Campus Stories - Posts
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…
Blooming Fibonacci
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…
Architect David Adjaye tells Stanford audience how he designs civic spaces to create community
Architect David Adjaye is international both in his heritage and in his career. Between his childhood and his working life he has spent considerable time in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the United States. He has built houses for Kofi Annan and, pro bono, for displaced residents of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward; he also…
Stanford d.school students ‘humanize’ a truck for a good cause
The well-used delivery truck came with seats for two. Now it needed sturdy, safe seats for three people and a dog. And the passenger seat had to be removable so mechanics could maintain and repair the engine. That’s just one of dozens of design challenges that must be solved by Stanford students in the Humanize…
Stanford scholar reveals the surprising cultural history of four-hand piano playing
In 19th-century Europe – long before LPs, CDs or mp3s – there were only two ways to listen to, say, the latest Beethoven symphony: either you were lucky enough to hear it performed at the local concert hall, or you played it at home yourself. Not with a full orchestra, of course, but in a…
Happy 2015!
We are looking forward to everything 2015 will bring in the arts at Stanford – new exhibitions at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Live performances at Bing Concert Hall and beyond, engagement with the Anderson Collection at Stanford University – and of course the enormous variety of performances, events, exhibitions and programs put on by…
Fernando Lopez-Lezcano to receive 2014 Marsh O’Neill Award
Keeps the lab humming. Faces daily crises with stellar aplomb. Constantly innovating. Intimately “groks” and practices the very science and art that is the research mission of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Increases the creative capacity and artistic agency of all who work there – students, faculty and visiting researchers…
Stanford music scholar explores how Indian traditional folk music fuses the devotional with the political
What happens when religious folk songs are used for political purposes? Stanford ethnomusicologist Anna Schultz explores this question in her latest publication, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance. For centuries people in India have gathered in temples or on pilgrimages to hear kirtan, a form of Indian folk music that praises the divine. Schultz…
Photographer Robert Frank drops in on a panel discussion of his work
The event was supposed to be an in-depth discussion of the Cantor Art Center’s special exhibition Robert Frank in America, with three panelists providing analysis of select photographs. For the lucky guests who got in, it lived up to the description, and then some. Robert Frank dropped in to participate. Frank visited the exhibition with his wife, June Leaf, a few days before…
Seen – and heard! – on campus
It’s hard to believe finals are right around the corner – what an exciting fall quarter! We have seen an amazing roster of high-profile artists and creative industry leaders on campus. I realize it may be difficult to keep up with them all – so for those keeping score at home, here are a few:…
