The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Early Music Seminar meets with A. Zayaruznaya. AZ (A. Zayaruznaya, they/them) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at Yale University. Their publications, situated at the intersecting histories of composition, notation, and music theory in the later Middle Ages, have received numerous prizes including the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America and the Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory. Currently Zayaruznaya is finishing their third book, which will be the first full-length study devoted to composer, theorist, poet, and public intellectual Philippe de Vitry.

Professor Zayaruznaya's USC Musicology Lecture is titled "Music and Drugs in the longee durée." Since at least the fifteenth century, drug cultures and music cultures in the West have often been imbricated. Not only have the social aspects of drug cultures shaped the ways in which music is consumed, but the altered perception induced by drugs has offered novel temporalities and subject-positions to composers and performers alike. This presentation takes a first stab at a music-historical account of such phenomena, offering caveats, case-studies, and critical frameworks that can help account for what happens when the musical and pharmacological intersect.

All EMSI events are free and open to the public.