The Observer, September 2, 2005
Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1
Baker-Nord Center, Music department present cultural lecture series
Beginning this fall, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, along with the Department of Music, will be co-sponsoring a Music and Culture lecture series. This school year, featured speakers will lecture on topics ranging from medieval musical culture to musical theater in the 1950s.
The series will begin with biographer Maynard Solomon on Sept. 16. The author of Beethoven and Mozart, both of which are still regarded as extremely important biographies in the world of music scholarship, Solomon will be giving a lecture entitled "In the Beginning: Creation Scenarios from Mozart to Schubert." Make sure to listen for any references he may make to the composers' psychic lives, as that tends to be a topic he often covers.
Less focused on particular composers and more so on culture, Craig Wright comes to Case from Yale University. His specialty is medieval and renaissance musical culture, and his lecture is entitled "Labyrinths and Music." His most recent book, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology and Music, is characteristic of his work as an accomplished musicologist, as evidenced by his many awards. Wright will be at Case on Nov. 14.
To end the series, Carol Oja, the William and Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University, will come to Case to give her lecture "Leonard Bernstein in the Early 1950s: Theater, Genre, Cultural Critique," on March 23. Recently, her book Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s won the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music. She is currently writing a book about Leonard Bernstein and his work in musical theater, which will be published in Yale's Broadway Masters Series.
As an educational environment where the arts are perhaps not as well supported or appreciated as they should be, students should attempt to make it to one of these lectures. It is an honor to have such distinguished guests coming to our school to share some of their knowledge, research, and insight into the world of music, and we should all take advantage of such an amazing opportunity.
