MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MOBILITIES

Mark Slobin
Music Department, Wesleyan University

My hometown, Detroit, changed from sleepy waterway crossroads to “capital of the 20th century” in record time, starting in 1910. Huge numbers of Europeans, white southerners, and African Americans converged on the city for work in the auto industry. All this massive mobility meant that everyone had to improvise a new urban life, including music, both the immigrants and the emerging set of corporations and city planners at the top. The product itself, the automobile, assured that mobility would be literally the driving force for constant change, pushing the city into rapid decline already by the 1960s, so the storyline is incredibly compressed.

The talk focuses on the intense interactivity between the mainstream managers and the subcultures, with attention to my own positioning as a 1943-born Detroiter in the Jewish and classical music communities. Spatiality issues are central to this ongoing research.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2015  |  6 P.M.
DANIEL FAMILY COMMONS  |  USDAN UNIVERSITY CENTER