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Music viewed as ‘a rediscovery of ourselves’

May 17, 2005

barkin_thumb.jpgThe innovative American composer and musicologist Elaine Barkin will talk about how her travels have affected her life and her music when she gives this year’s Gordon Athol Anderson Memorial Lecture for The University of New England.

“Listening to music is a way of knowing that we are, in fact, alive and thinking,” Professor Barkin said in previewing her lecture. “It’s a way of experiencing our own consciousness.”

“When we travel away from home,” she continued, “we ‘try others on’: their clothes, their food, their music. We cross over, rediscovering ourselves at the moment that we are discovering others.”

Her public lecture, titled “Of Sounds and Words”, will be in Armidale Town Hall on Thursday 26 May at 7.30 pm.

Professor Barkin, a distinguished academic, retired from the Music Faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1997 after working within the Faculty for 23 years. She has composed music for a wide range of performers, including solo instrumentalists, chamber ensembles, vocal soloists and choruses, and Indonesian gamelan orchestras. She formed UCLA’s Experimental Workshop, which has sought to redefine the relationship between composer, performer and audience through improvisation and collective work. Her world-wide travels have included five visits to Bali and Java to document new music for gamelan, and a period of teaching at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.

UNE inaugurated the Gordon Athol Anderson lecture series in 1983, and it has continued every year since then. It commemorates the work of Professor Gordon Anderson, who held a personal Chair in Music at UNE from 1979 until his death in 1981. Professor Anderson was the first Australian academic to make an international impact on the study of mediaeval music.

The Gordon Athol Anderson Memorial Lecture is free, and everyone is welcome. It will be followed by a light supper in the Town Hall foyer. To assist with catering, please let the organisers know (by Thursday 19 May) that you are planning to attend by e-mailing: rsvp.lecture@une.edu.au.


Media contact: Ann Ghandar, Senior Lecturer, UNE Music, on (02) 6773 6456 or Jen Ross, UNE Events Coordinator, on (02) 6773 2768.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at May 17, 2005 12:05 PM