Department of Music

The University of Virginia McIntire Department of Music presents a colloquium by Sumanth Gopinath (University of Minnesota, Department of Music) on Friday, February 7th at 3:30pm in 107 Old Cabell Hall. Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota. This colloquium is free and open to the public. For more information, call 434.924.3052. Presented by the Graduate Colloquium Series, McIntire Department of Music.

As part of a promotional charity release in anticipation of National Record Store Day, the Duluth, Minnesota-based “slowcore,” minimalist rock band Low covered Rihanna and Mikky Ekko’s 2013 hit pop/R&B ballad “Stay,” following up on the band’s performance of the song at the Pitchfork Festival in July. A comparison of the cover and the original recording raises familiar questions about the cleavages of style, genre, and race within the US music industry, but it also provides a pretext for considering the relationship between rock and minimalism—specifically, the multiple, entangled lineages connecting these two loosely defined musical supra-practices. Using Low’s music as a case study, this talk examines the ways in which musical minimalism has informed and transformed the sounds and forms of rock music in the wake of the long 1960s.

Sumanth Gopinath is the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (MIT Press, 2013) and is editing, with Jason Stanyek, the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies. His writings on Steve Reich, musical minimalism, Marxism and music scholarship, the Nike+ Sport Kit, the ringtone industry, Bob Dylan, and Benjamin Britten have appeared in various scholarly journals and edited collections. He is working on a book project on musical minimalism and is conducting research on sound in new and formerly new media, Bob Dylan's musicianship, the aesthetics of smoothness, and the music of the Scottish composer James Dillon.