Symposium: “’Footsteps of a Giant’: Brahms and the Influence of Beethoven”
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
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Styra Avins was born and educated in New York City, where she earned a B.A. Magna cum Laude in Social Studies from the City College of New York and went on to study cello at the Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music. She was awarded a Master of Music degree at the Manhattan School, joined the American Symphony Orchestra and the New York City Opera orchestra, and has worked extensively as a free lance cellist in New York City. She is currently a faculty member of the Bennington Chamber Music Festival, in Vermont.
Avins is author of Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters (Oxford University Press, 1997), and has contributed chapters to Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style ( Cambridge University Press, 2003) , Brahms and His World (Princeton University Press, 2009), and Brahms in the Home and Concert Hall (Cambridge U. Press, 2014). Her writings include numerous articles for scholarly journals as well as publications for the general public. Avins is a member of the Board of Directors of The American Brahms Society. |
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Daniel Beller-McKenna is Associate Professor of music at the University of New Hampshire where he has taught since 1998. His work has focused on cultural issues surrounding the music of Johannes Brahms, including the 2004 Brahms and the German Spirit and numerous articles and book chapters. His current work focuses on nostalgia as an issue in Brahms’s works and their reception from the composer’s time to the present. | |
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William Horne is the Francisco M. Gonzalez Professor of Music at Loyola University New Orleans, where he has taught music theory and composition since 1976. His research interests center mostly around the life and music of Johannes Brahms. His articles have appeared in Beethoven Forum, The Journal of Musicology, Journal of Musicological Research, The Musical Quarterly, NOTES, and various essay collections. Along with Valerie Goertzen, he co-edits the American Brahms Society Newsletter. As a composer he has written works for a variety of chamber music ensembles, for voice, and for large ensembles. His music may be heard on the Centaur and Blue Griffin labels, including the recent release of his Sonata for Flute and Piano, Sonata for Cello and Piano, and Bagatelles for Cello and Piano (BGR 357). In 2016 he received Loyola’s Dux Academicus award, the highest honor the university confers on a faculty member. |
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Christopher Reynolds is professor of music at the University of California, Davis. His article, “Porgy and Bess: An ‘American Wozzeck’,” in the Journal of the Society for American Music (2007), won awards from the American Musicological Society and the Kurt Weill Foundation. His article “Documenting the Zenith of Women Song Composers: A Database of Songs Published in the United States and the British Commonwealth, ca. 1890-1930,” Notes (2013) won the Richard S. Hill Award from the Music Library Association. Reynolds has published two books that deal in part with Brahms, Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music (Harvard, 2003), and his latest book Wagner, Schumann, and the Lessons of Beethoven’s Ninth (UC Press, 2015).
Reynolds has held visiting professorships at Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, and in Germany at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Goettingen. He has been editor of the monograph series AMS Studies in Music (Oxford University Press), and he was a founding editor of Beethoven Forum. Reynolds is a former President of the American Musicological Society and he was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. |
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Jacquelyn Sholes is a full-time lecturer in the Department of Musicology & Ethnomusicology at Boston University and has held visiting appointments at Williams College and Wellesley College. Her book on allusion and inter-movement narrative in the instrumental music of Brahms is forthcoming in the Musical Meaning and Interpretation Series published by Indiana University Press. Other forthcoming publications on music from Brahms’s circle include articles in Nineteenth-Century Music Review and Ad Parnassum. She has also authored articles and reviews in 19th-Century Music, The Journal of Musicological Research, Notes, Ars Lyrica, and The American Brahms Society Newsletter, and is a co-author on an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She has presented at meetings of the American Musicological Society, German Studies Association, Society for American Music, and (upcoming) Nineteenth-Century Studies Association and at the North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music. She serves as President of the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society. |
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