News
Peter Franklin gives Bloch Lectures
Peter Franklin, Professor of Music and Fellow of St Catherine's, has been appointed Ernest Bloch Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He will be resident at Berkeley during Michaelmas Term 2010.
Starting on 13 September, he will be delivering a series of lectures on the topic 'Distant Sound—Singing Devil: The Politics of Musical Passion in the Age of Leverkühn'. Seeking a different take on the history of music during the fictional life-span of the fated composer hero, Adrian Leverkühn, of Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Dr Faustus, Professor Franklin will consider both the reasons for and the problematics of the ambivalent relationship of composers such as Mahler, Delius, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Sibelius and Puccini with both the dominant Germanic aesthetic ideology of high art and the mass-culture audience they would encounter in the cinema.
The titles of the lectures are as follows: 1) Setting the scene: grandiose symphonics and the trouble with art; 2) Ecstatic aliens and pessimistic aristocrats; 3) Sunsets, sunrises and decadent oceanics; 4) Making the world weep (more problems with opera); 5) Late romanticism meets modernism at the movies; 6) The troubling stories of a forgotten composer.