Lateness: Historical, Biographical, Musical

2018-19 CUSP Distinguished Speaker Series - Core Connections

Monday, February 11, 2019
6:00–8:00 p.m.
Davis Auditorium, Schapiro CEPSR

In the Core, we explore musical works written within different “life cycles”: historical eras, composers' careers, and the evolution of musical genres like opera and symphony. How do works reflect, embody, transcend, unsettle, or stand at a distance from their times and their audiences? After Beethoven’s musical expressions of struggle, passion, and heroism, composers had to deal with profound feelings of belatedness and an awkward relationship to the Kantian sublime. Yet Beethoven himself embodied all the contradictions and paradoxes of the overlapping Enlightenment, Revolutionary, Napoleonic, and Romantic eras he lived through, and his controversial late works divided listeners as never before. Are Beethoven’s works timeless or untimely?

Biography

Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music and returning Chair of Music Humanities. Her research interests are the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, issues of musical meaning and persuasion, biography and late style, and the Enlightenment imagination; her most recent publications are “Music and the Labyrinth of Melancholy” in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies and “Is Don Giovanni Evil?” in Evil: A Philosophical History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts series). She has served as department chair and president of the American Musicological Society, and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. At Columbia, she has received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum and the Great Teacher Award.