My conducting students at the Jacobs School of Music sometimes manifest (with varying degrees of unease) their ambivalence towards music scholarship. It is not always clear to them that more knowledge about the context, technique, structure and rhetoric of a composition will enhance their interpretation in the real time of performance. You may surmise I believe it does, but the process is not necessarily direct. On the contrary, how an artist processes information and experience is akin to a mysterious […]

Categories: art and society, scholarship • Tags: art, art institute of chicago, art scholarship, Frick Collection, Giovanni Bellini, Huffington Post, jacobs school of music, james elkins, perception