[AMS-announce] CONF: The Mannes Institute: Schoenberg and his Legacy, New York, June 2007

[ams-announce-admin at list.bowdoin.edu]

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THE MANNES INSTITUTE: SCHOENBERG AND HIS LEGACY
JUNE 24-27, 2007  MANNES COLLEGE, NEW YORK CITY
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Wayne Alpern, Director

The Mannes Institute continues its innovative series of summer programs with its seventh annual Institute on the topic of ARNOLD SCHOENBERG AND HIS LEGACY from June 24-27, 2007 at Mannes College of Music in New York City. Program details are located on our website at Mannes Institute (www.mannes.edu/mi) and brochures will be distributed at the Joint AMS/SMT National Meeting in Los Angeles. Qualified musicologists and theorists are urged to apply, especially those who have never attended before. The Institute also continues its annual Musical Essay Award by honoring an outstanding creative essay on the topic of the Institute. Applications are accepted via the website from January 1 to March 1, 2007.

The Mannes Institute is an internationally acclaimed musical think tank dedicated to communal inquiry at the highest level of scholarship. Distinguished scholars from around the world gather in an informal collegial setting to explore a different subject each year through participatory workshops, plenary sessions, and special presentations emphasizing interactive dialogue and debate under the expert guidance of a rotating faculty of peers. This coming June we will explore the influential music, thought, and life of Arnold Schoenberg in depth from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives. A brief program description is provided below:

2007 SCHOENBERG INSTITUTE PROGRAM AND FACULTY
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A. Morning Workshops

HEARING AND MODELING SCHOENBERG’S SERIAL WORKS
Leader: Brian Alegant (Oberlin College)
An examination of aural relationships in Schoenberg’s serial compositions utilizing multiple performances and interpretations, with a critical assessment of different theoretical constructs of form and compositional strategy for conceptually modeling what we hear.

CONFLICT, FLUX, IMPERFECTION­AND SCHOENBERG
Leader: Michael Cherlin (University of Minnesota)
A quest for an adequate figurative language to depict Schoenberg’s complex and ambivalent musical-dramatic thought utilizing a nexus of rhetorical tropes involving conflict, flux, and imperfection, with correlations to other fields of inquiry and creativity.

SCHOENBERG AS THEORIST
Leader: Severine Neff (University of North Carolina)
An assessment of Schoenberg as a profound and original thinker about music based on published sources and unpublished theoretical writings from the Schoenberg archives, in order to distill a coherent theory of music and apply it to his own works and those of other composers.

B. Afternoon Workshops

SCHOENBERG AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE TEXT
Leader: Walter Frisch (Columbia University)
An exploration of the theory and practice of Schoenberg’s texted works emerging from his renowned 1911 essay “The Relationship to the Text,” considering how the music “expresses” its text, and how words and music interact (or do not) in lieder and other vocal works throughout his career.

SCHOENBERG AND THE PAST
Leader: Ethan Haimo (University of Notre Dame)
An inquiry into Schoenberg’s varied and complex relationships with tradition and the musical past, critiquing models of an artist’s engagement with history, and utilizing these conceptual paradigms to outline the central stages in Schoenberg’s relationships with his musical predecessors.

SCHOENBERG’S TWELVE-TONE THINKING
Leader: Andrew Mead (University of Michigan)
A study of the conceptual framework that makes Schoenberg’s music intelligible and the nature of twelve-tone musical thinking, emphasizing the limits and extents of the composer’s own serial conceptions in his writings and music, and the compositional restrictions he placed upon himself.

C. Plenary Sessions

SCHOENBERG AS WEBERN
Special Guest: Allen Forte (Yale University)
Because of their character, brevity, and other distinguishing features, Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra of 1910 bear remarkable similarities to Webern's short pieces during this same crucial period in the emergence of atonal music.

SYSTEMATIZING SCHOENBERG'S OEUVRE
Special Guest: Therese Muxeneder (Schoenberg Center, Vienna)
Insights into the evolving methodological, technological, and historical issues in assembling, archiving, and presenting one of the most unique and influential oeuvres in the musical and cultural history of the twentieth century.

MUSICAL ESSAY AWARD PRESENTATION
Winner to be announced

D. Musical Performances

PIERROT LUNAIRE
Artists: Da Capo Chamber Players featuring Lucy Shelton

THE SCHOENBERG PIANO FRAGMENTS
Artist: Noam Sivan (Mannes College of Music)

The 45 fellows of the Institute attend all plenary sessions and enroll in one Morning and one Afternoon Workshop for the entire program. Each workshop of 15 scholars meets for three 3-hour sessions. Prior preparation and active participation are essential. Communal meals, a reception, and a banquet on an historic Hudson riverboat restaurant are provided. Affordable housing is available. All applications are reviewed and decisions rendered by committee.

We invite you to join other outstanding music scholars and share in this unique and transformative experience in collaborative learning. Kindly direct all inquiries to Wayne Alpern, Director, The Mannes Institute, at mannesinstitute at aol.com.

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