Campus Stories - Posts
Stanford performance reimagines Doug Engelbart’s historic computer demonstration in a new multimedia work
Stanford Live’s world premiere of The Demo on April 1 and 2 at Bing Concert Hall reflects on a pivotal moment in Silicon Valley’s history with one of its most influential figures. Douglas Engelbart’s egalitarian vision for how technology could expand human intelligence set the world on its head and, ultimately, led to many of…
Honing the art of observation, and observing art
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…
In her research and in a new online course, Stanford scholar delves into the secrets of medieval texts
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…
Students and professionals join forces in the recording studio at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall
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…
Stanford students discover an 18th-century music treasure in Green Library
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…
Art 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…
The Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra from China
The 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…
For 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…
What would you ask Tony Award-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones? Stanford students get their chance, twice
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…
Stanford’s ‘Live Context’ series explores art and its ideas
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:…
Stanford students illustrate public online ‘Adventures in Writing’ class
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….
Stanford 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…
Wax works by local artists
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…
A Scene, A Song, A Number – Game On!
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…
Kronos Quartet visits the Graduate Composers Forum
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…
Rare 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…
