📅&Բ;Date: Friday, February 13, 2026
🕒&Բ;Start Time: 4:00 PM
📍&Բ;Location: Harkness Chapel, Classroom
👥&Բ;Who: Free | Open to the public
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
“Seismic Faults: Tracing the Colonial Origins of Haydn's Seven Last Words”
This talk examines how Joseph Haydn's earthquake finale in The Seven Last Words (1787) emerged as a product of transatlantic seismic culture rooted in colonial Peru. When Haydn received his commission for the Good Friday devotion of las tres horas in Cádiz, Spain, he worked within a ritual framework forged in response to Lima's devastating 1687 earthquake. I trace this practice backward through the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to seventeenth-century Peru, revealing how communities across the Atlantic world developed embodied protocols for understanding and responding to earthquakes as both geological threats and spiritual forces. The unevenness of the archive--densest around Haydn's commission but fragmentary regarding colonial origins--requires reverse chronology as method. This approach demonstrates how European canonicity obscures colonial genealogy, revealing the methodological challenges of reconstructing transatlantic networks when archival preservation privileges metropolitan endpoints over colonial origins.
About The Speaker
Diane Oliva is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan. Her research investigates the musical and sonic exchanges that linked Western Europe and Colonial America during the early modern period. In her current book project, Seismic Sounds: Music and Natural Disaster in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, she examines the function of eighteenth-century music in communicating, interpreting, and disseminating knowledge about the natural world to audiences across the Atlantic.
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.