Session 2

In July, 2015, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich will present the world premiere of a piece tentatively titled “Jephta’s Daughter,” directed by Saar Magal in collaboration with David Levin. Before its premiere, Magal and Levin are team-teaching a course that serves as a laboratory for the piece’s preparation. In this presentation, Levin and Magal introduce the project and model the process of collaborative creation in a performance laboratory.

“That’s all well and good in practice… but how does it work in theory?” is a popular slogan on student t-shirts on this campus.

J. Carter Brown directed the National Gallery from 1969 to 1992. During those years he changed the Gallery’s culture and competed with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for attention and glory. This lecture recounts the strategies he employed to do this, including his planning of the Gallery’s new East Building and his deployment of sensational blockbuster exhibitions, something of a novelty in the 1970s. It will also explore the tensions between Brown and his rival, Thomas Hoving.

John Eaton will discuss his piece “The End of It,” commissioned by Contempo for their 50th-anniversary performance. This multimedia presentation, including excerpts from four previous song cycles and and a DVD excerpt from an opera, will point toward the new song cycle and will discuss the use of microtonal and new vocal and instrumental techniques. The poems that inspired and are set in “The End of It” move from the terror of confronting the end of life in some of Donne and Swenson to the ecstatic end of the Paradiso, with the Borsch serving as a transition.

This talk provides an overview of how sign language poetry uses movements of the body and hands to create visual poetic form. We will focus on the rhythm, timing, and coordination of the articulators (the two hands, the body, the head) which give form and structure to the poetic verses.

Jewish music, especially cabaret styles, was present as sound first entered film history. The first English- and German-language talkies, The Jazz Singer and The Blue Angel, took place on vaudeville and cabaret stages. Jewish popular music was no less essential to early film musicals than to Yiddish film on the eve of the Holocaust. The New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Division of the Humanities ensemble-in-residence, brings this golden age to life for their Humanities Day performance.