We are excited to invite you to the fourth and final talk of the Fall 2023 semester! 

Pauline LeVen (Yale University) will give her talk entitled "A World in Eight Tones: Seikilos’ Musical Cosmography." Dr. LeVen's talk will take place on Friday, December 8th, at 4:10 PM EST in Hamilton 603 and on Zoom. 

If you would like to receive a Zoom link, please email Melody Wauke (maw2277@columbia.edu). The link will be sent the day before the event.

Our speaker has kindly agreed to pre-circulate an abstract, pasted below

Title: A World in Eight Tones: Seikilos’ Musical Cosmography

Abstract: This paper focuses on the Seikilos epitaph, described as the "oldest surviving complete musical composition including musical notation from anywhere in the world.” It considers the epitaph as a form of cosmography and examines three questions: 1) how does the Seikilos song, in its use of musical and semantic material, create a world with a sense of order and boundaries, and provide a quasi-sensory experience of what it evokes?; 2) how does the materiality of the composition affect its interpretation, the kind of world(s) it constructs, and the response it seeks to elicit?; 3) how does the life of the object itself, through time and space, create alternate cosmographies and forms of thinking about the world as a whole, and the kind of world(s) that the song imagines for itself?