Musicology Department chair, Professor Halina Goldberg, spearheaded Jacobs School of Music’s participation, as part of a consortium of orchestras and universities, in a program that recently secured a $400,000 National Endowment of the Humanities grant. The consortium, Music Unwound, was founded in 2010 by American music scholar Joseph Horowitz to promote humanities-infused public programming based on topics in American classical music, using cross-disciplinarity to strengthen both student and audience engagement.
Of the school’s participation in the grant program, Professor Goldberg says, “This is an important moment for artists and scholars to join forces, as we try to reach our students and broader audiences through arts and humanities. Our communal ties have been weakened by the isolation of the COVID pandemic and by powerful social and political forces. There is no more important task ahead of us than making sure these ties are being restored.”
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Peter Burkholder and Professor Ayana Smith are among the other key Jacobs and musicology faculty participants in the program. Thanks to their efforts, Jacobs will present two Music Unwound festivals in the coming years, “The Souls of Black Folk” and “Charles Ives America”, in conjunction with IU partners, including the African American Arts Institute, Center for Rural Engagement, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and Department of Comparative Literature. Professor Burkholder summarizes the purpose of these festivals, saying they “…will be a wonderful celebration of these composers. By presenting their music together with talks and panels that explain it and the contexts it came from, these festivals will draw all of us more deeply into America’s music, history and culture.”
We are very grateful to Professor Goldberg, Professor Burkholder, Professor Smith, and all the other faculty members who helped to secure this vital funding and who are producing these illuminating festivals.
To learn more about the grant and the other organizations in the consortium, see the school’s original announcement.
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