On Wednesday, March 31, the Indiana University Department of Musicology, along with the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute, Borns Jewish Studies Program, and the Institute for European Studies will host Dietmar Friesenegger as he delivers his lecture, “Regional Identity, Conflict, and the Nation State: The Four Lives of a Borderland Cantata.”
The presentation will address how music transcends national and linguistic boundaries while promoting national identification by exploring multiple performances (from 1889 to 2018) of Eusebius Mandyczewski’s In Bukovina. The cantata, written to celebrate a contested province in the Eastern European borderlands, was presented in three different countries — Austria-Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine — and in three different languages — German, Romanian, and Ukrainian — yet they all happened in a single city, Czernowitz.
Dr. Friesenegger holds a PhD in musicology from Cornell University and currently serves as Lecturer in the Department of Musicology at the University of Vienna and Lecturer in the Department of German Studies at the University of Iasi (Romania). His scholarship focuses on contested areas of Eastern Europe and how music has been forgotten, erased, or rewritten in nationalizing histories. His research also concerns musicians with ties to multiple cultures, their compositions in several languages, and their music for various religious denominations.
Registration information and additional details can be found here.
Leave a Reply