WSNSW — NEXT EVENT VIA ZOOM: 11.00am on Sunday 6 June 2021 (AEST)
Alex Ross, via zoom from San Francisco, in conversation with Dr David Larkin about Alex’s book Wagnerism, Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
Hot on the heels of our wonderful birthday concert on Sunday comes this zoom session with Alex Ross and David Larkin. Please note the earlier time – 11.00am.
We encourage as many members and friends as possible to join this zoom talk! Members of the public are most welcome!
Registration: Those wishing to join the zoom session will need to register
– by replying to this email, or
– by emailing Lis Bergmann at this email address, or
– by emailing us at webmaster@wagner.org.au.
Registration fee: $10 – An e-invoice will be emailed to those who register, for payment by debit or credit card – this is our preferred method.
However, details for paying by electronic funds transfer from the member’s bank will be included in the e-invoice.
Registration and fee: due by Saturday 5 June please.
Zoom link: will be emailed before the event to those who have registered and paid by Saturday 5 June 2021.
About Alex Ross
Alex Ross will talk to us from San Francisco about his monumental book Wagnerism, Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.
Alex Ross is a 1986 graduate of St Albans School in Washington, DC, having previously attended the Potomac School in McLean, Virginia. He is a 1990 graduate of Harvard University, where he studied under composer Peter Lieberson and was a DJ on the classical and underground rock departments of the college radio station, WHRB. He earned a Harvard AB (Bachelor of Arts) in English summa cum laude for a thesis on James Joyce.
His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a cultural history of music since 1900, was released in the US in 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the UK in 2008. The book received widespread critical praise in the US, garnering a National Book Critics Circle Award, a spot on The New York Times list of the ten best books of 2007, and a finalist citation for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. The book was also shortlisted for the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction.
His second book, Listen to This, was released in the US in September 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was published in the UK in November 2010.
In September 2020, his third book Wagnerism, Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music came out.
About Dr David Larkin
David Larkin is a senior lecturer in musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, specialising in nineteenth-century music. He joined the University in 2010, after two years as a postdoctoral research fellow attached to the School of Music, University College Dublin sponsored by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
His music education began at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, where he studied piano, violin and organ. He graduated from University College Dublin in 1999 with a first-class honours BMus degree, and in 2002 was awarded the MLitt degree with distinction for a thesis exploring the musical and personal connections between Liszt and Wagner. In 2007, he gained his PhD from the University of Cambridge for a dissertation entitled ‘Reshaping the Liszt-Wagner Legacy: Intertextual Dynamics in Strauss’s Tone Poems.’
Dr Larkin has given a number of presentations to the Wagner Society in NSW; his latest was a zoom talk in October 2020 on Beyond the opera house: CS Lewis and Wagner reception in Edwardian Britain.
With warm regards from the President and Committee of Wagner Society in NSW.
