(all Case Western Reserve University /CIM faculty and students welcome to attend)
Location: Harkness Chapel
The Department of Music opens Harkness Chapel to the wider CWRU/CIM community. Join us in the audience as Peter Sellars coaches students in an intimate setting.
Department of Music Colloquium
“Staging the Music: Peter Sellars in Conversation” with Susan McClary
(free and open to public; registration required)
Date: Friday October 11, 2019, 4:00 pm
Location: Harkness Chapel
Recognized as one of the most innovative and influential directors of our time, Sellars has produced acclaimed—and often controversial—versions of many beloved operas and oratorios. He has also collaborated with several composers, including John C. Adams and Kaija Saariaho, to create challenging new operas. Many directors leave the musical aspects of opera entirely to the singers and conductor. Sellars, however, immerses himself in the score, and has created a distinctive visual vocabulary to embody musical gesture on stage, drawing on the energies of the music as he shapes characters, ensemble interaction, and large-scale dramatic trajectories.
As a leading scholar of gender and music, and the history of opera, Susan McClary (CWRU) is ideally positioned to illuminate Sellars’s goal to address both the social tensions embodied in these operas as well as the spiritual dimensions of operatic performance.
Coffee, tea, and book signing to follow.