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With Fellowship, Martin Scherzinger Examines Pre-colonial Music and Dance Traditions

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Entering its seventh year, the Fellowship Program invites scholars and artists to The Center to develop self-directed projects that expand the way we think about ballet’s history, practice, and performance. Fellows come from a multitude of disciplines and bring a breadth of experience to the residency.

Martin Scherzinger

Associate Professor Martin Scherzinger has been named one of 12 Fellows at the international Center for Ballet and the Arts during the 2020-21 academic year.

Scherzinger, who is also a composer, works on sound, music, media, and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He will use his time at the Center to examine how a Newtonian conception for time-reckoning influenced conceptions of rhythm and meter in music theory, composition, and dance. In a scholarly article and a ballet score, Scherzinger aims to contrast this conception of time with pre-colonial music and dance traditions in non-western, notably African societies.