Deep Focus: Enriching the Aspen Experience

An array of micro-essays by accomplished musicologists, curated to enhance and enrich your historical and aesthetic engagement with the musical programming offered at Aspen’s summer seasons. 

Fiddling “In the Barn” with Charles Ives

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Dr. Jacob A. Cohen, Visiting Assistant Professor in Musicology, Oberlin Conservatory

Charles Ives loved a good, old-fashioned, rural barn dance. At least, he thought he did. Ives readily admits that his musical representations of the barn dance—as heard in pieces like “Washington’s...

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Serious Frivolity: Juggling the Profound and the Lighthearted in Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Cello Sonatas

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Kevin McBrien, PhD Candidate in Musicology, University of California, Santa Barbara

Musicologist Kevin McBrien takes a sideways look at Ludwig van Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Cello Sonatas, suggesting that they contain comic moments as well as deeply felt emotions, and that the two are not as mutually exclusive as we might think. 

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Withdrawn from “the diversions of society”: Seclusion and Beethoven’s Chamber Music

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Dr. Sarah Clemmens Waltz, Associate Professor, University of the Pacific

Dr. Sarah Waltz guides us to some of the social meanings of chamber music for Beethoven, meditating on the intimacy of the form and its meanings for his time and our own. 

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