Beyond the Notes is sponsored by Libbie Agran and the Shanbrom Family Foundation.

Marian Wilson Kimber is Professor of Musicology at the University of Iowa. Her publications have treated the biographies and reception of Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, exploring Mendelssohn’s works for piano and orchestra and Hensel’s Romantic piano cycle, Das Jahr. As part of the 2009 celebrations surrounding the 200th anniversary of Felix Mendelssohn’s birth, Wilson Kimber was the keynote speaker for a conference held at Seoul University under the auspices of four Korean universities. 

Her article, “The ‘Suppression’ of Fanny Mendelssohn: Rethinking Feminist Biography,” has been one of the most frequently read articles published in the journal Nineteenth Century Music. Wilson Kimber’s research also explores women’s roles in America’s concert life. Her book, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (University of Illinois Press, 2017) won the H. Earle Johnson Subvention from the Society for American Music. Wilson Kimber is a founding member of the duo Red Vespa, which performs comic spoken word pieces by women composers.

Saturday, April 22, 2023, 7:00 pm

“Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and the Problem of a Woman in Music” presented by Dr. Marian Wilson Kimber

Location: San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, 1010 Broad Street, San Luis Obispo

Composer Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was restricted from having a professional career due to her gender and upper-class status. In spite of this, she became an important musical figure in the nineteenth century and a symbol of women’s struggle for equality.

Sunday, April 23, 2023, 1:15 pm

“Felix Mendelssohn Composes His World” presented by Dr. Marian Wilson Kimber

Location: Pavilion, Performing Arts Center, 1 Grand Avenue, San Luis Obispo

Felix Mendelssohn’s romantic music drew on his lifelong engagement with his German musical heritage as well as theater, literature, and poetry. An amateur painter, Mendelssohn also composed music that reflected the natural landscape he encountered in his many travels.

Saturday, November 19, 2022, at 7:00 pm

“La Belle Époque: The Arts in Paris During Fauré’s Lifetime” will enlighten attendees about life, people, and the arts in Paris at the turn of the 20th century.  
Location: San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, 1010 Broad Street, San Luis Obispo

Sunday, November 20, 2022, at 1:15 pm

“Poulenc and Paris: An Embarrassment of Artistic Riches” will discuss the life, times, and friends of Francis Poulenc.
Location: Pavilion, Performing Arts Center, 1 Grand Avenue, San Luis Obispo

Dr. Eric Saylor is Professor of Music History and Musicology at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

A specialist in British music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he is the author of English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955 (University of Illinois Press, 2017) and the forthcoming Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 2022), the first entirely new life-and-works biography on the composer published in over half a century.

He is also co-editor, with Naomi André and Karen M. Bryan, of Blackness in Opera (2012), and of The Sea in the British Musical Imagination (2015), with Christopher Scheer. His research and writing has been published widely throughout North America and Europe, including for the Grove Dictionary of American Music, Oxford Bibliographies Online, and the British Library’s “Discovering Music” online exhibition. He is a former president of the North American British Music Studies Association, and in 2019 served as a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. His other areas of scholarly interest include historiography, intersections of music and politics, and shape-note hymnody.

Speaking Event I:

The Composer in Wartime: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Music of Conflict

Friday, April 22 at 6:00 PM
Room 218, Davidson Music Center, Cal Poly

War and conflict formed a backdrop to much of Vaughan Williams’s life and career. His military service in the Great War and his contributions to life on the home front during World War II inspired both immediate creative responses—in works such as the Pastoral and Fifth Symphonies, the chamber opera The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, and Thanksgiving for Victory —and later ones powerfully informed by his experiences, including the oratorio Sancta Civitas, the cantata Dona Nobis Pacem, the Sixth Symphony, and Job: A Masque for Dancing.

This presentation will explore the nature of Vaughan Williams’s service at the front and at home, and the ways in which his experience with and understanding of conflict shaped his musical and expressive idioms.

Speaking Event II:

The Letter and the Spirit:
The Religious and Visionary Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams

Saturday, April 23 at 3:30PM
First Presbyterian Church, Wilson Hall
981 Marsh Street, San Luis Obispo

There is no small irony in the fact that Vaughan Williams’s contributions to sacred music reveal a powerful understanding of and respect for religious faith, given his own lack of it. Yet in making his many contributions to hymnody and other genres of liturgical music—as well as non-liturgical pieces with sacred themes—Vaughan Williams hoped to elevate listeners to the same level of inspiration that he experienced when composing, or when he engaged with the works of visionary artists like Walt Whitman, George Meredith, William Blake, John Bunyan, and George Herbert. This talk will examine the complex and often contradictory nature of Vaughan Williams’s conception of religious belief, and the different artists and works that informed his own creative responses to such visionary and mystical topics.

Mozart’s Requiem: Myths, Motives, and Movies

Friday, November 22, 6:00 pm
Davidson Music Center, Cal Poly, Room 218

David B. Levy is professor of music at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, where he has taught since 1976 and served as chair of the department of music and associate dean of the college. Levy also served as program director for Wake Forest’s overseas program in Vienna. he received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Rochester in 1980. A prominent Beethoven scholar, he is the founder of the New Beethoven Research conferences that bring Beethoven scholars together from around the world.

Levy has written articles and reviews for several prestigious journals, including 19^th Century Music, Beethoven Forum, Historical Performance, Music Library Association Notes, andis the author of Beethoven: the Ninth Symphony. he also contributed to Berlitz Studies (Cambridge university press), the Dictionnaire Berlioz (2003), andthe second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.  Levy also has been the program annotator for the Winston-Salem Symphony for close to 40 years and began his duties as program annotator for the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra (New York state) in 2015. He is currently nearing completion of a monograph on all nine of Beethoven’s Symphonies for Yale University Press.

Why Mozart Died So Young? A physician’s perspective

Saturday, November 23 at 7:00 pm
San Luis Obispo County Library

Philip A. Mackowiak is director of medical care at the Veterans Administration Maryland Health Care System in Baltimore. An expert in infectious diseases, he is credited with debunking a fact so widely taken to be gospel that it stood for more than a century—that normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. What’s more, the medical school drew international recognition after he organized the first Historical Clinicopathological Conference 11 years ago.

Dr. Mackowiak has become so interested in history and the deaths of famous people that he is reinventing himself as a medical historian. “I am still an administrator and a teacher; and I still see patients,” he says. “But I have devoted a lot of my free time to reading and thinking about history.” History, for Dr. Mackowiak, is a road map that “helps one regardless of profession by understanding where one came from.”

Eleven years ago, Dr. Mackowiak read an account of Edgar Allen Poe’s bizarre death. He thought it would make an interesting subject for an Historical Clinicopathological Conference. “It was such a terrific success.” Dr. Mackowiak says. Since then he has hosted additional Historical Clinicopathological Conferences, plumbing the depths of history to debate the mysterious deaths of Alexander the Great, Beethoven, Mozart and Claudius. He even revisited the trial of Joan of Arc to determine if she was mentally competent for her alleged criminal acts. The conference “has become my passion,” Dr. Mackowiak says.