Sing the World: How Classical Music Inspires Artists and Audiences

In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment — we delve into the topical area of our environment. In recent years, we have rightly heard much about the world’s environmental problems, dangers, and disasters. However, in this series, we will invite speakers to explore the ways in which art and literature have foregrounded the inspirational beauty, delicacy, and strength of the natural world.

In this talk, international viola player and music educator Graham Oppenheimer will look at how his art of classical chamber music can communicate, educate, challenge, and inspire young people and audiences. Using musical examples, he will show how great composers make their music “sound” like their national identity and find inspiration from their natural world, be it nature, emotional turmoil, or the human-made environment of objects, machines, and cities. Educational initiatives can feed off these elements and be used to create both the artists and audiences of the future. The tools of a musician’s trade are also works of art themselves, being used every day to “sing the world.”

Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, will provide opening and closing remarks, and Kathryn Temple, a Future of the Humanities Project senior fellow, will moderate a Q&A session following the presentation.

Online. Open to all.

 

Participants:

Graham Oppenheimer is one of the United Kingdom’s most respected violists. He is senior chamber music tutor at Chetham’s School of Music and gives masterclasses internationally. He studied with Atar Arad at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He was a founding member and principal viola of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He has appeared in chamber music collaborations with Yehudi Menuhin, Paul Tortellier, Murray Perahia, Imogen Cooper, James Galway, and more. Oppenheimer was also a founding member of the Schidlof Quartet.

Kathryn Temple (moderator) is a professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University where she has taught since 1994. She specializes in the study of law and the humanities. Among her publications are Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (2019) and the co-edited Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021). Her humanities outreach activities include work with military veterans and the incarcerated.

Michael Scott is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college adviser for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president at Georgetown University. Scott was on the editorial board which relaunched Critical Survey from Oxford University Press. Scott previously served as the pro vice chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.

 

This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk