LITHOS 7.15
LITHOS 7.14
LITHOS 7.13
LITHOS 1.7
LITHOS 7.12
LITHOS 4.9
LITHOS 1.6
LITHOS 7.3
LITHOS 7.2
LITHOS 7.1
LITHOS 6.2
LITHOS 6.1
LITHOS 4.2
LITHOS 3.2
LITHOS 3.1
LITHOS 2.5
LITHOS 2.4
LITHOS 1.3
LITHOS 1.2
LITHOS 1.1
HOUR OF THE WOLF
HOUR OF THE WOLF: AMERICAN CHOREOGRAPHY & THE MUSIC OF ARVO PÄRT ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION: This presentation traces one line of thought in my ongoing engagement with the music of Pärt and its many forms of artistic repurposing. His Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977/1980), a posthumous tribute to the English composer Benjamin Britten, became a touchstone for American […]
Letters from Cairo
Letters from Cairo is a vivid memoir of an American experience in Nasser’s Egypt, seen through the eyes of two visiting academics who navigate the epiphanies, adventures, and paradoxes of a country at a critical turning point. On the eve
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Book of Hours
Breathing new life into the form of the devotional text, Book of Hours is a powerful meditation on the conditions of place, gaze, and being. This pocket-sized collection of original drawings and poems in English animates visual and
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Learning How to Mourn
ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION In this symposium, I joined Kythe Heller and Andrew Shenton in a conversation about the ways that Pärt’s music proposes a self-reflective space across religious and cultural divides. Our presentations explored how Pärt’s music has been valued in the contexts of theology, dance, film, and personal narrative, and we considered the reasons […]
Holbein’s Hymnal
Holbein’s Hymnal & Cosmology of Place in Painting ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION This paper presents one area of my research that explores the relationship between cartography and the ontologies and material history of musical scores. I am particularly interested in how musical scores, like maps, have often been the objects of semantic and symbolic experiences. Drawing […]
Music in the Court of Marie-Antoinette
ABOUT THIS INTRODUCTION In this presentation at Wellesley College, I introduced one of the staged vocal works that was performed at Versailles in the summer of 1780 at the request of Marie-Antoinette: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le Devin du village (1752). We investigated how this opera played a central role in Rousseau’s proposed French operatic reforms, including […]
Pärt’s Wallfahrtslied
ABOUT THIS INTRODUCTION In this introduction to the music of Arvo Pärt for an audience at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York City, I described Pärt’s compositional path, including his early training in twelve-tone and aleatory techniques. This included a demonstration of the “tintinnabuli” technique, which Pärt developed in the late 1970s, after […]
Verdi ‘Behind-the-Scenes’
Libera me: An Invitation, a Story, a Gift, and a Question ABOUT THIS INTRODUCTION This presentation was part of a program with the Montclair State University Chorale, conducted by Heather J. Buchanan. In between the movements of Verdi’s Requiem, I presented some images of the manuscripts from the movement, Libera me, and discussed the relationship […]
Carmina Burana in America
Gambling the World: Carmina Burana in America ABOUT THIS FILM In 2017, I made a short film in collaboration with my colleague Dave Sanders and students at the School of Communications and Media at Montclair State University. Its purpose was to introduce Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana before a multi-disciplinary performance of the work by the […]
Sonoristic Space in Mahler 1
ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION While sonorism is generally considered to be a practice of twentieth-century composition, some turn-of-the-century composers like Mahler pursued what could be characterized as an early type of sonoristic project. Critical reception of Mahler’s First Symphony has often concluded that the beginning of the first movement undermines the teleological premise of its symphonic […]
Beethoven & Friedrich
ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION This study begins by examining the Benedictus of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in terms of its rhetorical style and proposes that it is governed by an Arcadian pastoral idiom but the connotative meaning of this idiom is complicated through the appearance of other musical topics. It has been widely-established that Beethoven’s philosophical ideas, […]
Viennese ‘Moderne’
ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION The opening of Gustav Mahler’s “Der Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde demonstrates a remarkable set of musical conditions that include spare textures, a wide disposition of instrumental forces, and the effect of temporal suspension. Through this passage Mahler highlights voices that work in synthesis with those that are juxtaposed. In […]
Voice & Ground in Mahler 3
ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION In this study, I investigate the ways that a phenomenological approach can help us interpret the historical impact of Mahler’s orchestration. The post horn section from the third movement of his Third Symphony has been often characterized as a moment “outside” time. I propose that this effect of being a-temporal is largely […]
Morris & the Politics of Fate
ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION Dancer and choreographer Mark Morris arrived in New York in 1976, toward the end of a dance resurgence by artistic collectives that had been trained in the Martha Graham style but had later developed an analytical approach to movement and its component parts. Morris’s work represented a startling departure from the scene […]
Ghermandi’s Stories in Performance
ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION This collaborative study discusses the relationship between storytelling, history, resistance, and belonging in the context of the creative work of Gabriella Ghermandi, an author, musician, and performer of the spoken word with roots in the Horn of Africa and Italy. As the child of an Italian father and a mixed-race Eritrean mother, […]
Modality in Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle
ABOUT THE ARTICLE This collaborative study investigates Gabriella Ghermandi’s novel Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) through two perspectives: the first considers music as a historical and social practice by observing Ghermandi’s characters who reference Ethiopian oral traditions; the second explores the contemporary dynamics of migration and transnational identity that critically analyses how storytelling […]
Russian Orthodoxy & the Berlin Mass
ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION This presentation represents the starting point in my research and writing on Arvo Pärt. While I continue to be interested in his theological underpinnings, the focus of my questions have shifted generally to issues of how his music has formed pathways of meaning through its listeners as well as its other creative […]
Body into Sky, Pärt & Kapoor
ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate (2003, piano and orchestra) was commissioned to work in conjunction with Anish Kapoor’s sculpture, Marsyas, shown in 2002 at Tate Modern and named after the mythic satyr who was flayed alive by Apollo. Kapoor’s installation featured massive steel rings joined by a span of dark red PVC membrane that […]
Popular Transformation & Orthodox Ethos
ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION At the turn of the millennium, the music of John Tavener and Arvo Pärt gained a foothold with a surprisingly diverse range of American listeners, from the Orthodox sector to those identified with New Age practices. Although the compositional styles of these composers are significantly different in form and content, their stories […]
Pärt & Documentary Film
ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION Increasingly Pärt’s music has been used to reflect on different forms of violence. In its many partnerships with documentary film, his music has been situated in contrast to the devastation wrought by the attack on the World Trade Towers in New York (Fahrenheit 9/11; Michael Moore, 2004), the destruction of the giant Buddhas […]
Arvo Pärt & the Idea of North
ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION This paper explored Pärt’s affiliation with the concept of “North” through film, not as a geographical reference point but as a set of complex digressive evolutions (Foucault). I examined some of the conventional western associations of nordicity (Hamelin), including narratives of emptiness, silence, awe, stasis, and spaces outside the progressive laws of […]
Stillspotting( ) nyc: Arvo Pärt and Cultures of Commemoration
ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION The focus of this paper was an art installation, “Stillspotting Manhattan: To a Great City,” curated by the Guggenheim Museum (September 2011), where Pärt’s music played a central role in transforming five public spaces. The Oslo-based architectural firm Snøhetta contributed installation concepts. Viewers were guided through several sites in lower Manhattan, starting […]
Art-Making in America and the Music of Arvo Pärt
ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION What gives art its authority? If the role of music is to say something true – whose truth does it champion? Isn’t it worth re-considering how art can incite violence, or indict difference? Can music protect? In what ways can it sustain? What are the shapes of its borders? How do we […]
Pärt in the Marketplace
ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION This is my first published essay about the historical themes of Pärt’s marketable identity and their relationship to current politics and his reception. I explore the language of Pärt’s music in the marketplace, which has broadened from assertions of religiosity and autonomy in conventional recorded formats, to more public and creative ownership […]
Ethos & Industry of Culture
ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION By all indications, the “White Light Festival” in New York City had placed Arvo Pärt at the center of the Festival’s institutional mission its first year in 2010. This was achieved through a generous number of performances of his music, and by the appearance of his “white light” metaphor for listening, which […]
Arvo Pärt’s White Light
This book investigates how Arvo Pärt’s music has formed pathways of meaning through its listeners, musicians and the institutions that have performed, promoted and published it. Its essays deepen the conversation about the nature of this impact, its forms, and
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Pärt & the Medieval Present
Miserere: Arvo Pärt and the Medieval Present ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION This study explores a series of historical moments pertinent to Pärt’s Miserere – a work for soloists, chorus and instrumental ensemble that sets Psalm 50/51 and the thirteenth-century Dies irae hymn – in order to illustrate how the phenomenon of Pärt has energized a variety […]
Khan, Poetics of the Score
ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION This presentation drew on my ongoing exploration of music and mapping, in particular how musical scores and maps have cohabitated in their media, function, and poetic potential. The work of the London-based artist Idris Khan (1978- ) is a fruitful example. Since 2004, Khan’s work has appropriated scores (including works by Chopin, […]