Prof. Douglas Boyce '92

Professor Douglas Boyce ’92 of The George Washington University will give a lecture titled Memory and Imagination: Music Before and After Composers on Thursday, Feb. 17, at 4:15 p.m. in Bernhard Music Center Room 30 on the Williams College campus. This lecture is sponsored by the Class of 1960 Scholars Fund and is both free and open to the public.

Professor Boyce has provided the following description of his lecture: “Early Music and Contemporary Music are often thought of by the general public as having opposing world-views; one looking forward, one looking backward.  This lecture will propose an alternate view, that Early Music and Contemporary Music manifest the same fundamental approaches to composition and music making—  problematizing ‘the notion of the author’ and putting forward a view of music as a process of continual adoption and transformation.” Prof. Boyce will also discuss the connections between Early Music and his own works, including Paisaje con Dos Tumbas y Un Perro Asirio, to be performed by the Williams Chamber Players on Saturday, Feb. 19 at 8 p.m.

As Associate Professor of Music and Department Chair at The George Washington University, Prof. Boyce teaches theory, musicianship, and composition courses and also oversees all aspects of instructional technology in the Department of Music. A founding member of counter)induction, composer Douglas Boyce writes chamber music that bridges the medieval and the modern, the visceral and the cerebral. Praising his Quintet “l’homme armé”, Allan Kozinn of The New York Times, wrote “he couches [the medieval melody] in such thoroughly modern scoring that the ear is lured to other things, including the juxtaposition of eerie string writing with playful material for the clarinet and piano, or the lively interplay among all five instruments.” Mr. Boyce was born in New York City in 1970. After performing with various punk rock bands in the greater New York metropolitan area, he attended Williams College, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics and Music, with honors, in 1992. He holds an MM from the University of Oregon, and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where, in 1999, he was awarded the Weiss Prize in Composition for Trois Complaintes. He has attended the Master-Class in Composition at the Aspen Festival, the Czech-American Summer Music Institute in Prague, and the Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium. During the summers of 2000 and 2002, he was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has studied with George Crumb, James Primosch, Kathryn Alexander, Robert Kyr, Judith Weir, Ladislav Kubik and Robert Suderburg. His works have been performed in Philadelphia, New York, Aspen, Frankfurt and Prague. His music for The Muslin Plays, a film and performance project developed with JMandle Performance was featured at the 1996 SOHO Arts Festival. In 1999, he and his works were featured on WXPN Philadelphia’s Dystopia, a new music radio journal. His work Palimpsest: A Composition of Maps, commissioned by Concert Artists’ Guild for violinist Asmira Woodward-Page, was recently premiered at Carnegie Hall’s Well Hall in New York.

The Class of 1960 Scholars Fund, established at their 25th Reunion, brings eminent researchers from other colleges and universities to campus to give colloquia.