Stephen A. Crist of Emory University offers a Class of 1960 Lecture titled, End of the Line: Situating the Only Known Composition by the Last Professional Musician in the Bach Dynasty. This lecture tells a scholarly detective story about a late 18th-century manuscript attributed to “J. P. Bach,” acquired by the Riemenschneider Bach Institute in 2016. The case will be made…

In his talk titled, Finding Patterns and Feeling Affect in Agbadza Songs (Ewe people, Ghana/Togo), Prof. David Locke of Tufts University focuses on a corpus of twenty-five songs in the Agbadza genre. This paper articulates structural features of the genre and identifies compositional design choices in specific songs.  The analysis explicates the many different musical facets of a song—text setting,…

Wind Instruments for All Ensembles Ronald Feldman, Brian Messier, David Wharton Bernhard Music Center, room 30 For woodwind and brass students, only one audition is necessary for the Berkshire Symphony, Wind Ensembles, Brass Ensemble, and chamber music ensembles. For the Berkshire Symphony and chamber music ensembles, the audition is for membership/placement; for Wind Ensemble, Brass Ensemble and Student Symphony, the audition is…

Strings for All Ensembles Ronald Feldman Room 30, Bernhard Music Center String players auditioning for the Berkshire Symphony should play something lyrical, and something technical of their choosing. There will be no scales or sight reading. Placement in chamber music groupings is also arranged at this time. Returning students must re-audition. Some featured works for the 2019/2020 season are: Beethoven…

Professor Mark Burford of Reed College offers a Class of 1960 Lecture titled, 'Music in Crisis: Revisiting “Race Music” through W. E. B. Du Bois'. Studies of W. E. B. Du Bois and music have typically focused on the final two chapters of The Souls of Black Folk (1903): the short story “Of the Coming of John” and, especially, his…

Prof. Mark Evan Bonds offers a Class of 1960 Lecture titled Music’s Fourth Wall: Perspectives on the History of Listening. Composing, performing, listening: in histories of Western music, the last of these is by far the most elusive. Indeed, writing a history of listening is in some respects a fool’s errand, for there are as many histories as there are…

Prof. Kathryn Alexander of Yale University offers a Class of 1960 Music Lecture titled, Pathway(s) Towards A Musical Language. The talk reflects on the use of musical memory and transformation to coalesce a musical language that is a cohesive fabric of musical expressivity as seen in selected works from her solo, chamber, and music technological pieces in various genres. Composer…

Professor Philip Ewell of Hunter College of the City University of New York offers a Class of 1960 Lecture titled Racialized Musical (Hi)stories. “History” usually implies an accurate account of past events while a “story” is less accurate, embellished by a “storyteller.” With remarkable consistency in the U.S., our “histories” have been written by white persons, usually men, with little divergence…

Professor Damascus Kafumbe of Middlebury College offers a Class of 1960 Lecture titled, Court Song, Meaning, and Power Relations in Uganda. As the preeminent African musicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia noted in 1961, meaning in African music exists as a series of modes and perspectives rather than as one static and unified concept. Accordingly, one must examine the multitude of…

Professor Emily Richmond Pollock of MIT School of School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences offers a Class of 1960 Lecture titled, American Opera Festivals, the Geography of Canon, and the Canonicity of Geography. The operatic canon has changed substantially over time, but it also takes on distinctive characteristics in different places and institutional contexts. Opera festivals are a key…

Professor Juan Diego Díaz of University of California Davis offers a Class of 1960 Lecture. The talk is titled, Intimate Performances of Burrinha: Music, Brazilianness, and Political Repression in Togo. For nearly two centuries, a Brazilian folk theatre genre known as burrinha has been performed in various cities along the Lomé-Lagos corridor in West Africa. Emerging through the migration of…

Professor Brigid Cohen of New York University offers a Class of 1960 Lecture titled, The Musical Vocation of Yoko Ono. Yoko Ono’s wildly imaginative work as a multidisciplinary artist and intellectual has attracted growing recognition in recent years. Long overshadowed by her celebrity marriage to John Lennon, Ono’s career has inspired eager rediscovery in the last two decades by art…