providence