Music Embodiment Seminar Series (MESS) is an online event featuring academic presentations by and discussions with distinguished scholars in the field of music and embodiment.

Join us for our very first event, where we welcome Prof. David Borgo.

Time: Monday November 14, 5pm-6.30pm GMT

This seminar will take place on zoom. Zoom link will be sent to registered attendees a few days ahead of the seminar.

Title: Sync or Swarm: Improvisation, Intersubjectivity, and Embodied Mind Reading

Abstract: This talk with provide an overview of themes explored in Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (revised edition, 2022), and it will highlight more recent work on the ways that social cognition and coordination dynamics can inform our understandings of ensemble interaction in musical improvisation.

Bio: David Borgo is a Professor of Music at UC San Diego where he teaches in the Integrative Studies and Jazz and Music of the African Diaspora Programs. He is affiliated faculty in Ethnic Studies and Cognitive Science. David received a 2013 Distinguished Teaching Award from the African and African American Studies Research Project, a 2020 campus-wide Diversity Equity and Inclusion Teaching Award, and the 2006 Alan P. Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology for the first edition of his book, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (Continuum/Bloomsbury). David earned a B.M. degree in Jazz Studies from Indiana University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Ethnomusicology from UCLA. He joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2002 and served as the Department Chair from 2017-2020. As a saxophonist, David has released twelve CDs and one DVD of original music on a variety of record labels (Cadence Jazz, Resurgent Music, pfMentum, OA2 Records, Circumvention Music). His most recent recording is an album-length work composed during the pandemic titled Suite of Uncommon Sorrows. Later this year he will return to the studio to record a new suite of original compositions titled Cautiously Optimistic. In addition to modern jazz and contemporary improvised music, David performs electro-acoustic improvisation with KaiBorg and intricate polymetric music with Kronomorfic.

The event is co-organised by Dr Maria Witek, University of Birmingham, and Dr Andrea Schiavio, University of York, UK.

For more information about MESS, go to our website: https://sites.google.com/view/mess-musicembodiment

Music Embodiment Seminar Series (MESS) 1 - David Borgo