The lecture is held in English.
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Let's analyse Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars – Die With A Smile! (*)
• Can a love duet talk about current politics?
• If someone sings about the end of the world, can it be considered political at all?
• And what if two people sing about it?
• Can there be a connection between smiling and death?
These are just as important questions in relation to the duet by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars as the question of why and how the song – which reached 2 billion (!) plays on Spotify six months after its release in August 2024 – is connected to the music style of the 1970s and the retro wave that characterizes our time in general.
Of course, the presentation is not only about these themes, but also about certain musical phenomena: the song's breathtaking harmonies (there is not a single simple triad in it, only seventh and ninth chords), its captivating melody and the vocal chemistry between the two singers..
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POPSONGLAB:
PopSongLab was founded in Budapest (Hungary) in September 2021. According to the plan developed together with ISON, the lab’s headquarters, it was originally supposed to be a music education program for high school students, where we would interactively explore pop songs with them. However, the adult population started showing up at the door of pop musicology with so much enthusiasm that we eventually decided to make the lab two-pronged. We host monthly events for the public where we spend 90 minutes analyzing a contemporary mainstream pop song, while we also invite high school groups for private song analysis sessions at pre-arranged times.
What happens to pop songs in the PopSongLab? The same thing that happens to chemical substances in a chemistry lab. We analyze the substance of songs in order to understand their properties. The aim is to understand what happens "inside" the music: What are the main components, how do melody, harmony and text catalyze the chemical reaction of the listener. No previous musical knowledge is required to take part in the sessions. Apart from two open ears, you don't need any other tools (we provide you with a musical microscope to understand the secrets of harmony, a Bunsen burner to heat up the rhythm and the pipette for each verse of the lyrics). The PopSongLab staff guarantee that the dissected songs are returned intact to their fans at the end of each session. The lab is headed by musicologist Gergely Fazekas, associate professor at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.
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THE LAB DIRECTOR
Gergely Fazekas (1977) is an associate professor at the Liszt Academy of Music. After studying Hungarian philology and philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities at ELTE, he graduated from the Department of Musicology at the Academy of Music in 2006 and has been teaching music history at the institution ever since, where he obtained his doctorate in 2013. His dissertation, J. S. Bach and the Two Cultures of Musical Form, was published in book form in 2018. He is the founder of the Liszt Academy's youth programs, the "Liszt-kukacok Akadémiája" (Liszt Kid’s Academy), has worked as a consultant for music institutions and festivals, as a presenter for Bartók Radio, and was editor-in-chief of Rózsavölgyi Publishing for four years. His professional studies on the music of Bach, Debussy and György Kurtág have been published in English, French and Hungarian music journals, and he also regularly writes music journalism for the general public. In the fall of 2021, he launched a public lecture series on pop music entitled "Songmechanic Workshop" at ISON.
(*)
Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars will not be present.
