Posts by Robert D.
Honing the art of observation, and observing art
A new medical school course brings students to the Cantor Arts Center and Anderson Collection to practice close observation of art, and then learn how to translate those skills to a clinical setting.The scene: A group of medical students huddled around the iconic Robert Frank photograph, Car Accident — U.S. 66, Between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona, at Stanford’s Cantor Center for the Visual Arts. Sarah Naftalis, who’s studying for a PhD in art history at Stanford, led the students through an exercise: She asked them what they…
Read MoreIn her research and in a new online course, Stanford scholar delves into the secrets of medieval texts
Digital tools, including a free, public online manuscript training course, are allowing English professor and medieval manuscript scholar Elaine Treharne to share her expertise well beyond traditional classroom walls.Most people don’t realize that medieval manuscripts carry in them not only the words of people centuries ago, but also a history in blood, sweat and tears – quite literally. Take the 13th-century British tome that did double duty as an impromptu shield for a hapless monk when the Vikings attacked his monastery. Bloodstains that…
Read MoreStudents and professionals join forces in the recording studio at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall
Engineers and musicians balance the needs of a recording audience and a live audience.This fall, anybody and everybody will have the opportunity to enjoy the St. Lawrence String Quartet and the Stanford Chamber Chorale‘s commercial release of Lord Nelson Mass (Nelsonmesse)by Joseph Haydn, recorded in Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall. The recording presents the best performances possible; both live in concert and in recording sessions. The SLSQ’s recording of…
Read MoreStanford students discover an 18th-century music treasure in Green Library
Music lecturer and students edit and finish an incomplete manuscript by Francesco Durante for a modern-day première in Memorial Church.This week, Marie-Louise Catsalis and her music students will present what is likely the first performance in over 300 years of Neapolitan composer Francesco Durante’s Stabat Mater. Last spring, Catsalis and her students discovered an incomplete Latin music manuscript by Durante in Stanford Library’s Special Collections and undertook the challenge of finishing the work, editing…
Read MoreArt and Ideas at Stanford Live
An in-depth look at the composer Joseph Haydn and his era – coupled with performances of some of his most iconic works. An evening of music by 11 different cultures along the Nile River – combined with conversations about geography, cultural policy, and environmental sustainability. These were the first two programs in a new series…
Read MoreThe Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra from China
2015 Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival, February 20–21The 2015 Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival will showcase the China Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra will be in residency at Stanford University from February 18th to 22nd, 2015. During this period, it will give two symphonic concerts on February 20 and 21 in the Bing Concert Hall, focusing on music by Chinese composers. One of…
Read MoreFor Stanford Symphony Orchestra, The Planets align
For two nights, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra took center stage at Bing Concert Hall to perform The Planets by Gustav Holst. However, this was no ordinary production. An enormous projection screen, featuring images from around the solar system, accompanied the orchestra. The piece is broken into seven movements, with each movement corresponding to a particular…
Read MoreWhat would you ask Tony Award-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones? Stanford students get their chance, twice
Jones and his dance company perform on campus and the choreographer carves out time to engage with students in writing before his visit and in person once he arrives.In a rare performance appearance, choreographer, dancer, director and writer Bill T. Jones will narrate 70 one-minute vignettes performed by his company dancers on Friday, Jan. 30, in Memorial Auditorium. Story/Time is a multidisciplinary work about family, lovers and others drawn from his life. “Bill T. Jones and his great company of dancers are one…
Read MoreStanford’s ‘Live Context’ series explores art and its ideas
Leveraging the university’s deep intellectual and artistic resources, "Live Context" is inspired by the conviction that the more you know about a work of art's historical and contemporary resonance the richer your experience. On tap for February: Haydn and the music of the Nile River basin.Compared with Mozart and Beethoven, “Haydn gets the short end of the stick,” says violinist Geoff Nuttall of the celebrated Stanford-based St. Lawrence String Quartet. He will make his passionate case for Haydn’s greatness – playing and talking about the composer’s music – throughout the weekend of Feb. 13–15 as part of the campus-wide Haydn:…
Read MoreStanford students illustrate public online ‘Adventures in Writing’ class
Veteran writing instructors and undergraduate student artists teamed up to create a new public online course focused on teaching key strategies for effective writing.After a team of Stanford writing instructors created storyboards for an online class to teach writing skills to high school and college students, they turned to a team of Stanford undergraduates to bring their stories to life as a graphic novel. Adventures in Writing, a non-credit course, will be available to the public starting Jan.…
Read MoreStanford lecturer nominated for Oscar in documentary short category
Silver might beget gold for documentary filmmaker and Stanford lecturer J. CHRISTIAN JENSEN, MFA ’13. In June 2014 he won a silver medal from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Student Academy Awards for his film White Earth, a winter portrait of North Dakota’s oil boom seen through unexpected eyes. Jensen is now…
Read MoreWax works by local artists
Stanford Art Spaces displays encaustic works by Mari Marks and Howard Hersh.Stanford Art Spaces announces its January-February 2015 art exhibitions: The Spiritual Landscape by Mari Marks and One Day at a Time: Thirty Years in the Studio by Howard Hersh. Both are accomplished Bay Area artists: Marks lives in Berkeley, and Hersh in San Francisco. Both employ the medium of encaustic, i.e., powdered pigments bound in…
Read MoreA Scene, A Song, A Number – Game On!
It was the first-ever 72-Hour Musical Theater Contest in Stanford history. Possibly in anyone’s history.In this whirlwind of a weekend, small teams were given the challenge of creating a musical theater piece (one song, one scene, and one dance) – all over the course of only 72 hours! Three days of intense creative endeavor culminated in a live cabaret- style performance where teams presented the results of their hard…
Read MoreKronos Quartet visits the Graduate Composers Forum
Musicians share their history, travel woes and stress the importance of logically placed page turns.On Jan. 20, the Graduate Composition Forum at the Department of Music welcomed the Kronos Quartet – David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; and Sunny Yang, cello – for an in-depth question and answer session. Kronos is a leading proponent of new music for string quartet, nurturing long-standing relationships with composers throughout…
Read MoreRare Haydn materials in the Stanford Libraries
Over the past several months, I have been blogging about rare Haydn materials held in the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library of Music, including one autograph manuscript, one important letter, and nine first or early score editions. Each item was digitized for deep storage in the Stanford Digital Repository, and high-quality, downloadable images have…
Read MoreBlooming Fibonacci
John Edmark's 3D printed sculptures.These 3-D printed sculptures, called blooms, are designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. The placement of the appendages is determined by the same method nature uses in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotation speed is synchronized to the strobe so that one flash occurs every time the sculpture turns 137.5º – the golden…
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