Beyond the Notes features leading scholars who provide an in-depth look at pieces being performed and the background and history behind the music performed by the San Luis Obispo Master Chorale. The educational events offer the opportunity to meet and learn from a noted expert on the subject, an enhanced understanding of the context of the music, an increased appreciation for the music and live performance, and spreading awareness about the arts.

The San Luis Obispo Master Chorale will host an educational presentation given by Dr. Alyson McLamore, Professor of Music and Distinguished Teacher at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, as part of its Beyond the Notes series. This presentation coincides with the SLO Master Chorale’s 40th anniversary season, beginning with a concert on Sunday, November 24, at 3 pm at the Performing Arts Center San Luis Obispo.

Beyond the Notes is sponsored by the Harold J. Miossi Charitable Trust and Joan G. Sargen.

Alyson McLamore, Professor of Music and Distinguished Teacher at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, has studied numerous aspects of eighteenth-century British musical life, such as the concerts of the prodigies Charles Jr. and Samuel Wesley (sons of Charles Wesley, the co-founder of the Methodist Church), and the ways that “sea”-themed compositions impacted British national identity.

Her textbook Musical Theater: An Appreciation (Routledge) is in its second edition and has been translated into Chinese; she has also produced eight music resource guides for the U.S. Academic Decathlon. Dr. McLamore has written program notes for the Master Chorale since 1992 (back when Tom Davies still sported a mustache).

Beyond the Notes features leading scholars whose presentations highlight the times and culture surrounding the works performed by the San Luis Obispo Master Chorale. The educational events offer an in-depth look at pieces being performed and the background and history behind the music, including the opportunity to meet and learn from a noted expert on the subject, an enhanced understanding of the context of the music, an increased appreciation for the music and live performance, and spreading awareness about the arts.

The San Luis Obispo Master Chorale will host two educational presentations given by Dr. Vladimir Morosan, founder and president of publishing company Musica Russica, as part of its Beyond the Notes series. 

Beyond the Notes is sponsored by Libbie Agran and the Harold J. Miossi Charitable Trust.

Dr. Vladimir Morosan is one of the leading experts outside Russia in the field of Orthodox liturgical music. He is Founder and President of Musica Russica, a publishing company specializing in the publication and dissemination of Orthodox choral music throughout the Western world. He is also the director of the Orthodox Sacred Music Reference Library project, the largest online library of Orthodox music. As Founder and Artistic Director of Archangel Voices, a professional-level choral ensemble, he has recorded six CDs of Orthodox liturgical music in English.

He is also the composer and editor of numerous choral arrangements. He serves as Project Lead for music editing and online instruction for the Department of Liturgical Music of the Orthodox Church in America. A tonsured reader in the Orthodox Church, he currently serves as Director of Liturgical Singing at St. Katherine Orthodox Mission in Carlsbad, CA.

Beyond the Notes features leading scholars whose presentations highlight the times and culture surrounding the works performed by the San Luis Obispo Master Chorale. The educational events offer an in-depth look at pieces being performed and the background and history behind the music, including the opportunity to meet and learn from a noted expert on the subject, an enhanced understanding of the context of the music, an increased appreciation for the music and live performance, and spreading awareness about the arts.

The San Luis Obispo Master Chorale will host two educational presentations given by Dr. Andrew Shenton, Professor of Music at Boston University, as part of its Beyond the Notes series. 

Beyond the Notes is sponsored by Libbie Agran and the Harold J. Miossi Charitable Trust.

Andrew Shenton is a scholar, author, performer, and Professor of Music at Boston University. Born in England, he first studied at The Royal College of Music in London, and holds bachelor, masters and doctoral degrees from London University, Yale, and Harvard respectively. Dr. Shenton is Conductor of Vox Futura and has toured extensively in Europe and the US. He has been the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards and has given more than eighty premieres by composers, including Arvo Pärt. Moving freely between musicology and ethnomusicology, Shenton’s work is best subsumed under the heading ‘music and transcendence,’ and includes several major publications.

Saturday, November 18, 2023, 5:00 pm

“The Phenomenal Pärt” presented by Dr. Andrew Shenton

Location: The Bunker SLO, 810 Orcutt Road, San Luis Obispo

Ticketed Event

Arvo Pärt developed a new compositional technique called tintinnabulation which has produced music that resonates with diverse audiences and has consistently made him the most performed living composer in the world. This talk explores his tintinnabuli technique and explains the phenomenon of this transcendent music.

Sunday, November 19 at 1:15 pm

“Defining Genius: Pärt and Mozart” presented by Dr. Andrew Shenton

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

Free admission 

What makes a musical genius? Learn how a combination of traditional elements combined with innovative techniques and imagination have produced two extraordinary and impactful works of sacred music that speak beyond their Christian heritage to larger issues of human spirituality.

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.