Alum Tiffany Ng Reviews The Noisy Renaissance
Alum Tiffany Ng reviews The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life by Niall Atkinson. The Noisy Renaissance discusses public voices and tower bells, bringing into conversation the tensions between the built environment and the ephemeral, the government and popolo, etc.
From the article:
Atkinson’s book is a rich contribution to art and architectural history, campanology, sound studies, and the growing literature on the urban sensorium, offering a methodology for studying how exchanges between bells, voices, and other city sounds worked to construct meaning. It builds a fascinating foundation for the writing of future histories of listening, bells, and bell ringers in early modern Florence.
Read the full article here.
Tiffany Ng is an assistant professor of carillon and university carillonist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An energetic advocate of diversity in contemporary music, she has premiered or revived over forty pieces by emerging and established composers from Augusta Read Thomas to Yvette Janine Jackson, pioneered models for interactive “crowdsourced” carillon performances and environmental-data-driven sound installations with Greg Niemeyer, Chris Chafe, Ed Campion, Ken Goldberg, John Granzow, and Laura Steenberge, and through her composer collaborations significantly increased the American repertoire for carillon and electronics. Her concert career has taken her to festivals in fifteen countries in Europe, Australia, Asia, and North America, including the 2018 University of Chicago Rockefeller Carillon New Music Festival, 2018 Canberra Carillon Festival, 2017 University of Michigan Bicentennial, 2015 UC Berkeley Campanile Centennial, 2014 Stanford CCRMA anniversary festival, the 23rd International Carillon Festival at Bok Tower Gardens, Florida, the 2014 International Carillon Festival Barcelona, and the 2008 Post-Congress Festival of the World Carillon Federation. She has taught masterclasses at Yale University, the Eastman School of Music, Wellesley College, the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Mayo Clinic. At U-M, she is a faculty affiliate in the LSA Digital Studies program.