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Renowned Musicologist Opening UK Lecture Series
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 12, 2012) — The eminent, path-breaking musicologist Leo Treitler will appear on the University of Kentucky campus as the first speaker of the 2012-2013 Rey M. Longyear Lecture Series at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 16, in the Niles Gallery of the Lucille Caudill Little Fine Arts Library and Learning Center. The lecture is free and open to the public.
The opening lecture for the Longyear Series, titled “Reflections on the Communication and Reception of Affect and Idea through Music,” will be illustrated with excerpts from the compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Béla Bartók, as well as the poetry of William Blake.
Distinguished Professor Leo Treitler taught at the Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY) from 1986 to 2003. He also served as professor at the University of Chicago (1962-66), Brandeis University (1966-75), and the State University of New York-Stony Brook (1974-87). From 1983 to 2009, he held visiting or guest professorships at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, New York University, Columbia University, Basel University, Yale University and Harvard University, and he has given numerous guest lectures at prominent American and European universities.
More than just being a notable professor, Treitler has also received fellowships and grants sponsored by the Fulbright Program, Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Mellon Foundation. In 1997, he was elected honorary member of the American Musicological Society.
Widely recognized as a leading expert on medieval music and a transformational scholar, Treitler has continually challenged “unexamined habits and assumptions” of historiography in studies that range from the oral and written transmission of medieval music to interpretations of canonic repertoire of the Western tradition. Shortly after publishing the thought-provoking articles “On Historical Criticism” (Musical Quarterly, 1967) and “The Present as History” (Perspectives of New Music, 1969), he shook the field of medieval studies with the seminal writings, “Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant" (Musical Quarterly, 1974) and “Centonate' Chant: Übles Flickwerk or E Pluribus Unus?” (Journal of the American Musicological Society,1975).
Treitler has published many other articles and chapters throughout his career, including “Wozzeck and the Apocalypse: An Essay in Historical Criticism” (Critical Inquiry, 1979), “History, Criticism, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony” (19th-Century Music, 1979-80), “What Kind of Story is History?” (19th-Century Music, 1984), and “Gender and Other Dualities of Music History” (Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship,1993). He is also author of the book "With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made" (Oxford University Press, 2003, rev. 2007) and the essay collections, "Music and the Historical Imagination" (Harvard University Press, 1989) and "Reflections on Musical Meaning and its Representations" (Indiana University Press, 2011).
The Longyear Lecture Series is sponsored by the Division of Musicology and Ethnomusicology within the UK School of Music at the UK College of Fine Arts.
For more information on the Longyear Lecture Series or about musicology at UK, contact Ronald Pen, director of the UK John Jacob Niles Center for American Music, by email at rapen01@uky.edu or by phone at 859-257-8183.
MEDIA CONTACT: Whitney Hale, (859) 257-8716
or whitney.hale@uky.edu
