Music Colloquium (02/13): Diane Oliva

Please join us on Friday, February 13th, at 4:00 PM EST for this week's installment in the CWRU Department of Music Colloquium Series. Diane Olivia (University of Michigan) will be presenting a talk entitled “Seismic Faults: Tracing the Colonial Origins of Haydn's Seven Last Words.” This talk will take place on campus, in the Harkness classroom. For more about the series, please visit: https://case.edu/artsci/music/news-events/music-colloquium-series. 

Yours in music,

Anna Somerville and Carlos Gámez

ABOUT THE TALK:

This talk examines how Joseph Haydn's earthquake finale in The Seven Last Words (1787) emerged as a product of transatlantic seismic culture rooted in colonial Peru. When Haydn received his commission for the Good Friday devotion of las tres horas in Cádiz, Spain, he worked within a ritual framework forged in response to Lima's devastating 1687 earthquake. I trace this practice backward through the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to seventeenth-century Peru, revealing how communities across the Atlantic world developed embodied protocols for understanding and responding to earthquakes as both geological threats and spiritual forces. The unevenness of the archive--densest around Haydn's commission but fragmentary regarding colonial origins--requires reverse chronology as method. This approach demonstrates how European canonicity obscures colonial genealogy, revealing the methodological challenges of reconstructing transatlantic networks when archival preservation privileges metropolitan endpoints over colonial origins. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Diane Olivia is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan. Her research investigates the musical and sonic exchanges that linked Western Europe and Colonial America during the early modern period. In her current book project, Seismic Sounds: Music and Natural Disaster in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, she examines the function of eighteenth-century music in communicating, interpreting, and disseminating knowledge about the natural world to audiences across the Atlantic.