Bard College Presents Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Bard College honors preeminent poet, alumnus, and former Bard faculty member Anthony Hecht ’44 with renowned scholar Daniel Albright delivering the fourth biennial Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities. Albright, who is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, will present the lecture series, Comparative Arts: Theory and Practice, in October. The lecture series includes: “The Purposes of Literature: Remembering, Forgetting, Pounding into Shape” on Monday, October 1, at 4:30 p.m.; “Music’s Origin, Music’s End” on Wednesday, October 3, at 6 p.m.; and “Painting as Music: The Art of Counterpoint” on Thursday, October 4, at 4:30 p.m. Free and open to the public, all lectures take place in Weis Cinema of the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College. A reception precedes each lecture. For more information about this lecture series, please call (845) 758-7405.

Albright will deliver an additional lecture, “White Canvas and Silent Music: Definitions and Models for the Study of Comparative Arts,” on Tuesday, October 2, at 6:30 p.m. at The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, New York City. Tickets for this event are $15 for nonmembers and $10 for Morgan members and Bard College affiliates. Please visit www.themorgan.org/public or call 212-685-0008, ext. 560, for more information or to purchase tickets.

The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities at Bard College were established in 2007 to honor the memory of this preeminent poet by reflecting his lifelong interest in literature, music, the visual arts, and our cultural history. Anthony Hecht graduated from Bard in 1944 and taught at the College from 1952–55 and 1962–66. Every two years a distinguished scholar delivers a series of lectures at Bard College and in New York City that addresses works close to Hecht’s own imagination and sympathies. Each lecture series is published by Yale University Press. Previous Hecht Lecture Series speakers are literary scholar and author Christopher Ricks; historian, critic, author, and broadcaster Simon Schama; and renowned historian Garry Wills.

“It is a great honor that Anthony Hecht chose Bard as his home, both as a student and a faculty member, and we are delighted to recognize his extraordinary achievements through this important lecture series,” says Bard College President Leon Botstein.

About Daniel Abright
Daniel Albright, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, teaches in the Music Department as well as the English Department. He is particularly interested in the ways in which artistic media—poetry, music, painting—interact with one another; in 2000 his book Untwisting the Serpent: Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts won the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. Among his other books are Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources; Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism; and Stravinsky: The Music Box and the Nightingale.

At Harvard he teaches two Core Curriculum courses: the first, “Putting Modernism Together,” studies, for example, Impressionism through works by Monet, Debussy, and Joseph Conrad, or Surrealism through works by Apollinaire, Stravinsky, and Magritte; the second is “The History of the English Language.” He also teaches courses on opera, drama, Victorian and modernist poetry and fiction, and the relation of physics to literature.
(9/17/12)

This event was last updated on 09-24-2012

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