Faculty News: August 2013

Professor Emeritus Paul Bryan was interviewed on Czech National Radio in early August as part of a remembrance of the 200th anniversary of the death of composer Johann Baptist Vanhal (1739-1813).

Bryan Gilliam delivered a talk at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York on Aug. 24.

Philip Rupprecht is on a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, hard at work on his monograph Avant-Garde Nation: British Musical Modernism in the 1960s.  In the Britten centenary year, he has had a busy schedule of invited lectures – in May in Chicago, in July as the Keynote Speaker at the “Benjamin Britten on Stage & Screen” conference (Nottingham, UK), with upcoming talks at Illinois State and Oberlin this fall. In April, he delivered “Never the Same Twice: Some Varieties of Rhythmic Experience,” as Keynote for Music Theory Southeast, held at Appalachian State in Boone, NC; in October he will present “Rhythmic Dignity: Beat, Measure and Tempo in the Music of James Dillon” at the SMT national conference in Charlotte (on the same panel as Duke Ph.D. candidate, Brian Christian, who will discuss Claude Vivier’s music!). Two essays , “Britten’s Music and Its Audiences” and “Britten and the Avant-Garde in the 1950s,” have just appeared in Rethinking Britten, a volume Rupprecht has edited, published by OUP (right column).

The CD, Felix Mendelssohn: The Complete Works for Cello & Piano, featuring Nancy Green, cello, and R. Larry Todd, piano, has been released by JRI Recordings. Fanfare Magazine calls it “The most complete Mendelssohn disc yet. . . a very esthetically appealing package, visually, and aurally, an impressive accomplishment . . ."