The Third Friday Colloquia: Essays in Music, curated by Colin McAllister in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, showcases scholarship in the best sense, highlighting the power and range of human inquiry and creativity. Four times yearly, on Friday afternoons at the UCCS Downtown Center, UCCS faculty and select guests present creative work and research trajectories. Presentations begin at 4:00pm and last approximately 45 minutes, followed by discussion.

All events are hybrid, with the option to participate in-person, or virtually. The UCCS Downtown Center is located at 102 S. Tejon St., suite 105-a, Colorado Springs, CO 80903

February 18th, 2022

Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten: Arnold Schoenberg as Apocalyptic Visionary
Colin McAllister, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was one of the most influential—and controversial—composers of the early twentieth century. He is perhaps best known for positing music without a tonal center (commonly called ‘atonal’ or ‘non-tonal’ music), and then subsequently devising the ‘twelve-tone’ or ‘dodecaphonic’ system of composition, a method of organizing pitch material in the absence of common-practice, functional tonality. In this presentation, I argue that Schoenberg’s threshold works during his breakthrough move to atonality from late 1907 to 1909 may be properly construed as ‘music in an apocalyptic mode’. I set the stage via an overview of the late Romantic milieu in which Schoenberg developed his art, and briefly examine an early work (Four Songs, Op. 1, No. 1) which inaugurated his musical maturity as a composer. I then discuss the artistic movement of expressionism and Schoenberg’s role as prophetic revelator before concluding with an analysis of his Second String Quartet, Op. 10.

Colin McAllister is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where he is a 2021-22 Daniels Fund Ethics Initiative Fellow. His performances as a guitarist have been hailed as “sparkling….delivered superbly” (San Francisco Chronicle), “ravishing” (San Diego Union Tribune) and “an amazing tour de force” (San Diego Story), and he has recorded on the Summit, Innova, Centaur, Naxos, Albany, Old King Cole, Vienna Modern Masters, Carrier and Tzadik labels. His research interests include contemporary music performance and pedagogy, musical modernism, and the apocalyptic paradigm as manifested in various phenomena—literature, music, and art. His new book, Dies irae, dies illa: Music in the Apocalyptic Mode, will be published later this year by the Dutch publisher Brill in their Word and Music series.