đź“… Date: Friday, March 27, 2026
đź•’ Start Time: 4:00 PM
đź“Ť Location: Harkness Chapel, Classroom
đź‘Ą Who: Free | Open to the public
Our weekly Friday colloquia showcase current research by distinguished visiting scholars alongside our own faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education. A brief reception follows each talk to keep the conversation going. All are welcome!
About The Talk
"Roots and Soil: Heimat and Landscape Preservation in German Music"
The German word Heimat is complex: it signals home soil, local traditions, belonging, heritage, and landscape preservation. A wide swath of musical activity in 19th-century Germany had latent ties to the Heimat movement, ranging from men’s choirs to forest symphonies to Lieder about water wheels. This talk examines the dual lives of Ernst Rudorff, a composer, pedagogue, and music editor in the circle of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. In his spare time, Rudorff founded the landscape preservation movement. This was not environmentalism as we know it today; Rudorff’s anti-industrial philosophy smacks of a landed gentleman yearning for the eighteenth-century world order. In this talk, I show how Rudorff’s founding role in Heimat preservation informed the aesthetics of Clara Schumann’s circle. Rudorff’s conservative compositions dwelled in the Vormärz era, while his influential critical editions advanced what philologists call the Urtext approach, the study of original and authentic manuscripts. Rudorff forms the first chapter in a longer story of Heimat, a concept that explains anti-modernist music critics, the “blood and soil” rhetoric of the Third Reich, and the uncertainty of German and Austrian exiles who wrestled with a question posed by Jean Améry: “How much Heimat does a person need?”
About The Speaker
Abigail Fine is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Oregon. She is the author of The Composer Embalmed: Relic Culture from Piety to Kitsch (2025), a study of the little-known devotees who preserved tangible traces of composers through relics and rituals. She has published articles on the anecdote industry as it interfaced with a history of etiquette, on Jewish responses to art-religion, and on death masks in visual culture. She is currently interested in keepsake albums, music in subscription magazines, and the ties between Heimat, heritage preservation, and music culture.
Venue Information
Harkness Classroom, located inside Harkness Chapel, serves as both a lecture hall for large classes and a backstage area during events. It is also the meeting location for the CWRU Music Colloquium Series.
Health + Safety
The health and well-being of our community is important to us as we gather for campus events. University Health and Counseling Services provides up-to-date guidance and resources to help support a safe campus experience. For life-threatening emergencies, please call CWRU Public Safety immediately at 216.368.3333.