In The World in Six Songs, Daniel Levitin picks up where his New York Times bestselling This Is Your Brain On Music left off. Blending cutting-edge scientific findings with his own sometimes hilarious experiences as a musician and music-industry professional, Levitin takes readers on a journey across human civilization to argue that the brain evolved to play and listen to music in six fundamental forms—for friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love.
For ten years, Levitin worked as a session musician, commercial recording engineer, live sound engineer, and record producer for countless rock groups (including work with Santana, Narada Michael Walden, and The Grateful Dead), and also served as Director of A&R for 415/Columbia Records. A long time pursuer of interesting guitar tones, Levitin's custom modified guitar amplifiers have provided guitar sounds for albums by Blue öyster cult, Joe Satriani, and Chris Isaak. Dan has been awarded 17 gold and platinum records. In 1990, he returned to college at Stanford, earning his B.A. in Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science, and where he lectured on audio recording in the Music Department. Dan went on to earn his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Oregon, researching Absolute Pitch in expert and non-expert populations.
He has consulted on audio sound source separation for the U.S. Navy, and worked for two years at Paul Allen's Interval Research Corporation, a Silicon Valley computer firm where he worked on issues in Human-Computer Interaction, and Applications of Cognitive Psychology. He taught at Stanford University for 10 years, as a Lecturer in the Departments of Music, Anthropology, History of Science, Computer Science, (Program on Human-Computer Interaction), and Psychology. Currently, he is an James McGill Professor of Psychology, Behavioural Neuroscience, and Music at McGill University. He has consulted for several internet music companies, and has been active in issues related to intellectual property rights and copyright in the digital music domain.
Throughout his life, Dan has written extensively, both in refereed scientific journals, and in audio magazines and trade journals such as Grammy, Billboard, Audio, and others. He was the person who broke the now-infamous Steely Dan remastering scandal in Billboard, and has interviewed numerous artists including Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and kd lang. He was an associate editor of the Billboard Encyclopedia of Record Producers, and edited Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings (M.I.T. Press, 2002). He is the author of the international bestseller This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Dutton/Penguin, 2006), published in six languages.
Born in Sarajevo, Aleksandar Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. His work now appears regularly in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hemon was awarded a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. Riverhead will publish Hemon’s next book, Love and Obstacles, in 2009.
October 19, 2008 @ 4:00 pm
Franco Moretti Brittingham Scholar in Residence
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford Universty
This residency is made possible by a generous grant by the Brittingham Foundation through their Brittingham Visiting Scholars Grant.
Franco Moretti has written, most recently, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), and Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005). Chief editor of The Novel (Princeton, 2006). He has given the Gauss seminars at Princeton, the Beckman lectures at Berkeley, and the Carpenter lectures at Chicago; he is a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and writes often for New Left Review.
October 20, 2008 to October 25, 2008
Elections 2008: Reflections on Media, Voters, and Candidates – New and Old”
Humanities NOW
A discussion with UW-Madison faculty Jeremi Suri (History), Ken Goldstein (Political Science, Lewis Freedland (Journalism), Kathy Cramer Walsh (Political Science), and others.
Location: Madison Public Library- Central Branch
October 29, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
Coping With the Past: A Colloquium on Collective Guilt
February 27, 2009 @ 9:00 am
Pyle Center
Poetry of the Political Imagination: A Reading by Martin Espada
Martin Espada
Poet, Essayist, Editor & Translator and Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst
See poetry and performance by Martin Espada, winner of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2007, and a UW-Madison alum. His politics of poetry, rebellion, and laughter will take you on an unforgettable voyage of passion, edge, humor, and social conscience, from Puerto Rico and Chile to New York and Wisconsin. The Americas will never look the same.
