Explore the rich soundscapes of our historic city in an exciting new program organized by the UC College-Conservatory of Music and the National Endowment for the Humanities! This week’s PEWS News is dedicated to Cincinnati Sounds: an experiential site-based residency where participants will learn how various landmarks around Cincinnati are shaped by music and sound. This program runs July 6–11 and July 20–25, 2025, but be sure to submit your application by March 5th! Learn more below.
All information for this newsletter is taken from the Cincinnati Sounds website. Apply today!
The ethno/musicology faculty at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music invite you to apply for a week-long paid residency to immerse in experiential site-based learning. The goal of the project is for participants to investigate how Cincinnati landmarks – some still vibrant and carefully preserved, others lingering only in public memory – both shape and are shaped by music and sound. The workshop explores themes of education, instruments and sacred places, urban planning, performance, and social justice. Daily explorations through presentations, discussions, site visits, methods of storytelling, and instruction on mapping sound provides a framework through which participants may hone tools for research and teaching about the connections between music, sound, and landmarks that they can adapt to their own urban spaces. Scholars at all stages are encouraged to apply (students, junior, senior, independent), and participants will receive a stipend of $1300.
Deadline to apply: March 5, 2025
Program dates: July 6–11 and July 20–25, 2025
Workshop Overview
(From Cincinnati Sounds website. Follow the link for more!)
Cincinnati was officially founded in 1788 and since 1819 has become commonly referred to as “The Queen City.” A river city uniquely situated between the southern and northern United States alongside the Licking and Ohio Rivers, the city itself is a geographic landmark of the Great Migration, Hillbilly Highway, and Western Expansion. For over 230 years, it has buoyed a river of diverse people flowing through it bringing their cultures, customs, musics, and values to create significant landmarks and rich soundscapes. Some have been painstakingly conserved, preserved, and curated, others have been simultaneously profoundly fractured or erased, while others are being artfully and creatively re-imagined.
Many researchers and teachers in post-secondary education and humanities leaders in public arts organizations seek ways to develop diverse and equitable frameworks, just instructional systems, inclusive public spaces, and increased representation. Cincinnati landmarks provide a snapshot of spaces, places, and sounds representing historical migration, changing values, transforming and transformative locations, and modern reinterpretations through sounding and silencing. Across the workshop week, Cincinnati Sounds explores these themes in sites of education, sacred communities, urban development, performing spaces, and justice and freedom centers. The spaces and sounds evince not only a dividing along but also a blurring of historical, racial, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical boundaries.
The project faculty and visiting speakershelp to bring such landmarks and sounds together with interdisciplinary scholarship, and applications for humanities scholars to use in their research and teaching. Participants will be supported in storytelling, mapping of sounds, and developing syllabi, units of study, and Storymaps in their work during the week-long workshop and in the follow up post-workshop Zoom meetings. They will be invited to share resources from their own fields as well as utilize those provided by the project team. These shared files will remain available for continued use after the workshop. Team members and participants will continue to grow them after the workshop, which will remain available for continued use.
Apply today by March 5th, 2025
For more information on the program and application process, please visit the Cincinnati Sounds website.
