Columbia Professor Explores Hayden's Solar Motifs
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| Professor Elaine Sisman of Columbia University |
This lecture is sponsored by the Class of 1960 Scholars Fund and is both free and open to the public.
Sisman said the image of the sun, an 18th-century commonplace of worldly power, mythology, planetary motion, and philosophical enlightenment, was memorably evoked by Haydn in works across his career, from the early "times of day" symphonies to the late oratorios "The Creation" and "The Seasons." The talk draws connections between sun-related musical motifs and illuminations of human beings in the landscape to develop a poetics of solar time. By offering the keys to Haydn's more broadly communicative and enlightening gestures in a wider array of genres, it show his solar music points the way to a true music of illumination.
Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia, where she has taught since 1982, including six years as department chair. She has just completed a term as president of the American Musicological Society. The author of "Haydn and the Classical Variation" and "Mozart: The 'Jupiter' Symphony," and editor of "Haydn and His World," she specializes in music of the 18th and 19th centuries. She is completing studies of Haydn's "Metastasio" opera "L'isola disabitata" and of music and melancholy. Her most recent work concerns Haydn's "poetics of solar time."
Sisman studied piano at the Juilliard pre-college division and with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell, received her doctorate in music history at Princeton, and has taught at the University of Michigan and Harvard University.
The Class of 1960 Scholars Fund, established at its 25th reunion, brings eminent researchers from other colleges and universities to campus to give colloquia.
