Nathan Platte to lead film music workshop

In late October Nathan Platte will join forces with Colin Roust (Roosevelt University) at the College Music Society in Cambridge, Mass., where they will lead a pre-conference pedagogy workshop on film music. From there Nathan will travel to Syracuse University to participate in the “Belfer Audio Archive at 50” Symposium. The weekend includes performances, screenings, lectures, and guest appearances by the Kronos Quartet and music writer Alex Ross (The New Yorker). Nathan will give introductory remarks before a double feature of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945). He will also present a paper that explores the use of preview scores or “temp tracks” in both films.

http://www.music.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1453&Itemid=1238

http://library.syr.edu/belfer/programs/belferat50/events/index.php

Jennifer Iverson recently presents at the 2013 Ligeti Symposium and Festival

Jennifer Iverson recently presented “Ligeti and the Evolution of Klangfarbenmelodie” at the 2013 Ligeti Symposium and Festival. The paper traces the dual lineages for the reception history of “sound-color-melody”, from Schoenberg and Webern through Adorno to Ligeti. A notable scholar and analyst in his own right, Ligeti both received and advanced the discourse around Klangfarbenmelodie in his scholarship and in his compositions. Iverson’s analysis shows that Ligeti used a rather Schoenbergian notion of Klangfarbenmelodie in Lontano (1967) while he developed ideas from the mid-century discourse around Webern’s music in the opening of the Cello Concerto (1966). Celebrating the 90th year of Ligeti’s birth, the festival brought together leading scholars, performers, and enthusiasts of his music.

Matthew Arndt recently attends retreat for the Psalm 103 Project

Matthew Arndt recently attended a retreat for the Saint John of Damascus Society’s Psalm 103 Project and took part in a public presentation entitled “Networks of Echoes: Collaboration, Community, and Creativity in the Musics of the Eastern Orthodox Churches.” The Society has commissioned six composers, including Doctor Arndt, to collaboratively set Psalm 103 (Septuagint numbering) for mixed chorus. The composers met October 11–12, 2013, in Bloomington, Indiana, and came up with ways to integrate their music. At the public presentation on October 12, they spoke about their work on the project and had Ensemble Bdeniye, conducted by Christopher Grundy, present pieces representing their different musical traditions. You can see videos of the event here.

Photo, from left to right: Richard Toensing (composer), Matthew Arndt (composer), Kurt Sander (composer), Richard Barrett (Artistic Director), Franklin L. Hess (Executive Board Member), Harold Sabbagh (President), Vicki Pappas (Vice President), Laura Willms (Secretary and Education Director), Alexander Khalil (composer), Tikey Zes (composer), Brian Rogers (Treasurer), and John Michael Boyer (composer).

Marian Wilson Kimber gives talk for opening meeting of the Beethoven Club

On October 3, musicologist Marian Wilson Kimber gave a talk on the siblings Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn for the opening meeting of the Beethoven Club in Cedar Rapids.  The club’s theme for the year is “Musical Families.”

Wilson Kimber has also published an article about Carl Davis’s score for the 1995 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance. [http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=16232/].  In September she attended the Minneapolis general meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, which celebrated the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Austen’s novel.