Life Solved Live: How Music Helps Us Know Ourselves

5 Mar 2025

6.00pm - 8.15pm

University of 1024ºË¹¤³§ - Eldon Building, Winston Churchill Avenue, 1024ºË¹¤³§, PO1 2DJ

Free

Sold out

Discover how music tackles major issues facing society – from jazz musicians that challenged racism, to the dance craze that helped us through a king’s abdication.

Our Life Solved Live events are your chance to hear first-hand how research changes the world – and why people do it.

An Inaugural Lecture is one of the most prestigious Life Solved Live events. It’s a celebration of a newly promoted professor’s career and the difference they make. 

In Discursive Dissonances: Tensions of Styles, Practices and Values in Music and Musicals, Professor of Music and Theatre, George Burrows, reveals his research journey.

On a musical exploration that takes in everything from Fats Waller’s London Suite, to Handel’s Messiah, to Me and My Girl, Professor Burrows reveals music and musicians that engage critically with pressing issues of race, class, gender and sexuality.

He’s joined by the University of 1024ºË¹¤³§ Choir, who bring prime examples to vivid life.

Professor Burrows says:

'This lecture focuses on music marked by internal tensions and frictions which stem from contrasting styles, practices and values rubbing up against each other.

'I show that these features represent discursive dissonances that sing loudly of aesthetic and social politics.

'Through a range of music, I demonstrate that, when we listen for discursive dissonances, musical works can be heard to resonate loudly with the artistic and social politics of their time and of ours.

'Ultimately, I show that music and musical theatre are always engaged with far more than simply entertainment, because they shape conceptions, values and identities that have an impact on us all.'

Don’t miss this one-of-a-kind event.

Keen to hear more about world-changing research and the amazing people who do it? The Life Solved podcast has shared well over 100 stories to date. Listen now.

Book your FREE Life Solved Live tickets to see Professor George Burrows.