đ
Date: Friday, September 22, 2026
đ Start Time: 4:00 PM
đ Location: Harkness Chapel, Classroom
đ„ Who: Free | Open to the public
About The Series
Our weekly Friday colloquia showcase current research by distinguished visiting scholars alongside our own faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education. A brief reception follows each talk to keep the conversation going. All are welcome!
About The Talk
âAlpha Grooveâ
âEveryone has a little electronic studio inside his or her brainââso suggested Alvin Lucier in a 1971 interview with Douglas Chambers. He made the comment in connection with his Music for Solo Performer, a landmark work in which signals from the human brain were captured, electronically amplified, filtered, and rendered audible via sympathetic vibration. The process was both medical and mystical: an electrical circuiting of neural and musical frequency such that that inner and outer vibration appeared to be continuous. And yet, for Lucier, Solo Performer was less a âsound ideaâ than an experiment in âcontrolâ and âattentionâ arising from what he termed âa perfectly meditative alpha state.â Here, I unpack the assemblage of technologies and sound ideologies that produced these claims, situating Solo Performer in a long-arc history of neural sonification extending back to the 1930s and forward through more elaborate sound-mind syntheses of the 1970s, including those of David Rosenboom. I am particularly interested in âalphaâ frequencies, which exercised a curiously powerful influence across the fields of experimental psychology, physics, philosophy, music, and aesthetics. Laying special claim to the domain of the sonic, alpha stood at the center of a new neural acoustemology that made listening an index of volition and consciousness itself an auditory technique.
About The Speaker
Douglas W. Shadleâs award-winning scholarship interrogates the roles played by symphony orchestras and orchestral music in American culture, past and present. Valuable for scholars and classical music lovers alike, his work has received coverage in major media outlets throughout the United States and Europe.
A leading authority on fellow Little Rock native Florence B. Price (1888â1953), the first African American woman to earn international acclaim for her compositions, Shadle is currently writing a biography of Price for Oxford University Pressâs signature Composers Across Cultures series. From 2023 to 2025, Shadle served as principal investigator for a National Endowment for the Arts grant celebrating Priceâs work as a composer, pianist, and educator with collaborative interdisciplinary performances in Nashville and Louisville, Kentucky. These performances included the world premiere of a newly commissioned âstory-recitalâ for children written by poetâsoprano Christine Jobson.
Bringing his interest in music criticism to a different type of scholarly venture, Shadle was co-editor, with John R. Schmidt, of A Portrait in Four Movements: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Barenboim, Boulez, Haitink, and Muti (Chicago, 2019)âa posthumous collection of the beloved Chicago Sun-Times critic Andrew Patnerâs best reviews of the Chicago Symphony and interviews with its conductors.
Shadle has welcomed scholarly and artistic collaborations with a wide range of international performing arts organizations, including the Berlin Festspiele, BBC Proms, HallĂ© Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati May Festival, Tanglewood Festival, Orchestra of St. Lukeâs, Louisville Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, Black Hills Symphony Orchestra, Shriver Hall Concert Series, President James K. Polk Home and Museum, and Nashville-based contemporary music groups Intersection and chatterbird.
He is currently Treasurer for both the Society for American Music and the International Florence Price Festival. As of 2024, he is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Musicological Research.
Venue Information
Harkness Classroom, located inside Harkness Chapel, serves as both a lecture hall for large classes and a backstage area during events. It is also the meeting location for the CWRU Music Colloquium Series.
Health + Safety
The health and well-being of our community is important to us as we gather for campus events. University Health and Counseling Services provides up-to-date guidance and resources to help support a safe campus experience. For life-threatening emergencies, please call CWRU Public Safety immediately at 216.368.3333.