Music and Gardens

In this episode, we take a stroll with IMV postdoctoral fellow Sadie Menicanin through Oslo’s Botaniske hage. As we walk along gravel paths and under shady boughs, we discuss Sadie’s recent and current research related to music and gardens. The conversation touches on garden scenes in French grand opera, Vienna’s municipal planning of green space in the later 19th century, erotically charged greenhouses, imperial botanical gardens, outdoor concerts, songs for hiking, class-coded noise complaints in public green spaces, and more. 

Together with her colleague Cana McGhee, Sadie is hosting a symposium on 28-29 October at IMV called “grounded,” which will delve into themes of soil, waste, and decomposition, and will explore music’s many connections to such material and political environmental matters. 

What is The Music Talkshow?

“Music Talkshow” is a musicology dissemination show by our local University of Oslo early career music and sound researchers – PhD’s and postdocs. How do we communicate our research to the “outside” world? How do we maintain our relevance to society as academics? People who write about music, but not the music itself? In other words, how does our work relate to the real world, and how does the real-world manifests in our work?

In this show, we tackle these unanswerable questions with a light-hearted approach: through informal conversations, sound and music examples, and perhaps some experiments. We hope to bridge the gap between those who wonder about music casually and those who do that professionally – from prospective students to lifelong music fans, fidelity nerds, and helpless cheesy romantics. By doing so, we will leave our own comfort zones to show the diversity of the academic community to showcase new voices and sounds, encourage participation, and take an alternative turn on the University.