Bellucci Special Events
Science Café Event
On 29 April 2025, the Bellucci Center put on a Science Café in collaboration with the School of Music and Boys Town National Research Hospital entitled The Sounds of Science: Hearing Music Through Art and Science. Our panelists were Barron Breland, DM, vice provost and Dean of the Graduate College at Creighton and the artistic director of the River City Mixed Chorus, Allison Coffin, PhD, associate professor at Creighton and co-founder and President of the Association of Science Communicators, and Christopher Stecker, PhD, Psychoacoustician, Auditory Neuroscientist, and the Director of the Spatial Hearing Lab at Boys Town National Research Hospital.
The conversation centered on acoustics and live music. Dr. Coffin moderated the event and Drs. Breland and Stecker had a discussion of the topic from their own disciplinary perspectives. The presenters were excellent. The conversation was fascinating and incredibly entertaining.
The event exceeded expectations. It outgrew the provided space, we quickly rearranged furniture and speakers, and ultimately took over much of the bar. The organizer of Science Café extended an invitation for future events.
Stephin Merritt Spotlight
Stephin Merritt, who suffers from pain hyperacusis that is triggered by the sound of cymbals, suffered an abrupt onset of symptoms while performing live. His inability to tolerate a traditional drumkit forced him to reinvent his music and thereby arrive at what has become his signature sound. Merritt’s resulting master work, the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs, was named the second-best album of 1999 by the Village Voice, was included on lists of the greatest rock albums of all time by Rolling Stone and NME, and was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, edited by critic Robert Dimery. Robert Cristgau, the famously acerbic rock critic at the Village Voice, wrote, “69 Love Songs “upend[ed] my preconceptions the way high art's ‘sposed to."
Dame Evelyn Glennie Spotlight
Dame Evelyn Glennie lost her hearing as a child but she came from a musically inclined family and attended a school that had daily music lessons where a teacher encouraged her to take out her hearing aids and attempt to feel rather than hear the drum. She became a solo percussion performer and composer. She has released nearly 50 album-length recordings to date including collaborations with an eclectic list of artists including Björk, Belá Fleck, Bobby McFerrin, and many classical performers and ensembles. She also performed prominently in the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. She was the first deaf performer to win a Grammy and has received three thus far in her career, she was inducted into the Order of the British Empire in 1993, and was named Scotswoman of the Decade for the 1990s.
