Recording-technology expert plans ‘musicology’ lecture

Dr. Simon Zagorski-Thomas, an expert on the art and implications of recording technology, will visit MTSU on Tuesday, Dec. 6, for a special lecture, “Playing to an Empty Room: Performance, Recording and Musicology.”

Dr. Simon Zagorski-Thomas

The free public event is scheduled to begin at 4:30 p.m. in MTSU’s Center for Popular Music, located in Room 140 of the Bragg Mass Communication Building on campus.

It’s sponsored by the CPM in co-sponsorship with the University’s Department of Recording Industry and the School of Music.

Zagorski-Thomas is a senior lecturer in music technology at the London College of Music at the University of West London. He also chairs of the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production and is the director of the Art of Record Production Conference.

Dr. Dale Cockrell, director of the CPM, noted that musicology has traditionally addressed “the score” as its primary text, but that approach tends to marginalize many musical forms and ignore performance and interpretation, as well as the fact that recorded music is now a primary form of listening and engagement.

Zagorski-Thomas’s lecture will study how the recording process has affected and is in turn affected by performance, Cockrell said. The guest will address how artists have learned to perform without an audience and the changes in the collaborative process of editing and producing, even asking who “owns” such a performance.