This year's Cambridge Festival of Ideas includes a wide range of talks, lecture-concerts, workshops, and performances featuring members of the Faculty of Music.
On 16 October, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Francesca Vella will be talking about Jenny Lind as part of the exhibition 'Victorian Celebrity Culture: Jenny Lind, The 'Swedish Nightingale' (for more on Dr Vella's work on Jenny Lind, check out her recent music@Cambridge research blog post).
Also on 16 October, Francis Knights (Director of Studies in Music at Fitzwilliam College), and astronomer-historian Simon Mitton, present 'Buxtehude's Lost Planets', a reconstruction of the 17th-Century composer's 'lost' cycle of keyboard suites based on the planets.
Then on 20 October, former graduate student Adam McDonagh will be part of 'Ensembles and Embryos', an interactive exploration of the parallels between making music and making an embryo.
The Festival of Ideas also includes several events devoted to contemporary music. On Thursday 25 October, Dr Ross Cole, Junior Research Fellow in Music at Homerton College, presents 'Sound and Subversion in the 1960s', an introduction to the avant-garde movement known as fluxus, featuring a programme of experimental pieces by composers such as La Monte Young, Alison Knowles and John Cage.
On 27 October, PhD student Naomi Woo will present 'A Certain Sense of Order', a pocket opera co-created by the Interdisciplinary Performance Company Tick Tock, exploring the work of American poet Anne Sexton. The performance will be preceded by an all-ages workshop, 'Embodying Poetry as Performance', in which participants will be guided through movement and sound exercises related to their chosen poems.
As the Festival draws to a close on 28 October, Dr Ewan Campbell (Director of Studies in Music, Murray Edwards College), will discuss his recent experiments with musical maps, in 'Mapping the Score', ahead of the East Anglian Young Composers Concert, in which the Magnard Ensemble will showcase new compositions by the winners of the East Anglian Young Composers Competition.
All of the above events are free to attend. Booking for the Festival opens today, Monday 24 September. See the Cambridge Festival of Ideas website for more details.
