This course examines ways of creating musical experiences that move an audience to deeper understanding. We will watch, listen to, and read about a good number of performances, music installations, and programs, while exploring the complex questions of how audiences experience them. Ultimately, students will gain new perspectives that will inform and enrich their relationship to music.
For instructor Seth Knopp, the musical experience is not first or foremost a history lesson or an anthology. “We may come away from concert programs knowing more about how the musical world has organized itself by natural evolution, by geography, by invention, by cultural upheaval, but in the end we are left with one fundamental continuum crystalized in those moments when composer-interpreter-listener become inseparable, and also invisible. Those are the rare moments that move us unmistakably, but that we cannot quantify or replicate, when all that is left is Music, and its love affair with itself.”
Instructor Seth Knopp is a pianist and founding member of the Peabody Trio, the recipient of the 1989 Naumburg Award. After making its Alice Tully Hall debut in 1990, the trio performed on the most important chamber music stages internationally.
Over his 25 years as artistic director of Yellow Barn, Seth has built an international center for chamber music, bringing musicians and audiences to Putney, Vermont each summer. Yellow Barn’s holistic philosophy and programming focuses listeners in new ways and has become an important influence in the music world. In 2008, he created Yellow Barn’s Artist Residencies, the first residency program for performing musicians in the United States.
In 2010 Seth founded and became the artistic director of Soundings: New Music at the Nasher, a concert series at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, exploring the unique lens through which music helps us better understand our world.
Now in his fourth decade on its faculty, Seth is Professor of Piano and Chamber music at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University.
Recent projects include the creation of Beethoven Walks, transcriptions of Bach’s Musical Offering and Chaconne, the premiere recording of Jörg Widmann’s song cycle Das Heiße Herz, and performances with members of the Brentano String Quartet for the opening of the Chou Wen-chung Center in Guangzhou, China.
Class Limit: 17
No Class on Sept. 29 and Oct. 20