Colloquium: Vijay Iyer

Vijay Iyer standards wearing a dark blazer and striped scarf in a dark street in New York

February 19, 2021 | 3:30PM
Zoom

Vijay Iyer
Composer; Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts, Harvard University

The category of music aligns with the category of the human; the two should be understood as mutually constitutive. explosively unstable constructs. Like personhood, music's status is not freely given. Rather, it is conferred through a fraught process in which "you," the subject, feel "'guided" or hailed into an affective relation with the sonorous actions of an other. Such a contingent relation, which I am calling musicality, can assume many forms; we must imagine not one but many musicalities, many modes of sonic mattering. If today's critical humanities interrogate the category of the human, I am asking similarly for a critical musicalities that might unthink tho totalizing category of music, and refabulate scenes of embodied, emergent, precarious sonic social life.

About Vijay Iyer

Composer-pianist Vijay Iyer (pronounced "VID-jay EYE-yor") has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, and shape-shifting presence in modern music. Active across multiple musical communities, he was described by The New York Times as a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway.'' He has released two dozen albums, most recently UnEasy (ECM Records, 2021), and has collaborated with Amiri Baraka, Wadada Leo Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Teju Cole, Tyshawn Sorey, Pamela Z, Henry Threadgill, Jennifer Koh, Matt Haimovitz, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and many other artists across disciplines. He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a U.S. Artists Fellowship, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German Echo Awards, and was the four-time Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat International Critics' Poll. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies, and founded the doctoral program in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry.

Read Iyer's complete bio here.