Keyboard Division Evening at the Murchison

Recital presented at Winspear Hall at the Murchison Performing Arts Center

Gained in Translation: Words about Cage in late 1950's Germany.

John Cage's 1958 visit to Darmstadt has taken on an unprecedented level of significance in the historiography of new music. Borio argues that Cage's physical arrival in Europe was one of four primary reasons for the dissolution of serial thinking. This article queries, though, whether the impact of Cage's visit was not created by Cage's own words or music, but instead by the translation of Cage's words into German. An analysis of the translation shows significant disparities between it and the original, making politically concrete in German what was only implicit in English. In short, this article will argue that one of the most significant controversies in the history of the post-war avant-garde became so through Cage's assimilation, through translation, into a burgeoning German political debate

Con lagreme bagnandome el viso

In the years before his death, Johannes Ciconia (1370?-1412) set to music several poems penned by the young Venetian humanist Leonardo Giustinian. One of the earliest of these settings is 'Con lagreme bagnandome el viso'. This article proposes that both the poem and its setting by Ciconia operate within the emotional community of early humanists active at Padua in the decades around the year 1400. The public funeral oratory of one of the high-profile humanists active in this community in Padua, Pier Paolo Vergerio, reveals a renewed interest in ancient rhetoric that was instrumental in the development of new modes of self-expression within this emotional community. Different types of musical repetition in Ciconia's setting of 'Con lagreme' serve as musical analogues to rhetorical figures of pathos witnessed in the orations of Vergerio