Newswise — Harvard Professor and the world's leading Bach expert Christoph Wolff will be the guest speaker for the Rhodes College Springfield Music lecture on Thursday Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. The public is invited to hear a revealing talk about Wolff's 20 year quest to find music from the Berlin Sing-Akademie library that disappeared from Berlin during World War II. "This is the first time that Dr. Wolff has been to our region to address this," says Dr. Timothy Sharp, chair of the Rhodes Department of Music. "Bach scholars throughout the world will gather with our own scholars at Rhodes to listen to this expert and hear other presentations and performances that will be a part of a symposium."
"History Recovered: The Return of the Musical Archive of the Berlin Sing-Akademie" is the title of Wolff's lecture to be held in the McCallum Ballroom of the Bryan Campus Life Center.
The audience also will have an opportunity to learn about the Berlin Sing-Akademie, the musical organization founded in 1791 and dedicated to the preservation and performance of 18th-century sacred choral music, most notably to Johann Sebastian Bach. When its archive of Bach family music disappeared in the 1940s, it was thought to have been destroyed.
Wolff was among scholars who followed a lead in 1999 and identified the archive in a library in Kieve, Ukraine. The archive contained some of the world's most significant compositions from the 17th and 18th centuries as well as unpublished manuscripts by Bach's great grandfather and Bach's son, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach that shed light on the Bach family genius.
The Springfield Music Lecture is featured as part of a Rhodes College international symposium November 6 -7 called "The Composers and Compositions of the Berlin Sing-Akademie." Presenters from as far as Ireland, London and Alaska will participate in the event. According to Sharp, attendees will have a unique opportunity to get a first view of some of the materials from the Berlin Sing-Akademie archive.
The symposium also will include a performance of the J.S. Bach Magnificat and the C.P.E. Bach Magnificat by the Rhodes Singers, Rhodes MasterSingers, soloists, and the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.
Born and educated in Germany, Wolff studied organ and historical keyboard instruments, musicology and art history at the Universities of Berlin, Erlangen, and Freiburg. He has published widely on the history of music from the 15th to the 20th centuries including Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, The New Bach Reader and Mozart's Requiem. He taught the history of music at Erlangen, Toronto, Princeton, and Columbia Universities before joining the Harvard faculty in 1976 as Professor of Music. Currently he is the Adams University Professor at Harvard.
The Springfield Music Lectures were established in 1991 by a bequest from the late John Murry Springfield, a 1951 Rhodes graduate. Each year an outstanding musicologist, researcher, music historian or music theorist presents both formal and informal lectures that foster an increased appreciation of music as an academic discipline.
For more information, contact the Rhodes College Department of Music at (901) 843-3775.
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