Should High Culture Be Dead and Buried:

The Problem of "Classical" Music in Left Cultural Politics

 

The Left in the United States - and everywhere where U.S. cultural influence is felt - has collapsed its advocacy of music to the realms of popular and protest music. This has partly to do with popular suspicion of any culture that has historically been dependent on elites for funding and audience, which is the case for classical music, western and non-western, and all but a handful of works of "serious" fiction. Should claiming the whole range of humanity's cultural heritage, both "high" and "low," be an issue for the left? Or should the entire realm of the high be ceded to the right?

  Symposium:

        The Problemat of American Classical Music
        Jazz: America's Classical Music?
        Left Populism, Cultural Elitism, and the National-Popular

      Panelists include:

        Stanley Aronowitz, Martin Brody, Sorrel Hays, Randy Martin, Melissa de Graaf, Michael J. Thompson, Charles Kronengold, Steve Holtje, Beth Griffith, Michael Sahl, Bern Nix

Concert: Innovations Then and Now

         J.S. Bach: Fifth Brandenburg Concerto and other works (on original instruments)
       Piano Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, Frederic Rzewski, and George Crumb; Songs of Charles Ives, Hanns
       Eisler,   and Marc Blitzstein
        Soloists include: Eric Canepa, Margaret Willig Crane, Judith Davidoff, Sorrel Doris Hays, Sandra Miller, Thomas Osuga, and Nancy Wilson

        7:00 pm - Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue at the corner of 34th Street.

 

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work,  and the School of Continuing Education of the CUNY Graduate Center, Left Forum, and the Logos Public Sphere Project,

        Early registration for symposium and concert:

        Symposium and concert: $15.00 (at door: $35.00)  Students $8.00 (door: $15.00)
        Symposium only: $10.00 (at door: $15.00)  Students: $5.00 (door: $10.00)
        Concert only: $10.00 (at door: $15.00)  Students: $5.00 (door: $10.00)

Information and online registration at www.leftforum.org