Wednesday, April 1, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING
2019, Sosnoff Theater, SummerScape
First performed in the U.S. almost 100 years after its world premiere in Hamburg, this lushly orchestrated allegorical tale was staged by Christian Räth in 2019. Performed by a remarkable cast and the 80-member American Symphony Orchestra, this staging was a stellar example of Maestro Botstein’s commitment to reintroduce rarely seen operatic treasures to a contemporary audience.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING 2018, Sosnoff Theater, SummerScape
Rubinstein’s operatic masterpiece is based on a poem depicting the isolation and despair of a fallen angel. Premiered to great acclaim in 1871, Demon received its first fully staged U.S. performances at Bard in 2018. With rich choral writing and a fiery libretto, the production was staged by Thaddeus Strassberger and featured an all-Russian cast, Pesvebi Georgian Dancers and The American Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Maestro Botstein.
Wednesday, May 13, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING Bard SummerScape Opera and the Bard Music Festival have become synonymous with a new kind of concert experience, one that provides a “rich web of context” (New York Times) for a full appreciation of each composer’s inspirations, significance, and legacy.
This week, UPSTREAMING illuminates the world of Russian composer Sergey Taneyev (1856–1915). A highly gifted pianist and composer, Taneyev was a protégé and champion of Tchaikovsky’s, serving as soloist in early performances of the older composer’s piano concertos.
Taneyev was one of Russia’s most influential music theorists, teaching for nearly three decades at the Moscow Conservatory, where his students included Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Glière; Stravinsky later recalled how highly he valued Taneyev’s treatise on counterpoint, calling it “one of the best books of its kind.” Yet in striving to synthesize counterpoint with folksong, he developed a distinct compositional voice that looked forward to Stravinsky himself. For more information, call 845-758-6822, or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/UPS-sergey-taneyev/.
Wednesday, June 10, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING Bard SummerScape Opera and the Bard Music Festival have become synonymous with a new kind of concert experience, one that provides a “rich web of context” (New York Times) for a full appreciation of each composer’s inspirations, significance, and legacy.
This week, UPSTREAMING illuminates the work of German Romantic composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), featuring:
Carl Maria von Weber’s short life was marked by many lows—frequent illnesses, an arrest on embezzlement and other charges—but he also became one of the most influential composers of the early 19th century whose prodigious gifts as a composer, pianist, conductor, and writer bring to mind Mozart. The premiere of Der Freischütz in 1821, an opera that immediately captured the imagination of audiences in Europe and beyond, was a transformative event in the history of Romanticism and helped to usher in a new sensibility in music. He did not have a comparable success in the remaining five years of his life, although the overtures to his later Euryanthe and Oberon became repertory standards. In these operas, and in less familiar compositions, his masterful orchestration and compelling evocation of mood became models for composers from Meyerbeer to Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, Glinka, and Hindemith. For more information, call 845-758-6822, or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/UPS-carl-maria-von-weber/.
Wednesday, June 24, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING
This engrossing program encompasses varied works exploring religion and spirituality through the lens of female composers: Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, staged at Bard in 2015, animates a moral drama about social justice and personal courage, while Lili Boulanger’s Psalm 130 “Du fond de l'abîme” (1917) offers a deeply personal requiem dedicated to her father. Lera Auerbach’s Violin Concerto No. 3, “De Profundis” (2015) with Vadim Repin rounds out the program.
Wednesday, July 22, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING This week’s UPSTREAMING selection offers an exploration of French romanticism through the work of two composers—Emmanuel Chabrier and Hector Berlioz—who, while stylistically different, shared capacity for independent thought and innovation. The fully staged production of Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui from the 2012 Bard SummerScape is complemented by Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette from the 2017 Bard Music Festival. For more information, call 845-758-6822, or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/French-Romanticism/.
Wednesday, August 5, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING “Botstein and Bard SummerScape show courage, foresight and great imagination, honoring operas that larger institutions are content to ignore. —Time Out New York
UPSTREAMING: Opera at Bard presents the musical centerpiece of the 2017 Bard SummerScape: Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s 1882 rare opera Dimitrij. Supporting content includes a recording of Janáček's Sinfonietta as performed by the American Symphony Orchestra and discussions including a lively and illuminating conversation between ASO music director Leon Botstein and noted Dvořák specialist Michael Beckerman. For more information, call 845-758-6822, or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/UPS-Dimitrij/.
Wednesday, August 19, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING
One of the most revered Romantic composers of the late 19th and early 20th century, Richard Strauss’s symphonic poems and operas remain an indispensable feature of the standard repertoire. This program—which includes the operatic rarity Die Liebe der Danae (The Love of Danae) from the 2011 Bard SummerScape along with various symphonic and choral works—explores the composer’s substantial melodic gifts and his mastery of instrumentation and expression.
Tuesday, October 20, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING
At once opulent and eerie, Pietro Mascagni’s Iris, composed in 1898 with libretto by Luigi Illica, received its North American premiere at Bard SummerScape in 2016. The American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Leon Botstein performed with a brilliant cast of accomplished singers including the Australian tenor Gerard Schneider as a menacing and callous Osaka alongside the soprano Talise Travigne who movingly embodied the naivete and fragility of the eponymous character.
Leon Botstein in conversation with Stephanie Blythe
Sunday, October 25, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING For World Opera Day 2020, join two iconoclastic figures from the opera world for a wide-ranging and lively conversation. Revered mezzo & Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at Bard, Stephanie Blythe joins Leon Botstein, Bard College President & Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra engage in an engrossing discussion about their shared fascination with rarely-performed operas along with anecdotes and trenchant observations about the past, present, and future of the art form.
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985
Saturday, June 26, 2021 – Sunday, November 28, 2021 12–6 pm
CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art This June, the Hessel Museum of Art will present With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, the first full-scale scholarly North American survey of the groundbreaking yet understudied Pattern and Decoration art movement. Including painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, textiles, installation art, and performance documentation, the exhibition spans the years 1972 to 1985 and features 45 artists from across the United States.Sponsored by: Center for Curatorial Studies.
Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection
Saturday, June 26, 2021 – Sunday, October 17, 2021 12–6 pm
CCS Galleries CCS Bard celebrates its 30th anniversary with Closer to Life, an exhibition of over forty artists of drawings and works on paper from the Marieluise Hessel Collection.
The exhibition of over 75 drawings and works on paper spans more than four decades of collecting by philanthropist, Marieluise Hessel, who co-founded the Center for Curatorial Studies in 1990. Closer to Life tracks a lifetime of collecting that spans periods of Hessel’s life spent in Germany, Mexico and the United States. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog that documents the entire collection of more than 300 works on paper, the exhibition presents highlights that reverberate with questions of gender, sexuality, race and politics often through personal expression and individual concerns. Revisiting different artistic periods and contexts, the exhibition draws out both contrasts and comparisons between artists, modes of representation and the continuing vitality of drawing (and paper) as an artistic medium.
The museum is open from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Wednesday through Monday, closed on Tuesdays.Sponsored by: Center for Curatorial Studies.
Trick or treating comes early this October with Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, which chronicles the misadventures of the titular practical jokester and German peasant folk hero. Then we get serious with a performance of Anton Bruckner’s massive and masterful Fifth Symphony. It was performed only once during the composer’s lifetime, and he died having never heard it.
Leon Botsteinconductor
R. StraussTill Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks Bruckner Symphony No. 5Sponsored by: The Orchestra Now.
Online Event We planning for both the October 1 and November 5, 2021 Bard College IWT Writer as Reader Workshops to be held online. We look forward to returning to in-person workshops in 2022.
Writer as Reader workshops model writing practices that inspire students to read more carefully, to grasp the meaning in more complex texts, and to infer meaning from what they read. These workshops invite secondary and college teachers to consider “writing to read” as a central classroom practice, one that shows rather than tells students how writing clarifies the meaning of texts. Working with diverse writing-to-read strategies, workshop participants discover what they bring to the text, what is apparent in the text, what is inferred, and what questions the text poses.
Workshop offerings:
Reading Climate, Writing Change: Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Christina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac’s The Future We Choose: Surviving Climate Crisis
“Vulnerable to Foreign Ways of Seeing and Thinking”: James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues” and Gloria Anzaldúa's “La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness”
Diving Into The Wreck: Daniel Defoe, Adrienne Rich, and J.M. Coetzee
“Who Will Take Up the Body?”: Sara Uribe’s Antígona González Reimagines Antigone within Today’s Global Politics
Othello and American Moor: Studying Shakespeare in a Racialized America
Science and Disenchantment: Max Weber’s “Science as Vocation” and the Role of Science in Ethical Life
Edith Wharton's Two New Yorks
“It’s Getting Started That’s the Puzzle”: Kelly Reichardt, First Cow, and telling American stories
"I would not paint — a picture —": Emily Dickinson’s Visual Poetics
The Lavender Scare: Mid-century Fictions and Fears
Trick or treating comes early this October with Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, which chronicles the misadventures of the titular practical jokester and German peasant folk hero. Then we get serious with a performance of Anton Bruckner’s massive and masterful Fifth Symphony. It was performed only once during the composer’s lifetime, and he died having never heard it.
Leon Botsteinconductor
R. StraussTill Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks Bruckner Symphony No. 5Sponsored by: The Orchestra Now.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's soccer team hosts William Smith College. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Preston Theater A Mexican biologist living in New York returns to his hometown, nestled in the majestic butterfly forests of Michoacán. The journey forces him to confront past traumas and reflect on his hybrid identity, sparking a personal metamorphosis.
Following the screening, meet the director Alexis Gambis and learn more about his Science New Wave movement, where scientific pursuit is free to co-exist and blend freely across disciplines and cultures.Sponsored by: Biology Program; Film and Electronic Arts Program; Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs.
For more information, call 845-752-2331, or e-mail keesing@bard.edu.
A Reading with Bard Fiction Prize Winner Akil Kumarasamy
Monday, October 4, 2021 6:30–8 pm
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium “Akil Kumarasamy’s Half-Gods is a breathtaking debut by one of those rare writers whose compassionate understanding—in this case, a multigenerational family with a frayed, crazy-quilt history—is matched by the narrative gifts necessary to bring her tales to life,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee. “While each individual story in this inventive collection is told in vivid, lusciously worded, image-rich prose, the overarching symphonic whole has—much like Jamaica Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River—the sweep and scope of a novel. What Kumarasamy has given us with Half-Gods is ultimately a meditation, as most great stories are, on time, memory, and hope for the future.”
Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey and the author of the story collection, Half Gods, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was the recipient of the Story Prize Spotlight Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and her debut novel, Better Humans, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Sponsored by: Written Arts Program.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail mbrien@bard.edu.
Noon Concert ( Please note: Open to students and the Bard College community. Concert will be live-streamed.)
Tuesday, October 5, 2021 12–1 pm
Bitó Conservatory Building Conservatory students perform short works during an hour-long program.
Live attendance to this event is limited to Bard College community and students. All other audience members are invited to visit our live stream of this concert - https://youtu.be/z3nJ8IJ6aVY Sponsored by: Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Much of modern number theory involves studying solutions to equations with integer coefficients. By combining techniques of geometry and abstract algebra, mathematicians have been able to solve fundamental questions, such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the Sato-Tate Conjecture.
More recently, statistics has become an important tool for studying number theoretic problems that resist classical techniques. In this talk, we will introduce this area of mathematics by focusing on three specific examples taken from three different areas of number theory. We will also do some real-time computation and data generation. This talk should be accessible to anyone who has taken Proofs and Fundamentals.
Economic Democracy Initiative's Global Forum on Democratizing Work
Wednesday, October 6, 2021
Online Event Open Society University Network's Economic Democracy Initiative (EDI) is pleased to sponsor the upcoming Global Forum on Democratizing Work, held online October 5-7 and featuring leading economists, such as Thomas Piketty, Dani Rodrick, and Jayati Ghosh and New Republic journalist Kate Aronoff.
Following the Democratizing Work op-ed turned manifesto published one year ago in more than 43 newspapers, in 27 languages and 36 countries, the first-ever Global Forum on Democratizing Work brings together experts from around the world for three days of discussions on the urgency of democratizing work.
The central lesson of the COVID crisis is that working people are much more than resources. From the Democratizing Work Manifesto: "Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged. How to avoid this unacceptable situation?"
The Global Forum provides the answer: by democratizing, decommodifying and decarbonizing work. That is, by involving employees in workplace decision-making, by guaranteeing useful employment to all, and by marshaling our collective strength and efforts to preserve life on the planet.
The forum brings together over 380 speakers from 6 continents presenting 100 panel discussions in 9 languages. Each day focuses on one of the Democratizing Work manifesto’s three principles: democratizing work, decommodifying work, and decarbonizing work.
Featuring voices from academia, trade unions, progressive flanks of the business community, the public sector, environmental activism, human rights advocacy organizations, and journalism, the Global Forum is a truly global event going far beyond a conventional academic conference.
EDI is not only co-sponsoring the event; EDI staff and student fellows are participating in these urgent conversations alongside many OSUN-affiliated faculty from across the globe. EDI encourages all those within OSUN and beyond to join the Global Forum, which is free and now open for registration!
Confirmed speakers include: Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics) Katharina Pistor (Columbia University) Dani Rodrik (Harvard University) Jayati Ghosh (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, United Nations High-Level Advisory Board on Economic, Social Affairs) Achille Mbembe (University of Witwatersrand) Jane Mansbridge (Harvard University) Juliet Schor (Boston College) Anthony Kwame Appiah (New York University) Debra Satz (Stanford College) Lukas Lehner (INET, Oxford University) Lawrence Lessig (Harvard University) Claudia Chwalisz (OECD) Daniel Aldana Cohen (University of California, Berkeley) Sanjay Pinto (Cornell University, Rutgers University) Kate Aronoff (New Republic) Sara Nelson (CWA, AFL-CIO) Aurore Lalucq (European Parliament) Iñigo Albizuri Landazabal (Mondragon Corporation) Robin Hahnel (American University) Jason Hickel (Royal Society of Arts)
Economic Democracy Initiative's Global Forum on Democratizing Work
Thursday, October 7, 2021
Online Event Open Society University Network's Economic Democracy Initiative (EDI) is pleased to sponsor the upcoming Global Forum on Democratizing Work, held online October 5-7 and featuring leading economists, such as Thomas Piketty, Dani Rodrick, and Jayati Ghosh and New Republic journalist Kate Aronoff.
Following the Democratizing Work op-ed turned manifesto published one year ago in more than 43 newspapers, in 27 languages and 36 countries, the first-ever Global Forum on Democratizing Work brings together experts from around the world for three days of discussions on the urgency of democratizing work.
The central lesson of the COVID crisis is that working people are much more than resources. From the Democratizing Work Manifesto: "Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged. How to avoid this unacceptable situation?"
The Global Forum provides the answer: by democratizing, decommodifying and decarbonizing work. That is, by involving employees in workplace decision-making, by guaranteeing useful employment to all, and by marshaling our collective strength and efforts to preserve life on the planet.
The forum brings together over 380 speakers from 6 continents presenting 100 panel discussions in 9 languages. Each day focuses on one of the Democratizing Work manifesto’s three principles: democratizing work, decommodifying work, and decarbonizing work.
Featuring voices from academia, trade unions, progressive flanks of the business community, the public sector, environmental activism, human rights advocacy organizations, and journalism, the Global Forum is a truly global event going far beyond a conventional academic conference.
EDI is not only co-sponsoring the event; EDI staff and student fellows are participating in these urgent conversations alongside many OSUN-affiliated faculty from across the globe. EDI encourages all those within OSUN and beyond to join the Global Forum, which is free and now open for registration!
Confirmed speakers include: Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics) Katharina Pistor (Columbia University) Dani Rodrik (Harvard University) Jayati Ghosh (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, United Nations High-Level Advisory Board on Economic, Social Affairs) Achille Mbembe (University of Witwatersrand) Jane Mansbridge (Harvard University) Juliet Schor (Boston College) Anthony Kwame Appiah (New York University) Debra Satz (Stanford College) Lukas Lehner (INET, Oxford University) Lawrence Lessig (Harvard University) Claudia Chwalisz (OECD) Daniel Aldana Cohen (University of California, Berkeley) Sanjay Pinto (Cornell University, Rutgers University) Kate Aronoff (New Republic) Sara Nelson (CWA, AFL-CIO) Aurore Lalucq (European Parliament) Iñigo Albizuri Landazabal (Mondragon Corporation) Robin Hahnel (American University) Jason Hickel (Royal Society of Arts)
In front of Gilson Place on Library Rd. Bard College Farm's weekly farm stand featuring fresh produce, mushrooms, fresh honey and maple syrup when seasonally available. Preorders can be placed here.
How Journalists Should Write about Hate Groups and Hate Group Members
A Bard Center for the Study of Hate Webinar
Thursday, October 7, 2021 3–4 pm
Online Event 3 PM NY l 9 PM Vienna
The Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) hosts a discussion with Bill Morlin, a journalist long admired for his reporting on white supremacy, who will speak on “how journalists should write about hate groups and hate group members.”
Ken Stern, of BCSH, notes that "In my opinion, most journalists who cover hate groups, their leaders, or their members do a poor job. For example, when David Duke was running for elective office in Louisiana, he’d frequently be asked questions about his past as a Klan leader, which he would charmingly deflect. Some 1990s militia leaders explained their hate and planning for violence as, 'we’re only defending the Constitution,' and few journalists knew how to expose exactly what they meant . (Militia leaders claimed that the Constitution didn’t include Amendments after the Bill of Rights, and thus didn’t free the slaves or allow women to vote).
Writing about hate and hate groups takes special journalistic skill. Bill Morlin's powerful writing always treats the haters as real people but also clearly demonstrates the menace and danger of their ideas and organizing.
This is an online event. Register via Zoom.Sponsored by: Bard Center for the Study of Hate.
Style, Sex, Shame, and the End of Literature in Ivy Compton-Burnett
Len Gutkin '07, Senior Editor, The Chronicle Review and Author
Thursday, October 7, 2021 5:30–7:30 pm
Olin, Room 102 Len Gutkin '07 is a senior editor at The Chronicle Review and the author of Dandyism: Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present (University of Virginia Press, 2020). His essays and reviews have appeared in venues including Times Literary Supplement, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books,Bookforum, and Post45.Sponsored by: Hannah Arendt Center; Literature Program; Written Arts Program.
Faculty Recital: Marka Gustavsson, viola, and Frank Corliss, piano
Saturday, October 9, 2021 7–9 pm
Bitó Conservatory Building Works by Bach, Hall Overton, and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson
Live attendance to this event is limited to Bard College community and students. All other audience members are invited to visit our live stream of this concert - https://youtu.be/60tyTOr8wSsSponsored by: Bard College Conservatory of Music.
ABOUT Webinars include a program overview for the Bard MBA in Sustainability and the Bard Center for Environmental Policy programs as well as detailed admissions information, course requirements, tips to make your application strong, and financial information.
Join a live information session with Director Goodstein and the admissions team and ask questions directly of the Bard team.
WHAT WILL BE COVERED?
Overview of graduate program offerings
Alumni success and career outcomes
Admissions information
Prerequisite course information
Peace Corps and AmeriCorps programs
Financial aid and scholarships
Tips for a standout application
Degree Options Degree options include: MS in Environmental Policy MS in Climate Science and Policy MBA in Sustainability
Dual degree options include: MS/JD with Pace Law School MS/MAT with Bard's Master of Arts in Teaching MS/MBA with Bard's MBA in Sustainability
Peace Corps Programs Master's International (before you serve) Peace Corps Fellows (after you serve)
A $65 application fee waiver is available to those who participate in the webinar at the end of the session. Email Margo Bogossian at mbogossian@bard.edu for further details.
The Orchestra Now Del Sol Quartet China Now Festival Chorus
The opening event of the fourth annual China Now Music Festival, Asian American Voices, presents two major works by New York-based composer Huang Ruo: A Dust in Time, composed in 2020 in response to the pandemic; and a preview of excerpts from the oratorio Angel Island, composed in 2021 to honor the stories of immigrants from China. Performances by the Del Sol Quartet from San Francisco, Bard’s own The Orchestra Now, and the China Now Festival Chorus. The festival’s artistic director, Jindong Cai, will conduct.Estimated run time: 97 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.Sponsored by: US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Fall BreakMonday, October 11, 2021 – Tuesday, October 12, 2021
Women's Volleyball match
Wednesday, October 13, 2021 6–8 pm
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's volleyball team hosts Vassar College. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Asian American Voices: Undercurrents in American Contemporary Music
A Multimedia Chamber Concert
Wednesday, October 13, 2021 8 pm
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater
Jin Hi Kim Del Sol Quartet
The second night of China Now features the festival’s ensemble in residence, the Del Sol String Quartet, and Guggenheim Composer Fellow Jin Hi Kim, in a showcase of Asian American composers of contemporary American music. The quartet will perform new compositions by Erberk Eryilmaz, Takuma Itoh, Vijay Iyer, Erika Oba, and Jungyoon Wie, representing many diverse voices to reflect various aspects of Asian American society and history. Kim will perform the world premiere of her latest work, A Ritual for COVID-19, a multimedia composition honoring the spirits of those who lost their lives to the pandemic.Estimated run time: 92 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.Sponsored by: US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
In front of Gilson Place on Library Rd. Bard College Farm's weekly farm stand featuring fresh produce, mushrooms, fresh honey and maple syrup when seasonally available. Preorders can be placed here.
Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom
Hannah Arendt Center 13th Annual Fall Conference
Thursday, October 14, 2021 – Friday, October 15, 2021 10 am – 6 pm
Olin Hall
Hannah Arendt knew that democracy is tenuous. In 1970 she famously wrote:
“Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.”
Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom
Hannah Arendt Center 13th Annual Fall Conference
Thursday, October 14, 2021 – Friday, October 15, 2021 10 am – 6 pm
Olin Hall
Hannah Arendt knew that democracy is tenuous. In 1970 she famously wrote:
“Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.”
The Fisher Center at Bard and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities are teaming up to develop and present a new iteration of The Gauntlet, an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol.
The Gauntlet is site-specific and bespoke. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.”
Performed on and around the lawn of Bard’s Fisher Center (including on the Olafur Eliasson installation “the parliament of reality”), the libretto is comprised of text generated from 20 movement interviews with local activists, organizers, artists, scholars, elected officials, and citizens, and sung by a choir of singers assembled from all corners of the Bard College and Hudson Valley community.Sponsored by: Fisher Center LAB and Hannah Arendt Center Present.
Guest Lecture: The Organic and Symbolic Structure of Bach's D minor Partita for Solo Violin An inquiry into the contrapuntal fabric of Bach’s music.
A talk by Philip Lasser, a composer, pianist, and music theorist on the faculty at the Juilliard School. (All events and concerts open to students and the Bard College community only until further notice.)
Friday, October 15, 2021 4–5:30 pm
Bitó Conservatory Building How does a composer write “abstract” music so that it can communicate to us as human beings and somehow create meaning? After all, pitches by themselves do not represent anything specific or concrete in the world. When a painter (abstraction aside) paints a landscape or a bouquet of peonies, though in fact the painting itself be only an assemblage of pigments and colors, we recognize with our eyes a “landscape,” or a “bouquet of peonies.”
Historically, music was long attached to the word through vocal music or instrumentally, through short and clearly defined dances bearing specific rhythms and recognizable gestures. JS Bach was born at a time when instrumental music takes on an ever increasing role in the production of music and was going well beyond the recognizable into true abstraction. Sounds organized by themselves and through themselves only, with no true reference to anything recognizable in the real world.
With Bach’s D minor Partita for Solo Violin as a subject, Dr. Philip Lasser, Professor at The Juilliard School and Director of the European American Musical Alliance (EAMA) Summer Music Institute and Online Academy, will discuss the use of specific sub-motivic units to create an internal organization of pitches from moment to moment enabling us to enjoy meaning, message and philosophy through pure abstract music. Using simple tools discussed in his treatise The Spiraling Tapestry - An inquiry into the Contrapuntal Fabric of Music, Dr. Lasser will elucidate how Bach creates organic structure and through symbolic and enigmatic motives, creates an aural universe of depth and meaning.
Philip Lasser is a visionary composer native to French and American traditions. His music, direct and undisguised, creates a unique sound world that blends together the colorful harmonies of French Impressionist sonorities and the dynamic rhythms and characteristics of American music.
Early in his musical training, Lasser entered Nadia Boulanger’s famed Ecole d’Arts Americaines in Fontainebleau, France, where he began to establish his connection to the French lineage. Following his studies at Harvard College, Lasser lived in Paris, where he worked with Boulanger’s closest colleague and disciple, Narcis Bonet, and legendary pianist Gaby Casadesus. He received his master’s degree from Columbia University while studying with Jacques-Louis Monod, and his doctorate at The Juilliard School, where he worked with David Diamond. Since 1994, Lasser has been a distinguished member of the faculty of The Juilliard School. He also directs the European American Music Alliance (EAMA) Summer Music Institute, a school dedicated to training composers, chamber musicians, and conductors in the tradition of Nadia Boulanger.
Lasser’s works can be heard on the Sony Classical, Telarc, New World, Delos, Crystal, and BMG RCA/Red Seal labels. Sponsored by: Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The men's soccer team hosts St. Lawrence University. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
The Fisher Center at Bard and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities are teaming up to develop and present a new iteration of The Gauntlet, an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol.
The Gauntlet is site-specific and bespoke. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.”
Performed on and around the lawn of Bard’s Fisher Center (including on the Olafur Eliasson installation “the parliament of reality”), the libretto is comprised of text generated from 20 movement interviews with local activists, organizers, artists, scholars, elected officials, and citizens, and sung by a choir of singers assembled from all corners of the Bard College and Hudson Valley community.Sponsored by: Fisher Center LAB and Hannah Arendt Center Present.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's volleyball team hosts St. Joseph's College of Long Island and Maritime College. Bard will play St. Joseph's at 10, St. Joseph's will play Maritime at 12, and Bard will play Maritime at 2. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The men's soccer team hosts Clarkson University. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Jindong Cai conductor Yixin Wangguzheng Nina Yoshida Nelsenmezzo-soprano Helen Zhibing Huangsoprano Li Yitenor David Henry Hwang narrator
Jindong Cai conducts The Orchestra Now in a symphonic concert featuring works by Tan Dun, Huang Ruo, Peng-Peng Gong, and Xinyan Li. The program includes Tan’s Prayer and Blessing, his initial response to the pandemic, composed in early 2020; Li’s Awakening Light,concerto for guzheng and orchestra, commissioned by the festival to be performed by the winner of the 2019 Bard Conservatory Concerto Competition, Yixin Wang; Gong’s A Chinese in New York, a raw description of the experience of a Chinese student confronting cultural differences in America.
The concert concludes with several moving episodes from composer Huang Ruo’s 2014 opera, An American Soldier. The opera tells the powerful and haunting true story of the death of US Army Private Danny Chen, who was born and raised in New York's Chinatown and died in Afghanistan in 2001 after being subjected to relentless hazing and racial maltreatment by his superiors. The episodes presented here will be introduced by the opera’s librettist, Tony award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. Estimated run time: 100 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.Sponsored by: US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
The Fisher Center at Bard and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities are teaming up to develop and present a new iteration of The Gauntlet, an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol.
The Gauntlet is site-specific and bespoke. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.”
Performed on and around the lawn of Bard’s Fisher Center (including on the Olafur Eliasson installation “the parliament of reality”), the libretto is comprised of text generated from 20 movement interviews with local activists, organizers, artists, scholars, elected officials, and citizens, and sung by a choir of singers assembled from all corners of the Bard College and Hudson Valley community.Sponsored by: Fisher Center LAB and Hannah Arendt Center Present.
Asian American Voices: American Stories, American Music
A Symphonic Concert Online
Sunday, October 17, 2021 5 pm
Online Event The fourth annual China Now Music Festival concludes online with a selection of pieces from the Festival’s live concerts, presented to the worldwide public for free. The Del Sol Quartet and China Now Festival Chorus perform a preview of excerpts from Huang Ruo’s Angel Island: oratorio for voices and string quartet. The Orchestra Now performs selected episodes from An American Soldier, with tenor Li Yi, mezzo-soprano Nina Yoshida Nelsen, soprano Helen Zhibing Huang, and live narration by librettist David Henry Hwang. The event concludes with two symphonic pieces by Peng-Peng Gong and Xinyan Li that further express the themes of Asian American experiences and reflections on this moment in history. Sponsored by: US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Digital Commission: Only God Can Make Tomato Sauce
Monday, October 18, 2021 12–1:30 pm
Online Event 12 PM New York l 6 PM PM Vienna
The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts presents the world premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Brian Lobel and writer Season Butler, moderated by Jack Ferver (Bard College).
Two friends and food makers share their recipes for healing, their personal histories and food journeys, and wider reflections on medicine versus the medicinal, knowledge versus expertise, the homegrown and the home-y, the wholesome and the holy-cow-get-that-away-from-me.
Brian Lobel is a performer, teacher and curator who is interested in creating work about bodies and how they are watched, policed, poked, prodded and loved by others. His performance work has been shown internationally in a range of contexts from Harvard Medical School, to Sydney Opera House, to the National Theatre (London) and Lagos Theatre Festival, blending provocative humour with insightful reflection. Books include Theatre & Cancer, Purge and BALL & Other Funny Stories About Cancer. Brian has received commissions and grants from the Wellcome Trust, Complicite, and Arts Council England, among others. Brian is a Professor of Theatre & Performance at Rose Bruford College, a Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow and the co-founder of The Sick of the Fringe.
Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and lecturer in Performance Studies and Creative Writing. She thinks a lot about youth and old age; solitude and community; negotiations with hope and what it means to look forward to an increasingly wily future. Season’s current work-in-progress explores bodies and identities in constant motion, crossing borders, heading from crash to crash. Her recent artwork has appeared in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Tate Exchange, the Latvian National Museum (Riga) and Hotel Maria Kapel (Netherlands). Her debut novel, Cygnet, was published in spring 2019 and won the Writers’ Guild 2020 Award for Best First Novel. She lives and works between London and Berlin.
This is an online event. Join via Zoom. For more information, call 845-758-6822.
De-centering Rome: Dura-Europos, Digital Humanities, and the Global Turn
Anne Hunnell Chen, ARCHAIA Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University
Monday, October 18, 2021 5:30–6:30 pm
Olin, Room 102
The modern phrase “all roads lead to Rome'' frames the Roman Empire in terms of one city’s power, grandiosely (and Eurocentrically) implying both a singular centrality for that city and for the Roman Empire more generally. Yet there is good reason to think that the Romans’ own understanding of their world and their place within it was much more complex. Taking the fascinating archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) and the art left behind by its inhabitants as a case study, this talk will argue that the comingling of diverse cultures, goods, and ideas—including those that traversed ancient political boundaries—was fundamental to life in the Roman Empire. It will also point to ways that colonialist dynamics and biases in play at the time of Dura’s initial excavation continue to shape modern understandings of the site. The talk will conclude with some thoughts on how the digital principle of Linked Open Data (LOD) holds promise for improving our understanding of the globally-interconnected premodern world.
Sponsored by: Art History and Visual Culture Program; Dean of the College.
For more information, call 845-758-7158, or e-mail kboivin@bard.edu.
The 2017 American Book Award–winning author reads from his work
Monday, October 18, 2021 6:30–8 pm
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium On Monday, October 18, at 6:30 p.m., in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium, Reem-Kayden Center (RKC), Marc Anthony Richardson reads from his work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and the Written Arts Program, and introduced by MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu.
Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia, who specializes in dense, visceral prose that circles on itself and leaps from present to past, using language that is, at times, phantasmagoric. Year of the Rat, his debut novel, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and an American Book Award. Richardson was also the recipient of a PEN America grant, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center residency. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, and the anthology, Who Will Speak for America?, from Temple University Press. He received his MFA from Mills College, taught at Rutgers University, and currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the recipient of a 2021 Sachs Program Grant for Arts Innovation for his novel-in-progress, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, for which he has also received a 2021 Creative Capital Award. He will be a writer-in-residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.
PRAISE FOR MARC ANTHONY RICHARDSON
“Richardson has found a way to describe in words the inability to understand other people...once readers enter the story it’s easy to be swept into its stormy momentum, and to acknowledge the very promising start of the author’s career.” —Publishers Weekly
“Even the most challenging of transgressive writers pales in comparison...” —Kirkus Reviews
“This is a novel that commands attention, both because its forms and expressions are so contemporary, and because it reminds us that telling is often insufficient—that, even if it’s not thus excused, at least what’s most wanting about us might be accepted by virtue of being retold.” —Joe Milazzo for EntropySponsored by: Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, Written Arts Program, and Division of Languages and Literature.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail mbrien@bard.edu.
This lecture series, held throughout the 2021-2022 academic year, will explore the ongoing phenomenon of antisemitism by examining its myriad historical contexts and relationships to other forms of prejudice and hatred.
This presentation will first consider the recent debate whether anti-Semitism should be considered a form of racism or a unique form of hatred. Framing this discussion within a historical overview, we will consider how Judeophobia was entangled with Islamophobia and what Fanon called Negrophobia. We will unpack the origins of the terms “anti-Semitism” and “racism” and consider how many theorists in the aftermath of the Holocaust and during anti-colonial struggles understood the linkages between these terms. These theorists were opposed by scholars and writers who insist upon the singularity of anti-Semitism. I will suggest that the root of these claims stem from notions of Jewish choseness, Zionist understandings of anti-Semitism, and claims about the uniqueness of the Holocaust. I will argue that the assertions of uniqueness do not hold up to scrutiny, make a case for why exceptionalist arguments lead to a dead-end in efforts to fight anti-Semitism, and conclude that the struggle today demands that we be clear that anti-Semitism is racism and must be combatted as part of the broader anti-racist struggle.
Jonathan Judaken is the Spence L. Wilson Chair in the Humanities at Rhodes College. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartreand the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Nebraska, 2006) and the editor of Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (SUNY 2008) and Naming Race, Naming Racisms (Routledge 2009). He recently edited a round table in the American Historical Review titled, “Rethinking Anti-Semitism” (October 2018) and co-edited a special issue of Jewish History (with Ethan Katz) on “Jews and Muslims in France Before and After Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher” (September 2018). He has just finished co-editing The Albert Memmi Reader (with Michael Lejman), a compendium of the Tunisian Franco-Jewish writer’s work (Nebraska, 2020).
NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate
Sponsored by: Office of the President and the Jewish Studies Program.
Conservatory students perform short works during an hour-long program.
Tuesday, October 19, 2021 12–1 pm
Bitó Conservatory Building Live attendance to this event is limited to Bard College community and students. All other audience members are invited to visit our live stream of this concert - https://youtu.be/J-6DMrXH6-ISponsored by: Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Nothing to Lose but Our Tents: Camp, Revolution, Novel
Nasser Abourahme, Faculty Fellow, Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, NYU
Tuesday, October 19, 2021 5:30–7 pm
Campus Center, Weis Cinema Revolution and narrative are entangled forms. Both are understood as being about the forward progressive movement of time, as organized around totalizing events and central protagonists. The Palestinian Revolution was at once a territorial and narrational struggle. And these struggles came together in what was the Revolution’s principal dilemma—the camp. How one might form a historical subject of movement from the encamped refugees became itself a problem of narrative. If revolution and narrative are both about the movement of time, and camps are essentially devices for the immobilization of time, then how does one stage and write a revolution from the camp? The challenge required nothing less than the transformation of the camps into the means of their own undoing. This talk examines three novels of the revolutionary period to show that Palestinian revolutionary realism both heeded the insurrectionary call but also undermined it. Reading these novels along this defining tension, I argue, points us to political roads not taken, to ways of thinking about revolution itself differently.Nasser Abourahme is a faculty fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, where he works between political and urban geography, colonial studies, and political theory. Sponsored by: Literature Program; Middle Eastern Studies Program.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail dramadan@bard.edu.
In front of Gilson Place on Library Rd. Bard College Farm's weekly farm stand featuring fresh produce, mushrooms, fresh honey and maple syrup when seasonally available. Preorders can be placed here.
Friday, October 22, 2021 – Sunday, October 24, 2021
Bard College Campus Please save the date for Family and Alumni/ae Weekend: October 22-24, 2021 in Annandale. We are excited to welcome families and alumni/ae back to campus to attend sample classes, take an informative tour, and hear from President Botstein at Ask the President. There will be a Conservatory Concert, a Fall Dance Concert, a Blithewood Garden Open House, and much more. Advanced online registration required. COVID-19 vaccinations are mandatory in order to attend. Registration is now closed. Join us for virtual events and watch our video series any time. #bardfallwknd For more information, call 845-758-7867, or visit https://www.annandaleonline.org/s/990/bp18/interior.aspx?sid=990&gid=1&pgid=3420&content_id=6697.
Finding Your Way Out of the Woods: Leaning into Discomfort to Influence Chemistry and Culture
Dani Schultz Merck Pharmaceuticals
Friday, October 22, 2021 12:10–1:10 pm
RKC 115 Aspects of this session will highlight my journey from a small town in northern Wisconsin to the bustling east coast where leaning into discomfort has been critical in driving my career at Merck and the chemistry that I have pursued. Throughout my career, I have tapped into my ability to forge meaningful collaborations, internally and externally, to challenge the status quo and drive disruptive thinking – both in chemistry but also in improving STEM culture. I’ll briefly touch upon some recently completed academic-industrial research collaborations that aimed to empower early-career female professors and provide a platform to mentor and train female professors and students in pharmaceutical research. Throughout all of this, I have a passion for diversity, equity and inclusion and will share how I’ve navigated raising important, and at times difficult, topics and how to influence workplace culture. I’ve learned a lot through failed experiments along the way and I am looking forward to an active discussion with fellow changemakers!
Dani Schultz received her PhD from the University of Michigan working with Professor John Wolfe and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Professor Tehshik Yoon. Since joining Merck in 2014, Dani has been a member of Process Chemistry and Enabling Technologies in Rahway, NJ and as of 2021 became the Director of the Discovery Process Chemistry group in Kenilworth, NJ. Throughout her time at Merck, Dani has been involved in the development of synthetic routes for drug candidates spanning HIV and oncology – forging meaningful collaborations, both internally and externally, to address the synthetic challenges that occur during pharmaceutical development. Most recently, she has served as co-host to the Pharm to Table podcast that aims to elevate the people and stories behind #MerckChemistry.Sponsored by: Chemistry Program; the Women in STEM Club.
For more information, call 845-752-2355, or e-mail mclaughl@bard.edu.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's volleyball team hosts Ithaca College. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Friday, October 22, 2021 – Sunday, October 24, 2021
Bard College Campus Please save the date for Family and Alumni/ae Weekend: October 22-24, 2021 in Annandale. We are excited to welcome families and alumni/ae back to campus to attend sample classes, take an informative tour, and hear from President Botstein at Ask the President. There will be a Conservatory Concert, a Fall Dance Concert, a Blithewood Garden Open House, and much more. Advanced online registration required. COVID-19 vaccinations are mandatory in order to attend. Registration is now closed. Join us for virtual events and watch our video series any time. #bardfallwknd For more information, call 845-758-7867, or visit https://www.annandaleonline.org/s/990/bp18/interior.aspx?sid=990&gid=1&pgid=3420&content_id=6697.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's soccer team hosts Rochester Institute of Technology. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's volleyball team hosts Rochester Institute of Technology. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Friday, October 22, 2021 – Sunday, October 24, 2021
Bard College Campus Please save the date for Family and Alumni/ae Weekend: October 22-24, 2021 in Annandale. We are excited to welcome families and alumni/ae back to campus to attend sample classes, take an informative tour, and hear from President Botstein at Ask the President. There will be a Conservatory Concert, a Fall Dance Concert, a Blithewood Garden Open House, and much more. Advanced online registration required. COVID-19 vaccinations are mandatory in order to attend. Registration is now closed. Join us for virtual events and watch our video series any time. #bardfallwknd For more information, call 845-758-7867, or visit https://www.annandaleonline.org/s/990/bp18/interior.aspx?sid=990&gid=1&pgid=3420&content_id=6697.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's volleyball team hosts SUNY Cobleskill. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
In front of Gilson Place on Library Rd. Bard College Farm's weekly farm stand featuring fresh produce, mushrooms, fresh honey and maple syrup when seasonally available. Preorders can be placed here.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The men's soccer team hosts Skidmore University. It's Senior Day. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Beattie Powers on Main, 310 Main St, Catskill, NY Singers from the Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program, accompanied by Conservatory Collaborative Pianists perform works by Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Tagore. Sponsored by: Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program.
Wednesday, April 1, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING
2019, Sosnoff Theater, SummerScape
First performed in the U.S. almost 100 years after its world premiere in Hamburg, this lushly orchestrated allegorical tale was staged by Christian Räth in 2019. Performed by a remarkable cast and the 80-member American Symphony Orchestra, this staging was a stellar example of Maestro Botstein’s commitment to reintroduce rarely seen operatic treasures to a contemporary audience.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING 2018, Sosnoff Theater, SummerScape
Rubinstein’s operatic masterpiece is based on a poem depicting the isolation and despair of a fallen angel. Premiered to great acclaim in 1871, Demon received its first fully staged U.S. performances at Bard in 2018. With rich choral writing and a fiery libretto, the production was staged by Thaddeus Strassberger and featured an all-Russian cast, Pesvebi Georgian Dancers and The American Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Maestro Botstein.
Wednesday, May 13, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING Bard SummerScape Opera and the Bard Music Festival have become synonymous with a new kind of concert experience, one that provides a “rich web of context” (New York Times) for a full appreciation of each composer’s inspirations, significance, and legacy.
This week, UPSTREAMING illuminates the world of Russian composer Sergey Taneyev (1856–1915). A highly gifted pianist and composer, Taneyev was a protégé and champion of Tchaikovsky’s, serving as soloist in early performances of the older composer’s piano concertos.
Taneyev was one of Russia’s most influential music theorists, teaching for nearly three decades at the Moscow Conservatory, where his students included Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Glière; Stravinsky later recalled how highly he valued Taneyev’s treatise on counterpoint, calling it “one of the best books of its kind.” Yet in striving to synthesize counterpoint with folksong, he developed a distinct compositional voice that looked forward to Stravinsky himself. For more information, call 845-758-6822, or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/UPS-sergey-taneyev/.
Wednesday, June 10, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING Bard SummerScape Opera and the Bard Music Festival have become synonymous with a new kind of concert experience, one that provides a “rich web of context” (New York Times) for a full appreciation of each composer’s inspirations, significance, and legacy.
This week, UPSTREAMING illuminates the work of German Romantic composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), featuring:
Carl Maria von Weber’s short life was marked by many lows—frequent illnesses, an arrest on embezzlement and other charges—but he also became one of the most influential composers of the early 19th century whose prodigious gifts as a composer, pianist, conductor, and writer bring to mind Mozart. The premiere of Der Freischütz in 1821, an opera that immediately captured the imagination of audiences in Europe and beyond, was a transformative event in the history of Romanticism and helped to usher in a new sensibility in music. He did not have a comparable success in the remaining five years of his life, although the overtures to his later Euryanthe and Oberon became repertory standards. In these operas, and in less familiar compositions, his masterful orchestration and compelling evocation of mood became models for composers from Meyerbeer to Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, Glinka, and Hindemith. For more information, call 845-758-6822, or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/UPS-carl-maria-von-weber/.
Wednesday, June 24, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING
This engrossing program encompasses varied works exploring religion and spirituality through the lens of female composers: Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, staged at Bard in 2015, animates a moral drama about social justice and personal courage, while Lili Boulanger’s Psalm 130 “Du fond de l'abîme” (1917) offers a deeply personal requiem dedicated to her father. Lera Auerbach’s Violin Concerto No. 3, “De Profundis” (2015) with Vadim Repin rounds out the program.
Wednesday, July 22, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING This week’s UPSTREAMING selection offers an exploration of French romanticism through the work of two composers—Emmanuel Chabrier and Hector Berlioz—who, while stylistically different, shared capacity for independent thought and innovation. The fully staged production of Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui from the 2012 Bard SummerScape is complemented by Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette from the 2017 Bard Music Festival. For more information, call 845-758-6822, or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/French-Romanticism/.
Wednesday, August 5, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING “Botstein and Bard SummerScape show courage, foresight and great imagination, honoring operas that larger institutions are content to ignore. —Time Out New York
UPSTREAMING: Opera at Bard presents the musical centerpiece of the 2017 Bard SummerScape: Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s 1882 rare opera Dimitrij. Supporting content includes a recording of Janáček's Sinfonietta as performed by the American Symphony Orchestra and discussions including a lively and illuminating conversation between ASO music director Leon Botstein and noted Dvořák specialist Michael Beckerman. For more information, call 845-758-6822, or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/UPS-Dimitrij/.
Wednesday, August 19, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING
One of the most revered Romantic composers of the late 19th and early 20th century, Richard Strauss’s symphonic poems and operas remain an indispensable feature of the standard repertoire. This program—which includes the operatic rarity Die Liebe der Danae (The Love of Danae) from the 2011 Bard SummerScape along with various symphonic and choral works—explores the composer’s substantial melodic gifts and his mastery of instrumentation and expression.
Tuesday, October 20, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING
At once opulent and eerie, Pietro Mascagni’s Iris, composed in 1898 with libretto by Luigi Illica, received its North American premiere at Bard SummerScape in 2016. The American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Leon Botstein performed with a brilliant cast of accomplished singers including the Australian tenor Gerard Schneider as a menacing and callous Osaka alongside the soprano Talise Travigne who movingly embodied the naivete and fragility of the eponymous character.
Leon Botstein in conversation with Stephanie Blythe
Sunday, October 25, 2020 – Friday, December 31, 2021
UPSTREAMING For World Opera Day 2020, join two iconoclastic figures from the opera world for a wide-ranging and lively conversation. Revered mezzo & Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at Bard, Stephanie Blythe joins Leon Botstein, Bard College President & Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra engage in an engrossing discussion about their shared fascination with rarely-performed operas along with anecdotes and trenchant observations about the past, present, and future of the art form.
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985
Saturday, June 26, 2021 – Sunday, November 28, 2021 12–6 pm
CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art This June, the Hessel Museum of Art will present With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, the first full-scale scholarly North American survey of the groundbreaking yet understudied Pattern and Decoration art movement. Including painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, textiles, installation art, and performance documentation, the exhibition spans the years 1972 to 1985 and features 45 artists from across the United States.Sponsored by: Center for Curatorial Studies.
Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection
Saturday, June 26, 2021 – Sunday, October 17, 2021 12–6 pm
CCS Galleries CCS Bard celebrates its 30th anniversary with Closer to Life, an exhibition of over forty artists of drawings and works on paper from the Marieluise Hessel Collection.
The exhibition of over 75 drawings and works on paper spans more than four decades of collecting by philanthropist, Marieluise Hessel, who co-founded the Center for Curatorial Studies in 1990. Closer to Life tracks a lifetime of collecting that spans periods of Hessel’s life spent in Germany, Mexico and the United States. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog that documents the entire collection of more than 300 works on paper, the exhibition presents highlights that reverberate with questions of gender, sexuality, race and politics often through personal expression and individual concerns. Revisiting different artistic periods and contexts, the exhibition draws out both contrasts and comparisons between artists, modes of representation and the continuing vitality of drawing (and paper) as an artistic medium.
The museum is open from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Wednesday through Monday, closed on Tuesdays.Sponsored by: Center for Curatorial Studies.
Trick or treating comes early this October with Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, which chronicles the misadventures of the titular practical jokester and German peasant folk hero. Then we get serious with a performance of Anton Bruckner’s massive and masterful Fifth Symphony. It was performed only once during the composer’s lifetime, and he died having never heard it.
Leon Botsteinconductor
R. StraussTill Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks Bruckner Symphony No. 5Sponsored by: The Orchestra Now.
Online Event We planning for both the October 1 and November 5, 2021 Bard College IWT Writer as Reader Workshops to be held online. We look forward to returning to in-person workshops in 2022.
Writer as Reader workshops model writing practices that inspire students to read more carefully, to grasp the meaning in more complex texts, and to infer meaning from what they read. These workshops invite secondary and college teachers to consider “writing to read” as a central classroom practice, one that shows rather than tells students how writing clarifies the meaning of texts. Working with diverse writing-to-read strategies, workshop participants discover what they bring to the text, what is apparent in the text, what is inferred, and what questions the text poses.
Workshop offerings:
Reading Climate, Writing Change: Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Christina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac’s The Future We Choose: Surviving Climate Crisis
“Vulnerable to Foreign Ways of Seeing and Thinking”: James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues” and Gloria Anzaldúa's “La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness”
Diving Into The Wreck: Daniel Defoe, Adrienne Rich, and J.M. Coetzee
“Who Will Take Up the Body?”: Sara Uribe’s Antígona González Reimagines Antigone within Today’s Global Politics
Othello and American Moor: Studying Shakespeare in a Racialized America
Science and Disenchantment: Max Weber’s “Science as Vocation” and the Role of Science in Ethical Life
Edith Wharton's Two New Yorks
“It’s Getting Started That’s the Puzzle”: Kelly Reichardt, First Cow, and telling American stories
"I would not paint — a picture —": Emily Dickinson’s Visual Poetics
The Lavender Scare: Mid-century Fictions and Fears
Trick or treating comes early this October with Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, which chronicles the misadventures of the titular practical jokester and German peasant folk hero. Then we get serious with a performance of Anton Bruckner’s massive and masterful Fifth Symphony. It was performed only once during the composer’s lifetime, and he died having never heard it.
Leon Botsteinconductor
R. StraussTill Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks Bruckner Symphony No. 5Sponsored by: The Orchestra Now.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's soccer team hosts William Smith College. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Preston Theater A Mexican biologist living in New York returns to his hometown, nestled in the majestic butterfly forests of Michoacán. The journey forces him to confront past traumas and reflect on his hybrid identity, sparking a personal metamorphosis.
Following the screening, meet the director Alexis Gambis and learn more about his Science New Wave movement, where scientific pursuit is free to co-exist and blend freely across disciplines and cultures.Sponsored by: Biology Program; Film and Electronic Arts Program; Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs.
For more information, call 845-752-2331, or e-mail keesing@bard.edu.
A Reading with Bard Fiction Prize Winner Akil Kumarasamy
Monday, October 4, 2021 6:30–8 pm
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium “Akil Kumarasamy’s Half-Gods is a breathtaking debut by one of those rare writers whose compassionate understanding—in this case, a multigenerational family with a frayed, crazy-quilt history—is matched by the narrative gifts necessary to bring her tales to life,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee. “While each individual story in this inventive collection is told in vivid, lusciously worded, image-rich prose, the overarching symphonic whole has—much like Jamaica Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River—the sweep and scope of a novel. What Kumarasamy has given us with Half-Gods is ultimately a meditation, as most great stories are, on time, memory, and hope for the future.”
Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey and the author of the story collection, Half Gods, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was the recipient of the Story Prize Spotlight Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and her debut novel, Better Humans, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Sponsored by: Written Arts Program.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail mbrien@bard.edu.
Noon Concert ( Please note: Open to students and the Bard College community. Concert will be live-streamed.)
Tuesday, October 5, 2021 12–1 pm
Bitó Conservatory Building Conservatory students perform short works during an hour-long program.
Live attendance to this event is limited to Bard College community and students. All other audience members are invited to visit our live stream of this concert - https://youtu.be/z3nJ8IJ6aVY Sponsored by: Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Much of modern number theory involves studying solutions to equations with integer coefficients. By combining techniques of geometry and abstract algebra, mathematicians have been able to solve fundamental questions, such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the Sato-Tate Conjecture.
More recently, statistics has become an important tool for studying number theoretic problems that resist classical techniques. In this talk, we will introduce this area of mathematics by focusing on three specific examples taken from three different areas of number theory. We will also do some real-time computation and data generation. This talk should be accessible to anyone who has taken Proofs and Fundamentals.
Economic Democracy Initiative's Global Forum on Democratizing Work
Wednesday, October 6, 2021
Online Event Open Society University Network's Economic Democracy Initiative (EDI) is pleased to sponsor the upcoming Global Forum on Democratizing Work, held online October 5-7 and featuring leading economists, such as Thomas Piketty, Dani Rodrick, and Jayati Ghosh and New Republic journalist Kate Aronoff.
Following the Democratizing Work op-ed turned manifesto published one year ago in more than 43 newspapers, in 27 languages and 36 countries, the first-ever Global Forum on Democratizing Work brings together experts from around the world for three days of discussions on the urgency of democratizing work.
The central lesson of the COVID crisis is that working people are much more than resources. From the Democratizing Work Manifesto: "Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged. How to avoid this unacceptable situation?"
The Global Forum provides the answer: by democratizing, decommodifying and decarbonizing work. That is, by involving employees in workplace decision-making, by guaranteeing useful employment to all, and by marshaling our collective strength and efforts to preserve life on the planet.
The forum brings together over 380 speakers from 6 continents presenting 100 panel discussions in 9 languages. Each day focuses on one of the Democratizing Work manifesto’s three principles: democratizing work, decommodifying work, and decarbonizing work.
Featuring voices from academia, trade unions, progressive flanks of the business community, the public sector, environmental activism, human rights advocacy organizations, and journalism, the Global Forum is a truly global event going far beyond a conventional academic conference.
EDI is not only co-sponsoring the event; EDI staff and student fellows are participating in these urgent conversations alongside many OSUN-affiliated faculty from across the globe. EDI encourages all those within OSUN and beyond to join the Global Forum, which is free and now open for registration!
Confirmed speakers include: Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics) Katharina Pistor (Columbia University) Dani Rodrik (Harvard University) Jayati Ghosh (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, United Nations High-Level Advisory Board on Economic, Social Affairs) Achille Mbembe (University of Witwatersrand) Jane Mansbridge (Harvard University) Juliet Schor (Boston College) Anthony Kwame Appiah (New York University) Debra Satz (Stanford College) Lukas Lehner (INET, Oxford University) Lawrence Lessig (Harvard University) Claudia Chwalisz (OECD) Daniel Aldana Cohen (University of California, Berkeley) Sanjay Pinto (Cornell University, Rutgers University) Kate Aronoff (New Republic) Sara Nelson (CWA, AFL-CIO) Aurore Lalucq (European Parliament) Iñigo Albizuri Landazabal (Mondragon Corporation) Robin Hahnel (American University) Jason Hickel (Royal Society of Arts)
Economic Democracy Initiative's Global Forum on Democratizing Work
Thursday, October 7, 2021
Online Event Open Society University Network's Economic Democracy Initiative (EDI) is pleased to sponsor the upcoming Global Forum on Democratizing Work, held online October 5-7 and featuring leading economists, such as Thomas Piketty, Dani Rodrick, and Jayati Ghosh and New Republic journalist Kate Aronoff.
Following the Democratizing Work op-ed turned manifesto published one year ago in more than 43 newspapers, in 27 languages and 36 countries, the first-ever Global Forum on Democratizing Work brings together experts from around the world for three days of discussions on the urgency of democratizing work.
The central lesson of the COVID crisis is that working people are much more than resources. From the Democratizing Work Manifesto: "Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged. How to avoid this unacceptable situation?"
The Global Forum provides the answer: by democratizing, decommodifying and decarbonizing work. That is, by involving employees in workplace decision-making, by guaranteeing useful employment to all, and by marshaling our collective strength and efforts to preserve life on the planet.
The forum brings together over 380 speakers from 6 continents presenting 100 panel discussions in 9 languages. Each day focuses on one of the Democratizing Work manifesto’s three principles: democratizing work, decommodifying work, and decarbonizing work.
Featuring voices from academia, trade unions, progressive flanks of the business community, the public sector, environmental activism, human rights advocacy organizations, and journalism, the Global Forum is a truly global event going far beyond a conventional academic conference.
EDI is not only co-sponsoring the event; EDI staff and student fellows are participating in these urgent conversations alongside many OSUN-affiliated faculty from across the globe. EDI encourages all those within OSUN and beyond to join the Global Forum, which is free and now open for registration!
Confirmed speakers include: Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics) Katharina Pistor (Columbia University) Dani Rodrik (Harvard University) Jayati Ghosh (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, United Nations High-Level Advisory Board on Economic, Social Affairs) Achille Mbembe (University of Witwatersrand) Jane Mansbridge (Harvard University) Juliet Schor (Boston College) Anthony Kwame Appiah (New York University) Debra Satz (Stanford College) Lukas Lehner (INET, Oxford University) Lawrence Lessig (Harvard University) Claudia Chwalisz (OECD) Daniel Aldana Cohen (University of California, Berkeley) Sanjay Pinto (Cornell University, Rutgers University) Kate Aronoff (New Republic) Sara Nelson (CWA, AFL-CIO) Aurore Lalucq (European Parliament) Iñigo Albizuri Landazabal (Mondragon Corporation) Robin Hahnel (American University) Jason Hickel (Royal Society of Arts)
In front of Gilson Place on Library Rd. Bard College Farm's weekly farm stand featuring fresh produce, mushrooms, fresh honey and maple syrup when seasonally available. Preorders can be placed here.
How Journalists Should Write about Hate Groups and Hate Group Members
A Bard Center for the Study of Hate Webinar
Thursday, October 7, 2021 3–4 pm
Online Event 3 PM NY l 9 PM Vienna
The Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) hosts a discussion with Bill Morlin, a journalist long admired for his reporting on white supremacy, who will speak on “how journalists should write about hate groups and hate group members.”
Ken Stern, of BCSH, notes that "In my opinion, most journalists who cover hate groups, their leaders, or their members do a poor job. For example, when David Duke was running for elective office in Louisiana, he’d frequently be asked questions about his past as a Klan leader, which he would charmingly deflect. Some 1990s militia leaders explained their hate and planning for violence as, 'we’re only defending the Constitution,' and few journalists knew how to expose exactly what they meant . (Militia leaders claimed that the Constitution didn’t include Amendments after the Bill of Rights, and thus didn’t free the slaves or allow women to vote).
Writing about hate and hate groups takes special journalistic skill. Bill Morlin's powerful writing always treats the haters as real people but also clearly demonstrates the menace and danger of their ideas and organizing.
This is an online event. Register via Zoom.Sponsored by: Bard Center for the Study of Hate.
Style, Sex, Shame, and the End of Literature in Ivy Compton-Burnett
Len Gutkin '07, Senior Editor, The Chronicle Review and Author
Thursday, October 7, 2021 5:30–7:30 pm
Olin, Room 102 Len Gutkin '07 is a senior editor at The Chronicle Review and the author of Dandyism: Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present (University of Virginia Press, 2020). His essays and reviews have appeared in venues including Times Literary Supplement, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books,Bookforum, and Post45.Sponsored by: Hannah Arendt Center; Literature Program; Written Arts Program.
Faculty Recital: Marka Gustavsson, viola, and Frank Corliss, piano
Saturday, October 9, 2021 7–9 pm
Bitó Conservatory Building Works by Bach, Hall Overton, and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson
Live attendance to this event is limited to Bard College community and students. All other audience members are invited to visit our live stream of this concert - https://youtu.be/60tyTOr8wSsSponsored by: Bard College Conservatory of Music.
ABOUT Webinars include a program overview for the Bard MBA in Sustainability and the Bard Center for Environmental Policy programs as well as detailed admissions information, course requirements, tips to make your application strong, and financial information.
Join a live information session with Director Goodstein and the admissions team and ask questions directly of the Bard team.
WHAT WILL BE COVERED?
Overview of graduate program offerings
Alumni success and career outcomes
Admissions information
Prerequisite course information
Peace Corps and AmeriCorps programs
Financial aid and scholarships
Tips for a standout application
Degree Options Degree options include: MS in Environmental Policy MS in Climate Science and Policy MBA in Sustainability
Dual degree options include: MS/JD with Pace Law School MS/MAT with Bard's Master of Arts in Teaching MS/MBA with Bard's MBA in Sustainability
Peace Corps Programs Master's International (before you serve) Peace Corps Fellows (after you serve)
A $65 application fee waiver is available to those who participate in the webinar at the end of the session. Email Margo Bogossian at mbogossian@bard.edu for further details.
The Orchestra Now Del Sol Quartet China Now Festival Chorus
The opening event of the fourth annual China Now Music Festival, Asian American Voices, presents two major works by New York-based composer Huang Ruo: A Dust in Time, composed in 2020 in response to the pandemic; and a preview of excerpts from the oratorio Angel Island, composed in 2021 to honor the stories of immigrants from China. Performances by the Del Sol Quartet from San Francisco, Bard’s own The Orchestra Now, and the China Now Festival Chorus. The festival’s artistic director, Jindong Cai, will conduct.Estimated run time: 97 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.Sponsored by: US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's volleyball team hosts Vassar College. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Asian American Voices: Undercurrents in American Contemporary Music
A Multimedia Chamber Concert
Wednesday, October 13, 2021 8 pm
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater
Jin Hi Kim Del Sol Quartet
The second night of China Now features the festival’s ensemble in residence, the Del Sol String Quartet, and Guggenheim Composer Fellow Jin Hi Kim, in a showcase of Asian American composers of contemporary American music. The quartet will perform new compositions by Erberk Eryilmaz, Takuma Itoh, Vijay Iyer, Erika Oba, and Jungyoon Wie, representing many diverse voices to reflect various aspects of Asian American society and history. Kim will perform the world premiere of her latest work, A Ritual for COVID-19, a multimedia composition honoring the spirits of those who lost their lives to the pandemic.Estimated run time: 92 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.Sponsored by: US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
In front of Gilson Place on Library Rd. Bard College Farm's weekly farm stand featuring fresh produce, mushrooms, fresh honey and maple syrup when seasonally available. Preorders can be placed here.
Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom
Hannah Arendt Center 13th Annual Fall Conference
Thursday, October 14, 2021 – Friday, October 15, 2021 10 am – 6 pm
Olin Hall
Hannah Arendt knew that democracy is tenuous. In 1970 she famously wrote:
“Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.”
Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom
Hannah Arendt Center 13th Annual Fall Conference
Thursday, October 14, 2021 – Friday, October 15, 2021 10 am – 6 pm
Olin Hall
Hannah Arendt knew that democracy is tenuous. In 1970 she famously wrote:
“Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.”
The Fisher Center at Bard and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities are teaming up to develop and present a new iteration of The Gauntlet, an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol.
The Gauntlet is site-specific and bespoke. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.”
Performed on and around the lawn of Bard’s Fisher Center (including on the Olafur Eliasson installation “the parliament of reality”), the libretto is comprised of text generated from 20 movement interviews with local activists, organizers, artists, scholars, elected officials, and citizens, and sung by a choir of singers assembled from all corners of the Bard College and Hudson Valley community.Sponsored by: Fisher Center LAB and Hannah Arendt Center Present.
Guest Lecture: The Organic and Symbolic Structure of Bach's D minor Partita for Solo Violin An inquiry into the contrapuntal fabric of Bach’s music.
A talk by Philip Lasser, a composer, pianist, and music theorist on the faculty at the Juilliard School. (All events and concerts open to students and the Bard College community only until further notice.)
Friday, October 15, 2021 4–5:30 pm
Bitó Conservatory Building How does a composer write “abstract” music so that it can communicate to us as human beings and somehow create meaning? After all, pitches by themselves do not represent anything specific or concrete in the world. When a painter (abstraction aside) paints a landscape or a bouquet of peonies, though in fact the painting itself be only an assemblage of pigments and colors, we recognize with our eyes a “landscape,” or a “bouquet of peonies.”
Historically, music was long attached to the word through vocal music or instrumentally, through short and clearly defined dances bearing specific rhythms and recognizable gestures. JS Bach was born at a time when instrumental music takes on an ever increasing role in the production of music and was going well beyond the recognizable into true abstraction. Sounds organized by themselves and through themselves only, with no true reference to anything recognizable in the real world.
With Bach’s D minor Partita for Solo Violin as a subject, Dr. Philip Lasser, Professor at The Juilliard School and Director of the European American Musical Alliance (EAMA) Summer Music Institute and Online Academy, will discuss the use of specific sub-motivic units to create an internal organization of pitches from moment to moment enabling us to enjoy meaning, message and philosophy through pure abstract music. Using simple tools discussed in his treatise The Spiraling Tapestry - An inquiry into the Contrapuntal Fabric of Music, Dr. Lasser will elucidate how Bach creates organic structure and through symbolic and enigmatic motives, creates an aural universe of depth and meaning.
Philip Lasser is a visionary composer native to French and American traditions. His music, direct and undisguised, creates a unique sound world that blends together the colorful harmonies of French Impressionist sonorities and the dynamic rhythms and characteristics of American music.
Early in his musical training, Lasser entered Nadia Boulanger’s famed Ecole d’Arts Americaines in Fontainebleau, France, where he began to establish his connection to the French lineage. Following his studies at Harvard College, Lasser lived in Paris, where he worked with Boulanger’s closest colleague and disciple, Narcis Bonet, and legendary pianist Gaby Casadesus. He received his master’s degree from Columbia University while studying with Jacques-Louis Monod, and his doctorate at The Juilliard School, where he worked with David Diamond. Since 1994, Lasser has been a distinguished member of the faculty of The Juilliard School. He also directs the European American Music Alliance (EAMA) Summer Music Institute, a school dedicated to training composers, chamber musicians, and conductors in the tradition of Nadia Boulanger.
Lasser’s works can be heard on the Sony Classical, Telarc, New World, Delos, Crystal, and BMG RCA/Red Seal labels. Sponsored by: Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The men's soccer team hosts St. Lawrence University. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
The Fisher Center at Bard and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities are teaming up to develop and present a new iteration of The Gauntlet, an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol.
The Gauntlet is site-specific and bespoke. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.”
Performed on and around the lawn of Bard’s Fisher Center (including on the Olafur Eliasson installation “the parliament of reality”), the libretto is comprised of text generated from 20 movement interviews with local activists, organizers, artists, scholars, elected officials, and citizens, and sung by a choir of singers assembled from all corners of the Bard College and Hudson Valley community.Sponsored by: Fisher Center LAB and Hannah Arendt Center Present.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's volleyball team hosts St. Joseph's College of Long Island and Maritime College. Bard will play St. Joseph's at 10, St. Joseph's will play Maritime at 12, and Bard will play Maritime at 2. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The men's soccer team hosts Clarkson University. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Jindong Cai conductor Yixin Wangguzheng Nina Yoshida Nelsenmezzo-soprano Helen Zhibing Huangsoprano Li Yitenor David Henry Hwang narrator
Jindong Cai conducts The Orchestra Now in a symphonic concert featuring works by Tan Dun, Huang Ruo, Peng-Peng Gong, and Xinyan Li. The program includes Tan’s Prayer and Blessing, his initial response to the pandemic, composed in early 2020; Li’s Awakening Light,concerto for guzheng and orchestra, commissioned by the festival to be performed by the winner of the 2019 Bard Conservatory Concerto Competition, Yixin Wang; Gong’s A Chinese in New York, a raw description of the experience of a Chinese student confronting cultural differences in America.
The concert concludes with several moving episodes from composer Huang Ruo’s 2014 opera, An American Soldier. The opera tells the powerful and haunting true story of the death of US Army Private Danny Chen, who was born and raised in New York's Chinatown and died in Afghanistan in 2001 after being subjected to relentless hazing and racial maltreatment by his superiors. The episodes presented here will be introduced by the opera’s librettist, Tony award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. Estimated run time: 100 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.Sponsored by: US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
The Fisher Center at Bard and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities are teaming up to develop and present a new iteration of The Gauntlet, an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol.
The Gauntlet is site-specific and bespoke. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.”
Performed on and around the lawn of Bard’s Fisher Center (including on the Olafur Eliasson installation “the parliament of reality”), the libretto is comprised of text generated from 20 movement interviews with local activists, organizers, artists, scholars, elected officials, and citizens, and sung by a choir of singers assembled from all corners of the Bard College and Hudson Valley community.Sponsored by: Fisher Center LAB and Hannah Arendt Center Present.
Asian American Voices: American Stories, American Music
A Symphonic Concert Online
Sunday, October 17, 2021 5 pm
Online Event The fourth annual China Now Music Festival concludes online with a selection of pieces from the Festival’s live concerts, presented to the worldwide public for free. The Del Sol Quartet and China Now Festival Chorus perform a preview of excerpts from Huang Ruo’s Angel Island: oratorio for voices and string quartet. The Orchestra Now performs selected episodes from An American Soldier, with tenor Li Yi, mezzo-soprano Nina Yoshida Nelsen, soprano Helen Zhibing Huang, and live narration by librettist David Henry Hwang. The event concludes with two symphonic pieces by Peng-Peng Gong and Xinyan Li that further express the themes of Asian American experiences and reflections on this moment in history. Sponsored by: US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Digital Commission: Only God Can Make Tomato Sauce
Monday, October 18, 2021 12–1:30 pm
Online Event 12 PM New York l 6 PM PM Vienna
The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts presents the world premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Brian Lobel and writer Season Butler, moderated by Jack Ferver (Bard College).
Two friends and food makers share their recipes for healing, their personal histories and food journeys, and wider reflections on medicine versus the medicinal, knowledge versus expertise, the homegrown and the home-y, the wholesome and the holy-cow-get-that-away-from-me.
Brian Lobel is a performer, teacher and curator who is interested in creating work about bodies and how they are watched, policed, poked, prodded and loved by others. His performance work has been shown internationally in a range of contexts from Harvard Medical School, to Sydney Opera House, to the National Theatre (London) and Lagos Theatre Festival, blending provocative humour with insightful reflection. Books include Theatre & Cancer, Purge and BALL & Other Funny Stories About Cancer. Brian has received commissions and grants from the Wellcome Trust, Complicite, and Arts Council England, among others. Brian is a Professor of Theatre & Performance at Rose Bruford College, a Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow and the co-founder of The Sick of the Fringe.
Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and lecturer in Performance Studies and Creative Writing. She thinks a lot about youth and old age; solitude and community; negotiations with hope and what it means to look forward to an increasingly wily future. Season’s current work-in-progress explores bodies and identities in constant motion, crossing borders, heading from crash to crash. Her recent artwork has appeared in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Tate Exchange, the Latvian National Museum (Riga) and Hotel Maria Kapel (Netherlands). Her debut novel, Cygnet, was published in spring 2019 and won the Writers’ Guild 2020 Award for Best First Novel. She lives and works between London and Berlin.
This is an online event. Join via Zoom. For more information, call 845-758-6822.
De-centering Rome: Dura-Europos, Digital Humanities, and the Global Turn
Anne Hunnell Chen, ARCHAIA Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University
Monday, October 18, 2021 5:30–6:30 pm
Olin, Room 102
The modern phrase “all roads lead to Rome'' frames the Roman Empire in terms of one city’s power, grandiosely (and Eurocentrically) implying both a singular centrality for that city and for the Roman Empire more generally. Yet there is good reason to think that the Romans’ own understanding of their world and their place within it was much more complex. Taking the fascinating archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) and the art left behind by its inhabitants as a case study, this talk will argue that the comingling of diverse cultures, goods, and ideas—including those that traversed ancient political boundaries—was fundamental to life in the Roman Empire. It will also point to ways that colonialist dynamics and biases in play at the time of Dura’s initial excavation continue to shape modern understandings of the site. The talk will conclude with some thoughts on how the digital principle of Linked Open Data (LOD) holds promise for improving our understanding of the globally-interconnected premodern world.
Sponsored by: Art History and Visual Culture Program; Dean of the College.
For more information, call 845-758-7158, or e-mail kboivin@bard.edu.
The 2017 American Book Award–winning author reads from his work
Monday, October 18, 2021 6:30–8 pm
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium On Monday, October 18, at 6:30 p.m., in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium, Reem-Kayden Center (RKC), Marc Anthony Richardson reads from his work. Presented by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series and the Written Arts Program, and introduced by MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu.
Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia, who specializes in dense, visceral prose that circles on itself and leaps from present to past, using language that is, at times, phantasmagoric. Year of the Rat, his debut novel, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and an American Book Award. Richardson was also the recipient of a PEN America grant, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center residency. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, and the anthology, Who Will Speak for America?, from Temple University Press. He received his MFA from Mills College, taught at Rutgers University, and currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the recipient of a 2021 Sachs Program Grant for Arts Innovation for his novel-in-progress, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, for which he has also received a 2021 Creative Capital Award. He will be a writer-in-residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.
PRAISE FOR MARC ANTHONY RICHARDSON
“Richardson has found a way to describe in words the inability to understand other people...once readers enter the story it’s easy to be swept into its stormy momentum, and to acknowledge the very promising start of the author’s career.” —Publishers Weekly
“Even the most challenging of transgressive writers pales in comparison...” —Kirkus Reviews
“This is a novel that commands attention, both because its forms and expressions are so contemporary, and because it reminds us that telling is often insufficient—that, even if it’s not thus excused, at least what’s most wanting about us might be accepted by virtue of being retold.” —Joe Milazzo for EntropySponsored by: Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, Written Arts Program, and Division of Languages and Literature.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail mbrien@bard.edu.
This lecture series, held throughout the 2021-2022 academic year, will explore the ongoing phenomenon of antisemitism by examining its myriad historical contexts and relationships to other forms of prejudice and hatred.
This presentation will first consider the recent debate whether anti-Semitism should be considered a form of racism or a unique form of hatred. Framing this discussion within a historical overview, we will consider how Judeophobia was entangled with Islamophobia and what Fanon called Negrophobia. We will unpack the origins of the terms “anti-Semitism” and “racism” and consider how many theorists in the aftermath of the Holocaust and during anti-colonial struggles understood the linkages between these terms. These theorists were opposed by scholars and writers who insist upon the singularity of anti-Semitism. I will suggest that the root of these claims stem from notions of Jewish choseness, Zionist understandings of anti-Semitism, and claims about the uniqueness of the Holocaust. I will argue that the assertions of uniqueness do not hold up to scrutiny, make a case for why exceptionalist arguments lead to a dead-end in efforts to fight anti-Semitism, and conclude that the struggle today demands that we be clear that anti-Semitism is racism and must be combatted as part of the broader anti-racist struggle.
Jonathan Judaken is the Spence L. Wilson Chair in the Humanities at Rhodes College. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartreand the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Nebraska, 2006) and the editor of Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (SUNY 2008) and Naming Race, Naming Racisms (Routledge 2009). He recently edited a round table in the American Historical Review titled, “Rethinking Anti-Semitism” (October 2018) and co-edited a special issue of Jewish History (with Ethan Katz) on “Jews and Muslims in France Before and After Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher” (September 2018). He has just finished co-editing The Albert Memmi Reader (with Michael Lejman), a compendium of the Tunisian Franco-Jewish writer’s work (Nebraska, 2020).
NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate
Sponsored by: Office of the President and the Jewish Studies Program.
Conservatory students perform short works during an hour-long program.
Tuesday, October 19, 2021 12–1 pm
Bitó Conservatory Building Live attendance to this event is limited to Bard College community and students. All other audience members are invited to visit our live stream of this concert - https://youtu.be/J-6DMrXH6-ISponsored by: Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Nothing to Lose but Our Tents: Camp, Revolution, Novel
Nasser Abourahme, Faculty Fellow, Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, NYU
Tuesday, October 19, 2021 5:30–7 pm
Campus Center, Weis Cinema Revolution and narrative are entangled forms. Both are understood as being about the forward progressive movement of time, as organized around totalizing events and central protagonists. The Palestinian Revolution was at once a territorial and narrational struggle. And these struggles came together in what was the Revolution’s principal dilemma—the camp. How one might form a historical subject of movement from the encamped refugees became itself a problem of narrative. If revolution and narrative are both about the movement of time, and camps are essentially devices for the immobilization of time, then how does one stage and write a revolution from the camp? The challenge required nothing less than the transformation of the camps into the means of their own undoing. This talk examines three novels of the revolutionary period to show that Palestinian revolutionary realism both heeded the insurrectionary call but also undermined it. Reading these novels along this defining tension, I argue, points us to political roads not taken, to ways of thinking about revolution itself differently.Nasser Abourahme is a faculty fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, where he works between political and urban geography, colonial studies, and political theory. Sponsored by: Literature Program; Middle Eastern Studies Program.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail dramadan@bard.edu.
In front of Gilson Place on Library Rd. Bard College Farm's weekly farm stand featuring fresh produce, mushrooms, fresh honey and maple syrup when seasonally available. Preorders can be placed here.
Friday, October 22, 2021 – Sunday, October 24, 2021
Bard College Campus Please save the date for Family and Alumni/ae Weekend: October 22-24, 2021 in Annandale. We are excited to welcome families and alumni/ae back to campus to attend sample classes, take an informative tour, and hear from President Botstein at Ask the President. There will be a Conservatory Concert, a Fall Dance Concert, a Blithewood Garden Open House, and much more. Advanced online registration required. COVID-19 vaccinations are mandatory in order to attend. Registration is now closed. Join us for virtual events and watch our video series any time. #bardfallwknd For more information, call 845-758-7867, or visit https://www.annandaleonline.org/s/990/bp18/interior.aspx?sid=990&gid=1&pgid=3420&content_id=6697.
Finding Your Way Out of the Woods: Leaning into Discomfort to Influence Chemistry and Culture
Dani Schultz Merck Pharmaceuticals
Friday, October 22, 2021 12:10–1:10 pm
RKC 115 Aspects of this session will highlight my journey from a small town in northern Wisconsin to the bustling east coast where leaning into discomfort has been critical in driving my career at Merck and the chemistry that I have pursued. Throughout my career, I have tapped into my ability to forge meaningful collaborations, internally and externally, to challenge the status quo and drive disruptive thinking – both in chemistry but also in improving STEM culture. I’ll briefly touch upon some recently completed academic-industrial research collaborations that aimed to empower early-career female professors and provide a platform to mentor and train female professors and students in pharmaceutical research. Throughout all of this, I have a passion for diversity, equity and inclusion and will share how I’ve navigated raising important, and at times difficult, topics and how to influence workplace culture. I’ve learned a lot through failed experiments along the way and I am looking forward to an active discussion with fellow changemakers!
Dani Schultz received her PhD from the University of Michigan working with Professor John Wolfe and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Professor Tehshik Yoon. Since joining Merck in 2014, Dani has been a member of Process Chemistry and Enabling Technologies in Rahway, NJ and as of 2021 became the Director of the Discovery Process Chemistry group in Kenilworth, NJ. Throughout her time at Merck, Dani has been involved in the development of synthetic routes for drug candidates spanning HIV and oncology – forging meaningful collaborations, both internally and externally, to address the synthetic challenges that occur during pharmaceutical development. Most recently, she has served as co-host to the Pharm to Table podcast that aims to elevate the people and stories behind #MerckChemistry.Sponsored by: Chemistry Program; the Women in STEM Club.
For more information, call 845-752-2355, or e-mail mclaughl@bard.edu.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's volleyball team hosts Ithaca College. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Friday, October 22, 2021 – Sunday, October 24, 2021
Bard College Campus Please save the date for Family and Alumni/ae Weekend: October 22-24, 2021 in Annandale. We are excited to welcome families and alumni/ae back to campus to attend sample classes, take an informative tour, and hear from President Botstein at Ask the President. There will be a Conservatory Concert, a Fall Dance Concert, a Blithewood Garden Open House, and much more. Advanced online registration required. COVID-19 vaccinations are mandatory in order to attend. Registration is now closed. Join us for virtual events and watch our video series any time. #bardfallwknd For more information, call 845-758-7867, or visit https://www.annandaleonline.org/s/990/bp18/interior.aspx?sid=990&gid=1&pgid=3420&content_id=6697.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's soccer team hosts Rochester Institute of Technology. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's volleyball team hosts Rochester Institute of Technology. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Friday, October 22, 2021 – Sunday, October 24, 2021
Bard College Campus Please save the date for Family and Alumni/ae Weekend: October 22-24, 2021 in Annandale. We are excited to welcome families and alumni/ae back to campus to attend sample classes, take an informative tour, and hear from President Botstein at Ask the President. There will be a Conservatory Concert, a Fall Dance Concert, a Blithewood Garden Open House, and much more. Advanced online registration required. COVID-19 vaccinations are mandatory in order to attend. Registration is now closed. Join us for virtual events and watch our video series any time. #bardfallwknd For more information, call 845-758-7867, or visit https://www.annandaleonline.org/s/990/bp18/interior.aspx?sid=990&gid=1&pgid=3420&content_id=6697.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The women's volleyball team hosts SUNY Cobleskill. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
In front of Gilson Place on Library Rd. Bard College Farm's weekly farm stand featuring fresh produce, mushrooms, fresh honey and maple syrup when seasonally available. Preorders can be placed here.
Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer Complex The men's soccer team hosts Skidmore University. It's Senior Day. Come out and cheer!Sponsored by: Department of Athletics and Recreation.
Beattie Powers on Main, 310 Main St, Catskill, NY Singers from the Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program, accompanied by Conservatory Collaborative Pianists perform works by Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Tagore. Sponsored by: Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program.
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